Magna Systems modernises National Broadcasting Corporation of Papua New Guinea with integrated file-based workflow

Magna, with support from the Australian Government’s Regional Media Support Fund, has completed a systems integration project for the National Broadcasting Corporation of Papua New Guinea (NBC PNG), delivering a fully file-based production and content sharing environment that replaces the broadcaster’s legacy tape and manual processes.

NBC PNG’s new EditShare shared storage and media asset management system with Disk Archive supplied and installed by Magna Systems

NBC PNG, Papua New Guinea’s state-owned national broadcaster for more than 50 years, operates national radio services on 90.7 FM and 585 AM, Tribe 92FM and NBC Television. With news on the hour every hour, a nightly 6pm television bulletin and content contributions flowing in from geographically dispersed locations across the country, the corporation required a production platform that could keep pace with a demanding, deadline-driven schedule while bringing its operations into the digital era.

Future-Ready Solution

Magna was engaged to design and implement a reliable, future-ready solution. The engagement called for

• centralised file sharing
• dependable content access across multiple sites
• simplified ingest, editing and playout workflows
• improved system stability, redundancy, scalability for future HD and digital workflows
• ease of use for operational staff with varying technical expertise

The new solution centres on an EditShare shared storage and media asset management system paired with Disk Archive for long-form retention, connected through a high-speed network infrastructure and integrated with ingest, non-linear editing and playout.

Magna also supplied, installed and configured Apple edit systems to give journalists and producers direct, real-time access to centralised media. Backup and redundancy systems now protect content and ensure continuity of operations.

“Magna delivered exactly what we needed,” said Belsha Katun, Acting Executive Director of the National Broadcasting Corporation of Papua New Guinea. “We have moved from a fragmented, manual workflow to a fully integrated, file-based production environment. Our journalists, editors and producers can now ingest content from multiple sources, work directly from shared storage and prepare packages for broadcast far faster than before. The platform is stable, it is reliable and it gives us a clear, confident path to HD and digital workflows in the future. Magna understood our environment and our people and they delivered.”

Real-time Collaborative Environment with Significantly Faster Turnaround

The standout feature of the new solution is the transformation itself. What was previously a disjointed, tape-dependent operation is now a cohesive, real-time collaborative environment. A typical workflow begins with content ingested into the central storage system, logged and made available through the asset management interface, edited directly from shared storage, exported or transferred to playout and then archived for future reuse. This enables significantly faster turnaround of news content and a foundation that supports the corporation’s planned expansion into digital and HD services.

Magna group CEO Matthew Clemesha added, “We were delighted to be able to help NBC PNG with this key SI project. Magna was responsible for the end-to-end delivery of the project, covering system design and architecture, EditShare and Disk Archive supply and integration, installation and configuration of the supplied Apple edit systems, workflow optimisation, testing and commissioning and training of NBC operational staff.”

Benefits Beyond Technology

For NBC PNG, the benefits extend beyond technology as Belsha Katun concluded, “Our journalists, editors and producers now share content seamlessly between departments and locations, the production base is more resilient and as a result we are positioned to grow our HD and digital output without replacing the core platform. Our viewers and listeners also stand to benefit from faster, more reliable delivery of news and programming on radio, television and online.”

The NBC PNG project underscores Magna Systems’ continuing role in supporting broadcasters across the Asia-Pacific region in their transition to modern, file-based operations.

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

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.

Magna Systems has refreshed the broadcast infrastructure at Fiji TV with new shared storage, sync and archive systems to support Fiji TV’s move to HD editing and production

Fiji TV has completed a systems integration project with Magna Systems (Magna) that updates its broadcast editing and production facilities.

The work introduces EditShare shared storage, Leader synchronisation and Disk Archive for long-term storage, replacing older equipment and workflows that had become difficult to maintain.

Fiji TV CEO Sunjeewa Perera said, “This project has changed how we work. Before, our teams were spending more time moving drives between machines than actually editing. The new EditShare workflow means everyone can access the same projects, share ideas and get programmes to air faster. The stability of the new Leader sync system gives us confidence we simply didn’t have before. For our viewers, that means better-quality content, delivered more reliably. Magna understood our challenges from day one and delivered a solution that fits Fiji TV perfectly.”

Fiji TV’s goal was to move its operations toward HD and address a number of technical issues that were affecting day-to-day productivity.

When Magna’s engineering team arrived on site in Suva, they found that the facility’s SPG (Sync Pulse Generator), which provides timing reference for the broadcast plant, was running on a backup unit. The team worked with Fiji TV to replace this with a new Leader synchronisation system, configured with redundancy, to provide more reliable timing across the facility.

