Hybrid Cloud für American Football: Setup & Vorteile

A top club in the American Football League has fundamentally modernized its media and editorial infrastructure – away from an aging on-premises environment and towards a modern hybrid cloud ecosystem around Adobe Premiere Pro, Mimir and Helmut4. With 500+ TB of active storage, a team of editors and producers, and diverse content (games, community events, social media campaigns), classic media asset management (MAM) was no longer sufficient. Project transparency, asset tracking, platform integration and workflow automation were needed.

Helmut4 from MoovIT became the missing link between storage and editorial workflows – with project understanding and flexibility that were simply not available in everyday life before.

The challenge: silos, shadow storage and workflow gaps

The team previously relied on Reach Engine as MAM – supplemented by an LTO archive and a Fiber Channel SAN. Reach Engine offered solid automation, but wasn’t granular enough to properly manage Adobe Premiere projects – especially as editors increasingly sourced media from multiple sources, including outside of MAM.

Core problems:

• Unmanaged media in isolated project folders on shared storage
• No transparency: Which assets are in which projects?
• Content duplicates (sometimes unnecessary copies from the MAM to the SAN)
• No tracking of project-related usage, storage consumption or ownership
• Rigid delivery workflows: publishing only possible after complete ingest
• Silo systems: Integration between editorial tools and storage infrastructure was unnecessarily difficult
• Further compounded: the end of Adobe Prelude and the need to replace integrated ingest and tagging workflows.
• The solution: Helmut4 + helmut.cloud integration

Helmut4 was rolled out as a project-centric orchestration layer across editorial, storage and MAM systems. Through flexibility, extensibility and agent-based architecture, the franchise was able to redesign its workflows “from the ground up”.

Central benefits:

• Project awareness: Helmut4 indexed every Adobe Premiere project on the SAN and made it visible to media managers: »Helmut4 gave them something they didn’t even know they needed: visibility across the entire project ecosystem. This allowed non-editorial media managers to track storage and workflows without having to understand Premiere.«
• Automation of Ingest & Delivery: Helmut4 has decoupled ingest and delivery. Editors could immediately upload finished content to YouTube or the team website – without waiting for it to be ingested into the MAM. At the same time, ingest jobs continued to run in the background: compliance/archive requirements met, speed-to-publish prioritized. »With Reach Engine you had to ingest first. Now delivery and ingest are two parallel workflows with Helmut4. This is massive when deadlines are tight.«
• Distributed processing: A slim Helmut4 agent ran on each workstation. This meant that transcoding and automation steps could be carried out decentrally. Instead of central queue bottlenecks, actions run locally – less load on central servers, faster delivery timelines.
• Legacy-Project-Relinking: Using historical metadata from the Reach Engine migration, Helmut4 made it possible to relink old projects to current file paths – particularly relevant after the move to Mimir, which manages files via object IDs and cloud-based systems.
• Expandability with helmut.cloud: To fill gaps in cloud-native integrations, helmut.cloud was introduced – for processing webhook events, metadata tagging and downstream automation. Examples:
  – When assets were tagged in Mimir, helmut.cloud recognized the event and adjusted titles to make them more usable in Premiere.
  – Custom processes synchronized title metadata across systems without changing original file names.
• Storage optimization: Before Helmut4, the team was often at 80-90% SAN utilization. Through duplicate detection, unused asset tracking, and project-based archive workflows, Helmut4 reduced storage waste and postponed expensive SAN expansions. »They used to just assume that they needed more SAN. Now you can see exactly where the data is, who owns it and how much of it is redundant.«
• The archive puzzle: From LTO to Backblaze: The team initially assumed the LTO archive contained over a petabyte. In reality, however, only 27 of 125 tapes contained usable data. This insight enabled approximately ~45 TB to be migrated from LTO to cloud storage via S3-CLI – and dramatically simplified the infrastructure.

Today applies:

• All content is archived to Backblaze when ingested via Mimir.
• helmut.cloud triggers purge processes and automatically removes deleted MAM content from the archive – for cost control.
• SAN expansion has been minimized with better workflow visibility and asset management.

outlook

After the basic workflows are running stably, the team evaluates:

• Advanced archiving options via helmut.cloud (e.g. push-to-LTO for redundancy)
• Deeper integration Helmut ↔ Mimir for project-based asset restoration
• Template-driven project creation for recurring shows and campaigns

Why Helmut4?

In contrast to classic MAMs, Helmut4 follows one principle: projects are central. Helmut4 sees Adobe Premiere projects as first-class citizens, tracks assets at project level and closes the gap between editorial requirements and IT infrastructure.

»Speed ​​is the deciding factor in our most powerful content – ​​the faster we publish, the more reach, the more impact and the more sales. With over 80,000 workflows per month, the optimized processes with Helmut4 and helmut.cloud enable our editors to collaborate seamlessly and work at the pace of the story: we deliver while the content is still fresh, relevant and gripping.«

Stacy Kelleher, production manager, Philadelphia Eagles