Back in November of 2008 I did an article awhile back on a way to use Amazon’s S3 to hook into Final Cut Server. At the time though, S3 had a pretty big limitation in that it wasn’t really suitable for backing up large video files as an archive device for Final Cut Server. But today, Amazon announced that S3 now supports files of up to 5 terabytes using multipart upload (previously the maximum file size was 5 gigabytes). This finally means that files do not have to be broken up at the file system layer in order to back up to Amazon’s cloud. However, this does not mean that…
-
-
S3 Command Line Part II
Earlier we looked at using s3cmd to interact with the Amazon S3 storage cloud. Now we’re going to delve into using Another S3 Bash Interface. To get started, first download the scripts and then copy the hmac and s3 commands into the ec2 folder created in previous walkthroughs. To use the s3 script, you need to store your Amazon secret key in a text file and set two environment variables. The INSTALL file included with the package has all the details. The only tricky part I ran into, and from the comments on Amazon, other people ran into, is how to create the secret key text file. Now go into your…
-
Custom VMs using S3+EC2
I’m obviously enjoying using Amazon for a number of testing applications (in addition to of course buying books and light bulbs from them, and not one showed up broken). So far, I’ve done articles on getting started with Amazon ec2, using the command line with ec2, whitelisting an IP address, deploying ec2 en masse, and setting up a static IP for ec2. But the S3 articles have been sparse. So, now let’s look at using Amazon’s storage service (S3) from the command line. Funny enough, if you’re going to upload your own custom Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) you’ll need to leverage S3. When you go to bundle an image, you will have a…
-
Final Cut Server: Using Amazon S3 for Archival
Final Cut Server allows you to archive the primary representation (or the original file) for assets that are cataloged. When you do so, the proxy clips (low resolution versions) of your assets still live on the Final Cut Server. However, the primary representation, once moved to your archive device can then be archived off to another form of media. There are a variety of strategies to manage archived media. The one I will describe here is using the Amazon S3 storage service at a cost of approximately $.12 to $.15 per gigabyte. As a conduit to and from Amazon S3 we will use the Jungle Disk application, which uses the…