Updating Fiji TV’s Workflow from Ingest to Playout

The broadcaster’s editorial workflow had also relied on producers physically moving media on USB drives and portable hard disks between individual workstations. The practice was slow and made collaborative editing difficult.

For a broadcaster covering news, sport, current affairs and cultural programming across two free-to-air channels – Fiji One and Na Lololo – the old approach was becoming hard to sustain.

The integrated solution updates Fiji TV’s workflow from ingest to playout. At the centre sits EditShare, a shared storage and media management platform that connects the Mac workstations across the facility. Fiji TV’s production teams can now collaborate on projects, share media and archive completed programmes for later re-use, removing the need to transfer portable drives between workstations.

Archive and Redundancy

For long-term content preservation, the solution incorporates Disk Archive, providing online storage for completed productions and archive material. Network redundancy measures were also implemented throughout the facility to support operational continuity.

Content now enters the facility through networked ingest, is processed and edited within the EditShare environment by multiple producers and is then handed to the playout chain timed by the new Leader SPG. Improved monitoring gives technical staff a clearer view of the facility and helps them identify issues far earlier, a capability the old setup did not provide.

The system supports Fiji TV’s range of output delivered to viewers across Fiji and the Pacific, including

• live news
• sports coverage
• studio programming, and
• pre-recorded content

Working Beyond Equipment Supply

Magna’s work went beyond equipment supply. Drawing on its experience in broadcast and telecommunications systems integration, Magna worked alongside Fiji TV from initial site assessment and fault diagnosis, through solution design, to installation, commissioning and handover. The aim was to select technology that suited Fiji TV’s operational and budgetary context, rather than simply specifying the latest available equipment.

By addressing the SPG issue and redesigning core infrastructure around redundancy and shared access, Magna 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.

“The new EditShare workflow means everyone can access the same projects, share ideas and get programmes to air faster.”

Sunjeewa Perera concluded, “For Fiji TV’s staff, the most noticeable change is in day-to-day production. With shared project access, faster media availability and a more stable technical backbone, our editors and producers are able to deliver content with fewer technical interruptions. The updated facility positions Fiji TV to meet current broadcast standards and to scale operations as demand for content grows.”

About Fiji TV

Fiji Television Limited, also known as Fiji TV, is a television network headquartered in Suva, Fiji. It was established in 1994 as the first commercial television station in the country and quickly became the leading broadcaster in Fiji. Since its establishment, Fiji TV has expanded its reach to include a number of channels and has also developed a strong online presence with a website and social media pages that provide viewers with access to its programs and content. Programmes includes news, sports, entertainment, cultural programs as well as international content from around the world. Today, Fiji TV continues to be a major force in the broadcasting industry in Fiji and the Pacific and is dedicated to providing its viewers with the best in local and international television content.

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

Gorilla has connected its Cardiff and Bristol finishing operations around high-performance EditShare NVMe storage, working with Altered Images to give creative teams faster access to native media while reducing the manual media movement that can slow down high-end television (HETV) and film workflows..

Formed in 1999 around a single linear tape edit suite, Gorilla now operates three facilities spanning Avid editing, Baselight and DaVinci Resolve grading, and audio dubbing, including Dolby Atmos.

Creating a new tier

As Gorilla’s scripted and feature work increased, teams were working from local and internal storage, moving large volumes of media manually between systems. Conforms had to be copied onto individual Baselight systems and kept synchronised as projects progressed.

“We have expanded our films and HETV output and reached the point where it was time to invest in what we call tier-zero storage,” says Gorilla Managing Director Rich Moss. “It was our first shared storage tier designed for the high speeds required by image sequences and the other media we work with in finishing.”

Gorilla initially deployed EditShare NVMe shared storage at its Cardiff facility in 2025. Following its success, the company worked with Altered Images to extend the EditShare environment into Bristol, installing a second NVMe system in spring 2026. The facilities are connected by a low-latency 10Gb link, allowing media to be synchronised between the two systems.

“The Bristol project was about extending the capability Gorilla had already seen from EditShare NVMe into a second location,” says Mike Fitchie, Head of Technical Presales at Altered Images. “Our technical consultation with Gorilla has always been based on long-term value and personal support.”

Conform once, work in either city

For Online Finishing Editor Mark Bankhead, the change has been immediate. “Before EditShare, we were doing a lot of media management, moving conforms between Baselights and different internal storage systems,” he says. “As projects progressed, we had to keep the media synchronised manually. EditShare has completely transformed our conform workflows.”

A production can be conformed onto the EditShare storage at one facility and synchronised overnight to the other, giving Cardiff and Bristol users local access to the same media.

“When you access a scene, the media is there and automatically comes online,” says Bankhead. “We no longer have to manually manage it from a facility 50 miles away. We can concentrate on the work we need to do.”

