Act Schnittwerk Unifies Editing and Grading Workflows with EditShare

Scalable EFS storage and NVMe performance give the Cologne post-production company a shared platform for demanding creative workflows

Based in Cologne, Act Schnittwerk is a leading independent post-production company providing creative and technical services for film and television. Its teams support productions from early workflow planning and ingest through editing, conforming, grading and final delivery, working across Avid Media Composer, Baselight, Adobe Creative Cloud, DaVinci Resolve and additional VFX tools.

As resolutions, codecs and production workloads increased, Act Schnittwerk’s existing storage environment at one of it sites was no longer delivering the bandwidth expected by its editing and finishing teams. The company needed to bring projects together on a central platform that could support collaborative editorial alongside the sustained performance demands of grading.

Working with Cologne-based systems integrator MoovIT, Act Schnittwerk implemented a high-availability EditShare EFS environment combining a high-availability EFS 410 storage cluster with an Ultimate EFS NVMe tier for performance-intensive work. The platform went live in September 2025 and has since been proven
across sustained, real-world production workloads.

A shared foundation for post-production

Act Schnittwerk provides a broad range of post-production services, including workflow consulting, ingest and digitization, transcoding, editing, conforming, color grading, audio post-production, graphics, VFX, mastering and archive.

Supporting these services through separate storage systems would make it harderfor teams to collaborate and for media to move efficiently between different stages of production. One of Act Schnittwerks main objectives was therefore to bring projects and creative teams together around a unified storage cluster.

The completed platform comprises two metadata controllers, five 480TB EFS 410 storage nodes configured for high availability, and a separate 192TB Ultimate EFS NVMe system.

The EFS 410 cluster provides resilient, scalable capacity for facility-wide collaborative production, while the NVMe tier delivers the additional bandwidth required for demanding grading, finishing and higher-resolution codec workflows.

Matching storage to the workload

Different stages of post-production place different demands on the underlying infrastructure. Editorial teams may need broad, concurrent access to large volumes of media, while grading and finishing require consistently high bandwidth and low-latency performance.

Act Schnittwerk can move projects between the EFS 410 and NVMe storage tiers as those requirements change. Performance-intensive work can be placed on NVMe, while the wider EFS environment supports editorial and other collaborative production tasks.

This allows Act Schnittwerk to manage projects according to their current workflow requirements without separating teams across independent storage platforms. It also creates a more flexible foundation for productions that move between editing, conforming, grading and final delivery. Media remains within the wider EFS environment, with the appropriate storage resources assigned as work progresses.

Real-world testing drives the decision

Performance was central to Act Schnittwerk’s evaluation of the platform. Rather than relying on specifications or controlled benchmarks alone, the company wanted the opportunity to test EditShare EFS under genuine production conditions in its own environment before making a purchasing decision.

Working together, Act Schnittwerk, MoovIT and EditShare committed significant technical and personnel resources to the evaluation. The storage was tested within Act Schnittwerk’s production environment and subjected to the types of editing, grading and finishing workloads it would need to support in everyday use.

This real-world testing played a major role in the purchasing decision. It gave Act Schnittwerk the opportunity to assess the storage alongside its network and existing
workflows, and to build confidence in its ability to deliver sustained performance under demanding production conditions.

“Trust only develops over time,” says Malte Kandil, Technical Director at Act Schnittwerk. “After gaining practical experience with the new platform, I can say that our expectations have been more than met. We can put the system under full load and still have performance in reserve.”

That performance headroom gives Act Schnittwerk confidence that the storage environment can support demanding work across the facility without grading and finishing workloads becoming a bottleneck for other production teams.

Storage and network working together

Meeting Act Schnittwerks requirements involved more than installing a new storage platform. The facility’s network infrastructure also needed to be refreshed and optimized around the bandwidth demands of the EFS environment.

MoovIT worked closely with Act Schnittwerk and EditShare throughout testing and implementation, treating the storage and network as connected parts of the same
production system.

“For us as a system integrator in the post-production world, customer satisfaction is the most important criterion,” says Vural Bostanci, Sales Director at MoovIT. “That can only be achieved when the network infrastructure and storage work together perfectly.

“We knew the requirements were demanding, but our close technical collaboration with EditShare meant we had the support needed to achieve the project’s objectives. We are proud of what we were able to deliver together with Act Schnittwerk and EditShare.”

Technical feedback from Act Schnittwerk helped the teams identify and address optimization requirements during the project, while MoovIT’s local expertise ensured the network was tightly integrated with the storage platform.

“From the outset, it was clear that Act Schnittwerk had exacting performance requirements,” says Christian Plitt, Regional Sales Director at EditShare. “The project required a strong local integrator that could optimize the network infrastructure around the storage and its bandwidth requirements. “Act Schnittwerk provided detailed technical input throughout the process, while MoovIT and our international team worked closely together to resolve challenges as they emerged. This is how collaboration between a customer, integrator and technology provider should work in practice.”

Ready for future growth

The platform currently provides the capacity and bandwidth Act Schnittwerk needs across its production operation. Its scale-out architecture also gives the company a clear route to add storage or performance as project volumes and technical requirements grow.

Additional capacity or bandwidth can be introduced without replacing the underlying platform, allowing the infrastructure to evolve alongside Act Schnittwerk’s workflows. For Act Schnittwerk, the result is a centralized production environment that supports collaborative editorial and demanding finishing work today, with the flexibility to adapt as the business develops.agna delivered a facility that is more reliable and able to support future production requirements. The shift from portable-drive workflows to a networked, HD-ready environment marks a practical step forward for the broadcaster.

For more information on EditShare solutions, please click here to get in touch.