The Challenge: Silos, Shadow Storage, and Workflow Gaps

The team previously relied on Reach Engine as its MAM, coupled with an LTO archive and a Fiber Channel SAN. While Reach Engine offered decent automation capabilities, its structure lacked the granularity to manage Adobe Premiere projects, especially as editors began pulling media from various sources—including outside the MAM.

Key problems included:
• Unmanaged media stored in isolated project folders on shared storage
• No visibility into which assets were used in which projects
• Duplication of content, sometimes needlessly copied from MAM to SAN
• Lack of tracking on project-based usage, storage consumption, or ownership
• Rigid delivery workflows that required ingest completion before content could be published
• Siloed systems, making integration between editorial tools and storage
infrastructure difficult

These pain points were compounded by the retirement of Adobe Prelude and the need to replace integrated ingest and tagging workflows.

The Solution: Helmut4 + helmut.cloud Integration

Helmut4 was deployed as the project-centric orchestration layer across editorial, storage, and MAM systems. Its flexibility, extensibility, and agent-based architecture enabled the franchise to redesign their workflows from the ground up.

Core Benefits:

• Project Awareness
  Helmut4 indexed every Adobe Premiere project across the SAN and made it visible to media managers—showing who created it, what assets it referenced, and how much storage it consumed. This alone helped eliminate blind spots in budgeting and SAN expansion planning. “Helmut4 gave them something they didn’t even know they needed: visibility into the entire project ecosystem. It allowed the non-editorial media managers to track storage and workflows without understanding Premiere.”
• Automation of Ingest & Delivery
  Helmut4 decoupled ingest and delivery, enabling editors to immediately deliver finished content to YouTube or the team’s website without waiting for ingest into the MAM. In parallel, ingest jobs ran in the background—ensuring compliance with archival requirements while prioritizing speed to publish.
  “With Reach Engine, you had to ingest first. Now, with Helmut4, delivery and ingest are two parallel workflows. That’s huge when deadlines are tight.”
• Distributed Processing
  Each workstation ran a lightweight Helmut4 agent, allowing distributed transcode and automation processing. Instead of queue-based workflows, actions could run locally—offloading burden from centralized servers and speeding up delivery timelines.
• Legacy Project Linking
  Using historical metadata from the Reach Engine migration, Helmut4 enabled relinking of old projects with current file paths—especially important after the move to Mimir, which manages files via object IDs and cloud-based systems.
• Extensibility with helmut.cloud
  To address gaps in cloud-native integrations, helmut.cloud was introduced to process webhook events, metadata tagging, and downstream automation.
  For example:
  • When assets were tagged in Mimir, helmut.cloud detected the event and renamed titles for better usability in Premiere.
  • Custom processes were built to synchronize title metadata across systems—without changing original file names.
• Storage Optimization
  Before Helmut4, the team often hit 80–90% SAN capacity. By identifying duplicates, tracking unused assets, and offering project-level archival workflows, Helmut4 helped them reduce storage waste and postpone SAN expansion.
  “They used to assume they needed more SAN. Now they can see exactly where the data lives, who owns it, and how much of it is redundant.”
• The Archive Puzzle: From LTO to Backblaze
  The team initially believed their LTO archive held over a petabyte of data. In reality, only 27 of 125 tapes contained usable data. This discovery allowed them to migrate ~45TB of LTO content to cloud storage via the S3 CLI, drastically simplifying their infrastructure.

Today:
• All content is archived at ingest via Mimir to Backblaze.
• Helmut Cloud handles purge triggers, automatically removing deleted MAM content from the archive to control costs.
• SAN expansion was minimized, thanks to improved workflow visibility and asset management.

Looking ahead

Now that foundational workflows are stabilized, the team is exploring:

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

Why Helmut4?

Unlike traditional MAMs, Helmut4 is built around one core principle: projects matter. It understands Adobe Premiere projects as first-class citizens, tracks assets at the project level, and bridges the gap between editorial needs and IT infrastructure.

“Speed is everything when it comes to our highest-performing content — getting it out fast means more eyes, more impact, and more revenue. Leveraging over 80,000 workflows a month, our streamlined workflows powered by Helmut4 and helmut.cloud let editors collaborate and move at the speed of the story, delivering while the content is still fresh, relevant, and engaging."

Stacy Kelleher, Director of Production Philadelpia Eagles