Sharing creative resources

The infrastructure is also changing how Gorilla allocates colourists and grading rooms. On The Dream Lands for Sister Pictures, two colourists working from Bristol have been able to use Baselight systems and media located across both facilities, including one remotely controlling a Baselight in Cardiff from a Bristol grading room.

“The addition of tier-zero shared storage has given us the flexibility to join the two sites and has changed the way we finish high-end productions,” says Moss.

Christine Kelly, Colourist at Gorilla, adds: “EditShare has made it much easier for colourists to work in parallel across the company. With a simple change of media container within Baselight, we can continue working on projects across different sites as though the media were local. For a company spanning multiple locations, that makes a huge difference.”

Native media, QC and delivery

Performance was central because Gorilla’s scripted teams generally work with native camera media throughout finishing. Baselight systems now access source media directly from EditShare storage, with local caching used where appropriate.

The impact extends into QC and delivery. Large image-sequence exports previously had to be copied from finishing storage onto local drives before playback and review, with feature-film deliveries sometimes involving around five terabytes of image sequences.

“If we exported an image sequence for a feature, QC would previously have needed to copy it to an internal drive before they could play it,” says Bankhead. “Now they can take the render on the EditShare and play it immediately. It has sped up the whole delivery and QC process.”

The EditShare systems have supported drama and feature-film work including The Rapture for Mammoth Screen, Film4 feature H Is for Hawk, and The Dream Lands for Sister Pictures. On H Is for Hawk, grading was completed in Bristol while online finishing took place in Cardiff, showing how stages of a production can be divided between facilities without manual media management.

The next opportunity

Gorilla is now exploring how EditShare FLOW Automation could save further time. Ken Burnett, Technical Operations Manager at Gorilla, says: “We are automatically synchronising media between our Bristol and Cardiff sites via our 10Gb line. Both sites will work from a local EditShare unit, with FLOW keeping each site synchronised. FLOW has removed the operational complexity, allowing our colourists to focus entirely on the creative side of the job.”

For Moss, the value lies in the workflows already transformed and the platform it provides for further development. “It has opened up the flexibility to connect our sites, share our resources and change how we deliver that work as a business.”

“The addition of tier-zero shared storage has given us the flexibility to join the two sites and has changed the way we finish high-end productions.”

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

When you walk into George Blood LP’s facility in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, it feels like stepping into both a high-tech lab and a living museum. Walls lined with equipment spanning decades of media history tell the story of a company that says “yes” to any preservation challenge. From rare audio formats to 4K film, George Blood LP has built a reputation for solving problems others can’t.

That relentless approach has fueled rapid growth. What started as an audio preservation shop has expanded into large-scale film and video digitization, serving clients as varied as national broadcasters, universities, cultural foundations, and the Library of Congress. Over the last decade, workloads have multiplied several times over, pushing the company’s infrastructure to its limits.

Hitting the Wall with Legacy Storage

For years, George Blood LP relied on a 300TB spinning disk SAN connected via a mix of fiber and SMB protocols. As demand grew, throughput requirements ballooned from 8–10 terabytes a day to as much as 50. Multiple film scanners, video ingest rooms, rendering, QC, and delivery workflows all competed for bandwidth. The result: dropped frames, bottlenecks, and engineers fighting the system instead of focusing on the work.

“Our existing storage just couldn’t sustain what we were asking of it,” recalled Jared Gibson, Video Team Lead at George Blood LP. “We needed speed, stability, and capacity to keep growing.”

A Partner-Led Search for a New Backbone

Working with Key Code Media, a nationwide systems integrator which has supported George Blood for many years. George Blood LP evaluated multiple storage vendors. Sustained high-speed ingest, heavy simultaneous reads/writes, and reliability across dozens of connected clients were non-negotiable.

Key Code Media recommended EditShare, and testing quickly proved it was the right fit. Verified by LaserGraphics as the only storage capable of handling its scanners’ performance requirements, EditShare provided the reliability and throughput George Blood LP needed.

Performance That Changed Everything

From the moment the EditShare Ultimate NVMe nodes went live, the results were clear. “We pushed the system as hard as we could, and we couldn’t break it,” said Gibson. “In stress tests we sustained 16 gigabytes per second in writes, well above our expectations. With our previous SAN, we were constantly dropping frames and struggling to keep up. With EditShare, the bottlenecks are gone.”

The system now supports massive daily ingest across multiple 2K and 4K film scanners, high-volume video rooms, rendering, QC, and delivery processes, all without faltering. Stress tests with more than 80 clients confirmed stability far beyond normal workloads, providing headroom for years of continued growth.

Enabling Growth Without Compromise

The performance leap has unlocked a new level of capability. George Blood LP can now sustain high-volume digitization while maintaining the precision restoration quality that made their name. “I’m just so enamored by the performance of the storage,” said Jared Gibson. “It’s brought so much relief to the team, our growth and our hardware are now in sync and that changes everything.”

George Blood’s unique market position combines the ability to handle bulk digitization with the high fidelity expected of specialist restoration houses. “We can take on a semi-truck of media and still deliver at the highest quality,” said George Blood, President of George Blood LP. “We’re proud to combine scale with the care these collections deserve, and EditShare has given us the infrastructure we needed to meet the demand.”

About George Blood LP

George Blood LP is a leading provider of preservation and digitization services, specializing in audio, video, film, and data. With clients worldwide, the company is trusted by major broadcasters, universities, government agencies, and cultural institutions to safeguard irreplaceable media. Learn more at www.georgeblood.com.gh a Storage DNA MAM, that sits on top of our whole environment, and bring those assets back down again and deep archive on LTO on completion of a project. Editshare offers us better workflows with less human time and more automation.”

“We can take on a semi-truck of media and still deliver at the highest quality.”

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

EditShare has partnered with integration experts Broad Service and Mediacast to deliver a next-generation ingest, asset management, and production system for the Association of Basketball Clubs (ACB), one of Europe’s top professional basketball leagues.

Faced with rising demands for fast-turnaround content and multi-platform publishing, ACB needed to overhaul its production infrastructure. The answer was a powerful, scalable solution built around EditShare technology.

The deployment includes:

• EditShare FLOW Ingest, a multi-channel ingest solution supporting both baseband and NDI sources, with full support for edit while capture codecs. This allows immediate access to footage while it is still being recorded, streamlining fast paced sports workflows.
  
• EFS media-engineered nodes, designed for scalability, reliability, robust security, ensuring uninterrupted performance during live events and high volume collaboration.
  
• Multiple FLOW production servers, enabling rapid format conversion via powerful automation engine  enabling  streamlined distribution across broadcast, digital, and social platforms.
  
• FLOW Live Logging, giving editors and content teams the ability to tag game moments such as three pointers, fouls, and free throws in real-time.
  

Solving Real Pain Points on the Court and in the Cloud

The challenge: ACB was dealing with scattered storage, slow manual ingest and no way to tag and track content in real time.

The EditShare solution:

• Automated ingest into an EFS media gets footage into the system instantly…fast, organised.
  
• Live logging lets teams tag key moments as they happen for instant retrieval.
  
• Centralized media storage supports real-time collaboration without crashes or lost files.
  
  

“In live sports, if you miss the moment, you miss the opportunity,” said Tara Montford, Co Founder and EVP of Product at EditShare. “Our live logging and ingest tools give ACB’s content teams the ability to react instantly and turn raw game footage into ready to share content while the action is still happening.”

A Broadcast Slam Dunk for ACB

This upgrade is more than a tech win. It shows ACB’s commitment to delivering top tier content to fans everywhere, from the arena to the app. The system helps content teams move faster, publish smarter and push high quality media to every platform without delay.

With this shift to IP based production, powered by NDI (Network Device Interface), ACB sets a new standard in sports broadcasting. Agile, automated, and ready for whatever comes next.

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

System designed and installed by EditShare’s Partner Jigsaw24 Media

Overview

Intermission Film is an award-winning marketing agency for film and television, handling trailers, titles, social content and print work for hits like Baby Reindeer, Black Doves, Skeleton Crew and recent Oscar nominees A Real Pain and Maria. With offices on three continents all working together to deliver Clio and Golder Trailer Award-winning content for clients who don’t like to be kept waiting, a joined-up storage workflow is key to their success. 

“When I joined Intermission, each of the global offices was busy, but they were very siloed,” explains Ben Cryer, Intermission’s Group Operations Director. “But as we started getting more work from bigger studios, we had to become much more 24/7 in our approach. When you’re working with a studio in LA and they’re on deadline, they don’t care about time zones, so we needed a system that would allow the team in Australia to jump on to a project when the team in London finished for the day. That meant we needed much better collaboration and connectivity. At the same time, our existing Avid NEXIS storage needed replacing with something newer and bigger.”

The team considered a straightforward Avid expansion, but having added Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve seats to their editorial workflow they wanted something which, as Group Post-Production Engineer Kat Earles puts it, “would work with the way our company was growing, and make sure that no matter the software people were using, they could access secure storage at a larger scale.”

A switched-on storage partner

Enter Jigsaw24 Media. Having worked with Kat on previous projects at other facilities, they were brought on board to advise on a storage setup that could handle Intermission’s fast pace of growth and demand for a globally joined-up workforce. Their recommendation? EditShare’s EFS storage with built in FLOW workflow management tools.

“Talking to Jigsaw24 Media and EditShare, it was very clear that EFS storage was a constantly evolving piece of kit from a company who were very switched on the more global, multi-site sort of solution that companies like us need, and who were bringing new ideas and new ways of working to the table,” Ben explains.

“The additional features of FLOW were really interesting to us because they meant we could work more closely with our wider post-production team,” Kat adds. Things like the review and approval features built into EditShare ONE mean that the storage isn’t a standalone thing, it integrates with other processes and allows us to cut costs by reducing the number of additional platforms we have to use.”

Connecting global offices

Working with the Jigsaw24 Media team, Intermission began their transition to EditShare by setting up two EFS servers in their London office: one to act as a hub for video workflows, the other to handle print work and project documentation that needed to be accessed by all team members globally. 

This streamlined approach to media management was particularly important to Intermission, who are operating a rapidly-expanding global business with a very small ops team who have to handle everything from innovation to support for multiple territories. 

To help keep their IT estate to a manageable size and complexity, Jigsaw24 adited Intermission’s systems and recommended a series of simplifications, including consolidating all their remote access workflows into the user-friendly platform Parsec, automating archiving processes through Archiware and bringing their Mac estate under centralised control with Jamf device management. In order to keep things low-touch for Intermission’s busy team, their team handle licence management for these services, plus the company’s Avid estate. 

Once the new workflow was established in London, an engineer was sent to Amsterdam to install and test EditShare at their offices there. “Having a partner like Jigsaw24 Media takes a big weight off my shoulders for projects like the Amsterdam deployment, because they’re able to give us that support on an international basis,” says Kat. “I’d actually just had surgery right before the install, so it was great knowing there was someone on the ground to handle things and I didn’t have to worry about it.”

“Knowing we’ve got someone at the end of the phone who can help us if the wheels come off is important,” agrees Ben. “Particularly the fact that it’s someone who has been involved since the beginning, knows our setup and knows what we’re trying to achieve. If I call Jigsaw24 Media, there’s no-one asking ‘okay, how is that configured?’ they already know. And that makes the whole problem-solving piece that much easier.”

”The whole relationship feels very collaborative; we’re able to meet regularly and let the team know what we’re working on and what we want to achieve, and they can come up with solutions that are suited to our way of working rather than trying to fit us into the mould of a big post house.” 

Ben Cryer, Group Operations Director, Intermission

“We can look to the future”

“Our ultimate goal is to have EditShare in every office globally and an independent FLOW server in London that everyone will access via a DMZ [de-militarised zone],” says Kat. “Obviously that’s a big outlay so we’re not moving every office at once, but there’s been a lot of positive momentum and people want to change,” says Kat. 

“We’re growing quickly, and because of how responsive EditShare and Jigsaw24 Media are, we’re able to set things up and change things as we go, which we wouldn’t have been able to do with our previous infrastructure, and they’re constantly releasing new types of storage and software features that give us more options,” says Kat. “We can look to the future and trust that we have storage that will work with us.” 

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

About EditShare

EditShare is an Emmy Award-winning technology leader, supporting storytellers through collaborative media workflows across on-premise, cloud and hybrid architectures. It offers scalable storage and collaboration for media businesses and at every stage of the video production process from storyboarding to screening. 

The software is inherently open, encouraging workflow collaboration, third-party integrations and content sharing across the entire production chain. Where required, the software is backed by high performance, high availability designed specifically for the demands of media storage, management and delivery. The comprehensive offering covers multi-level content storage for production and post, along with innovative asset and workflow management software, plus specialized and highly valued tools for content review and distribution, the creation of customized and branded pitch reels, and secure preview of high-value pre-release content. 

About Jigsaw24 Media

Jigsaw24 Media is a specialist division of Jigsaw24 and provides services and technology solutions to the media and entertainment, education and corporate sectors.   It’s the only UK-based company of its kind that has in-house system integration capabilities. Jigsaw24 Media’s team of industry-recognised experts design, deliver, integrate and support end-to-end solutions for some of the nation’s biggest broadcasters and facilities, underpinned by partnerships with over 30 leading technology vendors including Avid, Adobe, AWS, Nutanix and EditShare.  With headquarters in Nottingham, an office and demo space at the heart of London’s post-production community, and a nationwide support team, Jigsaw24 Media provides local services on a national scale.  For more information visit https://media.jigsaw24.com/

©2024 EditShare LLC. All rights reserved. EditShare® is a registered trademark of EditShare.

Press Contact
Katharine Guy
katharine.guy@editshare.com

When producer Khalil Bachooali founded Offroad Films in 2011, he aimed to build an independent, creative-led production company that merged artistic sensibilities with marketing acumen. And with more than a decade of work in commercials and business films, he’s done just that.

Today, Offroad Films is regarded as a leader in the industry, recognized by multiple awards. That includes four Lions from the Cannes International Festival of Creativity, the most prestigious in the advertising world. And throughout their journey, they’ve relied on Wiredrive every step of the way.

The key to Offroad’s success

The philosophy has always been to start with the client’s brand and the story they need to tell. From that the creative spark appears, developing the way that the story should best be told. Only then will a director be selected who can best translate that story into visual reality. The result is that the company’s passion comes out in films which are effective, purposeful and engaging.

For Offroad Films’ clients, gaining insight into the agency’s past successes and creative expertise becomes an invaluable tool, helping to showcase the agency’s ability to bring their unique stories to life with precision and flair. That needs evidence in terms of previous, similar projects and showreels from the right directors who will realize that treatment.

For this reason, since the foundation of Offroad Films, Wiredrive has been used to present showreels to clients. Over the years it has developed the way it uses the software, and now it has become a central collaborative tool as well as a means of sharing content.

Wiredrive simplifies winning showreels

Wiredrive was developed as the best way to create showreels that have impact. The simple software provides a common store for all business assets, with a powerful organization layer to search, tag and filter the archive. The user defines the parameters in the asset management layer so the tags are appropriate and searches rapidly locate the best content.

In turn, that makes it easy to build and share customized, branded presentations. Each pitch and presentation is tailored for the specific target but can be created in moments. Naturally, the agency’s corporate branding is maintained in every showreel.

Secure distribution is managed through Wiredrive to ensure that it arrives at the right people’s desks. Advanced analytics ensure the user can track the audience to get the right impact.

Developing from the showreel tools, Wiredrive has become a valuable collaboration tool. Workspaces are defined for each project, and all of its assets are managed in one space. Comments and approvals are logged and time-stamped to speed finishing and provide a sign-off trail.

The delivery capabilities mean that remote collaborators are part of the same workflow, sharing work instantly and securely among the project team.

Wiredrive’s indispensable functionality

When Offroad Films was formed in 2011, it urgently needed a way to create directors’ showreels. Wiredrive was tried and proved to be the best tool for the job. Since then, it has relied on it to develop pitch reels and manage the showreel content from the freelance directors it uses on its many projects.

“Showreels were the main reason to bring in Wiredrive,” said Rebecca Maria, Administrative Head at Offroad Films. “Nothing else delivers the same functionality.

“But as time has gone on, use cases have accumulated,” she added.

Today, each new production is allocated a workspace in Wiredrive to act as the hub for all content. As the team grows, with freelance and house staff, they are given access to the project workspace, where they can see progress and track assets.

“Typically, our associate producer is responsible for managing the content,” Rebecca Maria explained. “They will build up material from the first location research all the way to finished contents and share them easily.

“Wiredrive also allows us to quickly share specific content,” she said. “It is also useful to brief freelancers: we can create a ‘showreel’ showing the feel of what we are aiming to achieve in a film, so they know how their particular craft needs to fit in.”

The flexibility of the software means that all stages of the project use Wiredrive to be more efficient. It starts in pre-production, through shooting and post, and on to marketing and distribution. Each project that Offroad undertakes is different, and each team will use Wiredrive in its own way to best keep the team up to speed and deliver the project on time.

When a project is successfully completed, the finished films are added to the Wiredrive archive. There, they are ready to be used in future showreels, winning more creative commissions for striking and effective commercials.

“Showreels were the main reason to bring in Wiredrive, nothing else delivers the same functionality”.

Rebecca Maria, Administrative Head at Offroad Films

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

The variety of editing that goes on at a broadcaster would amaze you. There are promos, documentaries, news stories, specials and more. Some projects take weeks, and some projects take hours. The technical infrastructure is imposing, but it’s also mobile. Add to that a changing landscape of viewers’ tastes, outside consultants and inside pressures. 

To get an inside look at the world of broadcast video editing, we interviewed Gregg Ginnell, former senior editor and post-production supervisor at the CBS affiliate Kiro 7 in Seattle, WA. He’s had a career spanning more than two decades and was keen to share his insights.

Meet a broadcast editor

“I worked in broadcast for a large number of years. I did a lot of documentaries. I did a lot of promotion. I didn’t do a lot of news,” relates Grinnell. “I did do news for a couple of years after leaving Kiro when I worked for Al Jazeera America. That was a completely different news experience.” When an interview opens with that breath of experience, you know that you are going to get some interesting insights into the world of video editing for broadcast.

Video editing for film, corporate and broadcast is all storytelling. But Gregg pointed out that there’s a vast difference between a “three-and-a-half minute story” and a “six-shot” news segment. While working at Kiro, the work got split up between team members who were good with quickly putting together a series of shots and moving on and those who spent days crafting a story. 

He related a story of a colleague comparing the cutting of short segments to “making sandwiches.” That kind of edit had to be put together quickly to meet deadlines. Gregg focused on pieces that involved interviews and promotional spots for the station.

Film vs broadcast editing

I asked Gregg what the biggest difference was in the mindset of an editor working on a film vs. one working in broadcasting. His reply was, “Consultants.”

I didn’t expect that answer. He explained that every 12-18 months, a consultant would be brought into the station to give their perspective on trends in broadcast and how to gain market share. Each time, there was a different person, but they were all from the same firm. Sometimes their guidance would directly contradict each other or go back and forth between recommending a trend, advising against it, and then recommending it again.

Gregg shared that the advice of one consultant was to focus on the local news talent for their promo spots. So they went out and shot footage and tied that in with graphics to create a personal connection between the talent and the audience. Eighteen months later, another consultant from the same firm came in. This person advised that they need to drop the focus on talent and emphasize the news itself. Gregg’s team went to work on the new direction and crafted a whole new set of promos. 

A year or so went by, and, you guessed it, the next consultant from the firm said to highlight the talent. At this point, Gregg’s team showed them the promo package from the prior campaign and simply asked, “Like this?” 

Running decisions through the lens of outside consultants also led to feedback around everything from how many shots should be in a story to the content of the promotional packages. This dynamic leads to a balancing act for broadcast editors between their instincts on telling a story and outside feedback based on market research. 

For instance, a story might go off for review, and the feedback would come back as “We love this story, but your shot count is too low.” Gregg recalled thinking, “Well, actually, it has just the right number of shots.” But at the end of the day, you do your best work and try to balance those competing interests. 

This is in contrast to the work that Gregg did for the broadcaster Al-Jazeera America. In his experience, they deferred to the editor to determine the dynamics of the edit, even if it meant a piece was a few seconds longer than initially planned. 

Editing three-and-a-half-minute packages that took the editor’s lead feels more like a documentary filmmaker’s approach than working in a typical newsroom. 

Grinnell made an interesting comparison between documentary and news editors, saying, “I love news editors. I can’t do their job. I’m a little too frenetic. But I know news editors who became documentary editors. I don’t know any documentary editors who became news editors.” 

It appears that once you’ve had a chance to tell long form stories, you just keep coming back for more. 

Promo Editing

Gregg spent much of his time crafting “promos.” These spots air during commercial breaks and promote the news programming of the local station. 

A lot more effort goes into editing promos than your evening news stories. This demonstrates the broad spectrum of talent that needs to be brought to the table at your local broadcaster. Some editors need to be fast. Gregg mentioned an editor who cut 62 packages in eight hours! 

On the flip side, Gregg would spend half a day dialing in the color grade for a single promo spot. The message, visuals, motion graphics and sound would all be coordinated to reinforce the brand message for that season.

That difference in editing jobs perfectly illustrates Gregg’s comparison of editing a documentary vs a last-minute promo. He went on to describe it, “If I’m working on a documentary, I’m working directly with the producer, and we’re working every day together, and we are creating it from whole cloth. And that is a completely different experience than how [if] somebody comes in and drops a script down and going, [and says] ‘we got to promote this thing and we got to do it in the next two hours.’ And those are all really different, almost different jobs.”

Learning to shoot helps you edit better

As an editor, you are always looking to grow your storytelling skills. Gregg related, “I’ve always told everybody that I didn’t become a good editor until I became a better shooter. Go out and have to shoot your own stuff, and [when] you get back into the bay, there’s no one else you can blame.” 

Many shooters who started off as editors develop strong skills as interviewers. “Where you’re sitting there listening and you go,” Gregg recounted, “Oh, my story’s changing now! There’s nothing I love more than editing in my head.” 

You can see from Gregg’s career how the disciplines of editing, shooting and interviewing all work together in the head of the filmmaker to produce a better story. It’s a good reminder that in this age of specialization, there’s still value in combining the skills of a generalist with an area of specialization. 

Working remotely

Working remotely was a shock to many industries, but post-production had already laid in place much of the infrastructure to go remote. This preparation allowed editors to remote into their AVID workstations from home and crank out edits. Google docs, Slack and Zoom provided other means for collaboration. Broadcasters all over the world also began to use advanced tools like MediaSilo.com for review/approval, tracking versions and managing assets. These tools combined to really remake the landscape of post-production. 

Gregg shared about a campaign he edited for an app that focused on the footwear market. The shooters were in NYC, the graphic designer was in Utah, motion graphics were in California, and he was editing from Seattle. With the proliferation of mobile video capture and distributed teams, we’re going to see more and more of this kind of collaboration. 

But along with the ability to work from anywhere comes the importance of security. MediaSilo helps broadcasters secure their assets with SafeStream technology. SafeStream enables visible watermarks and invisible forensic watermarking so that you can track any leaks back to their source.

Conclusion

Getting to know this legendary Seattle broadcast editor, Gregg Grinnell, was an honor. He has a passion for editing that is still burning strong after decades in the business. 

Grinnell’s experiences remind us that being an editor is an act of service. Sometimes, you serve a client, a consultant, or a director, but you always serve the story. 

It’s inspiring to see how even though consultants come and go and technology changes, the need for crafting compelling stories only increases. It causes us to ask ourselves, “How will I adapt to a shifting landscape? What core skills can I continue to develop that will remain relevant no matter what the future holds?” Those questions will help editors remain sharp and stay in demand in this ever-changing landscape.

Building For The Future

Azimuth, a full service editing, post-production, finishing and delivery facility, has a new home, purpose built from the ground up, on Eagle Street in Holborn in the heart of Central London. With the changing demands of modern broadcast – particularly the need to deliver in 4K HDR and with Dolby Atmos Home Entertainment audio – Azimuth have designed and built a modern, flexible, and adaptable post house to fulfill these requirements incorporating the latest in post technology and workflow methodologies. Systems integration was carried out by technology experts, Altered Images.

Re-Imagining Azimuth

Operations Director, Yives Reed describes the challenge that led to the new, re-imagined Azimuth being built: “post pandemic, OR Media (parent production company) had lots of projects coming through with multiple specialist factual and documentary series. As they were getting closer to post production, it was obvious that the Azimuth as was, was not set up to accommodate either the volume or the 4K HDR deliverables required so the time was right for a reset.

High-End Television Post Workflows

At the heart of Azimuth’s technology vision was the need to fully support a range of high-end television post workflows. To achieve this, they knew they needed a robust server and media management system that could securely handle multiple streams of high-bandwidth data, including 4K and even 8K RAW files, and effortlessly distribute these with real time playback wherever and whenever required within the facility.

Head of Technical Operations, Steve Oak describes the new picture finishing set up at Azimuth. “The bulk of the work going through the facility is 4K HDR and Dolby Atmos for IMF delivery. If that high bandwidth work sets your benchmark, it helps to make some pioneering decisions with our hardware. Between two Resolve Grades and three Online, three Colour Assist stations and two QC rooms we are reading and writing huge amounts of data at the same time. Alongside native workflows in Resolve, we’ve got Baselight and Flame Open EXR and uncompressed workflows with its own demanding requirements. In Resolve we’re working with multi-layered sequences, including uncompressed RAW, all supported by the 40 Gb/s network input from each of the Editshare SSD arrays.”

Oak continues, “we are bricks and mortar within a Central London location and despite our cloud presence, the bulk of our services are hosted here. When you go back to the shell of a building, you have the chance to shape it in the way that you think it should be going forward. We wanted flexibility with what we put into place now and how it might be different in six or twelve months’ time which is not how most post houses work.”

The Need For Flexibility

“With Editshare, we have a petabyte of spinning disk and 200 terabytes of SSD between which we can move workspaces seamlessly while carrying on working. Importantly, Editshare is NLE agnostic allowing our customers to work the way they want to work with media plug-ins and workspaces for Media Composer, Resolve and Premiere Pro respectively.

“At Azimuth, we bring the native material into a Resolve conform to effectively create a re-link environment. We get a lot of XAVC at 300 and 450 Mb/s, RED, Canon XF, Sony X-OCN and ProRes RAW. In Final Post it means that we can have quite large workspaces and we can be pulling a huge amount of bandwidth per client.

Better Workflows

“An Editshare media asset management system sits on top for media encoding and cloud integration where you can work within an intuitive web GUI, all of which is tied into a server giving us better performance for our dollar than any other we reviewed. Investing in Editshare was a no-brainer.”

Reed concurs, “ Editshare gives us performance storage with a lot of useful tools to support a fully modern workflow and an agnostic approach to applications. It’s flexible and has a strong track record.”

Oak is consistently looking towards what’s next and was additionally impressed by Editshare’s M&E-centric approach, increasing use of automation and roadmap, “Editshare’s acquisition and integration of MediaSilo reflects the vendor’s approach. You can set up watch folders through your FLOW environment so you can export a cut and it will transcode and upload it to MediaSilo, and anyone within that group will get a notification that it’s been uploaded. It can scan our MediaSilo cloud storage through a Storage DNA MAM, that sits on top of our whole environment, and bring those assets back down again and deep archive on LTO on completion of a project. Editshare offers us better workflows with less human time and more automation.”

“Editshare gives us performance storage with a lot of useful tools to support a fully modern workflow and an agnostic approach to applications.”

Operations Director, Yives Reed

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