University of Hertfordshire, puts EditShare Solutions at the Core of Its Nationally Ranked Curriculum

Key Highlights

Enterprise Ready – IT-friendly and ultra-secure EditShare FLOW and EFS formed the media foundation to support the university’s two media labs consisting of 80 workstations as well as up to 400 Film and TV students who needed to access content remotely. 

Openness – Seamless integration with real-world tools Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid, Baselight, and Final Cut Pro ensured smooth project workflow and student collaboration. 

Future Proof – EditShare remote workflows supported critical remote production and review approvals, metadata entry, enabling students and teachers to do their coursework on campus and off.  

Automation – FLOW automation provided key efficiencies, including, managing the conversions of delivery formats for student project submissions. The consistency ensured access as well as managed storage volumes.

Competitive Proposal – EditShare’s competitive bid and robust offering stood out from the competition.

Background
Located in the picturesque Hertfordshire countryside in England, the University of Hertfordshire has a robust film and TV program with some 400 students. In 2018, the institution achieved the TEF gold rating by the UK government, the highest standard, for its teaching excellence framework. Thanks to its high-quality vocational content, graduates are ready for real-world careers upon entering the creative market.

The popular film and TV program recalibrates its curriculum every 5 years to ensure students are taught the latest techniques using modern filmmaking and video production technology. Just ahead of the COVID-19 shutdown, the university began its anniversary validation, selecting EditShare which supported multiple production and post-production workflows taught at the school, including remote-working workflows. Little did they know what lay ahead and how that investment in the future would enable them to keep the creativity flowing during a global pandemic.  

Widening the Opportunities to Learn
Principal lecturer, with a body of work that includes major motion pictures, Howard Berry brings a wealth of experience to the classroom. An Avid Certified Instructor, Apple Certified Master Trainer, and Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve Certified Trainer, Howard is also a savvy technologist who led the campus wide upgrade which coincided with the university’s course re-validation. Berry explains, “When we began the validation exercise, we had three different pathways that students could take: film and TV, documentary, film and TV fiction, and film and TV entertainment. People move from genre to genre, so we revised and consolidated to a unified film and TV production with a heavy emphasis on post-production. The new path would cover the range of productions as well as picture editing, color grading, visual effects, effects and, most importantly, the workflow side of things, giving students a more well-rounded education.” With the various productions consolidated into one track, Berry selected the EditShare EFS and FLOW solution to support the multiple workflows and various post-production tools used throughout the course. The open platform supported the university’s strategy for an integrated workflow that mapped back to real-world productions and provided a central shared storage platform to safely house content and easily manage student permissions from an administration module designed for educators.

Efficiency Through Automation
FLOW automation is key to streamlining the film and TV Program’s submission process. Berry explains the efficiency it has brought to the process, “FLOW hosts folders for all the student assignments. When they submit their QuickTime and finished version files to the EditShare system, FLOW automation scans the file and moves them into a folder only the lecturers can see. If the file is not in the right format, it will be scanned and transcoded. It also timestamps the submissions, so we know that the coursework was submitted on time.” Berry adds, “Some of the coursework is actual paperwork which is supposed to be submitted via the web portal, but students often hedge their bets and send it everything through FLOW, and FLOW automatically filters their PDFs into another folder. It’s a fantastic system where we can see all the relevant submitted files all the time. And it runs in a web browser, making it even easier for me to manage and share with my colleagues.”

Flip to Remote Production Overnight
The EditShare installation had been done just ahead of the pandemic, which enabled the film and TV department to continue its coursework after the world shut down. Key to the success of the remote production was EditShare’s FLOW, AirFLOW and FLOWStory. FLOW media management provided the media management foundation with AirFLOW and FLOWStory providing cloud-based editing, review and approval. Berry explains just how important these features became during the pandemic. “Without FLOWStory, the only option was to have students come into the university lab to work on their edits. During a pandemic the thought of having to go this route was not an option and our labs were closed for half of the year. FLOWStory was a light install that ran on Windows and Mac and would allow the students to edit from anywhere. It was perfect.” Berry adds, “As the students dived deeper into the application, they discovered that it could do 4k multi-camera editing and export the EDL directly into an NLE. And of course, AirFLOW gave us the important remote review and approval capabilities. Just incredible that we could slip into remote working so quickly. Weekly edit reviews, where staff and students would usually have to gather together, became easy with AirFLOW remote viewing and review markers added to the timeline with notes that the students could instantly see and act upon.” 

It’s All About Flexibility
For Berry, production has typically been rigid with required specifications and hardware.  With EditShare, the restrictions of connecting with other systems and geographic boundaries have been lifted. It allowed them to be adaptable to extremes. One degree project this year, “My Hundred Brothers and Sisters”, has involved students at a partner film school in Poland filming on behalf of Hertfordshire students who couldn’t travel abroad. The footage was sent from Poland over the internet, and the editor of the project was able to save it directly onto their dedicated 2TB EditShare space – instantly making it available to the director to review, the assistant editor to log and add metadata, and for transcripts to be prepared before the cut. The whole team could see the footage remotely any time they wanted to access it. Berry concludes, “We have many students who cannot return to campus because of the pandemic for one reason or another and they are still doing the coursework, they are still doing the training, and they are still able to learn because we are using EditShare. It’s an amazing gift of being able to do what we want and in any kind of way that we want to deliver it now. And I am very grateful.”

EditShare Solutions

FLOW media management provides a control layer for managing millions of assets as well as tools for ingest/log, browse, automate, and distribute
AirFLOW facilitates remote production including review and approval workflows
FLOW Story editor supports remote storyboarding and remote editing 
EFS provides media engineered shared storage 

Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston saw shared storage and collaborative working as the future of post-production ten years ago. Today, they’re convinced that their future is in the cloud.

Massachusetts College of Art and Design – usually known simply as MassArt – is a forward-looking visual and applied arts college in Boston. Founded in 1873, it’s the nation’s oldest art school, and the only publicly funded arts college in the United States. The college first installed EditShare over ten years ago. More recently the disruption caused by COVID-19 has accelerated the school’s journey into the cloud.

MassArt combined their film and video departments in 2000 and with continued growth, the department has seventy to eighty students plus a number of graduate students in any given year.

Joe Briganti, is the Associate Director of Video in the Film/Video department at MassArt. He describes himself as an artist, video editor, and video producer: “essentially, I’m a video person”. A familiar face at the school since the early eighties, when he was a student himself, he joined the staff in 1989. Joe is tasked with developing a strategy that mimics real world production and post-production for his students. “It’s pretty intense, because we always want to be on the cutting edge.”

And, they have always been on the cutting edge. Their first digital editing system arrived in 1995 which was right at the start of the steep ascent of NLE editing.

Boston-based EditShare has a proud history of being involved in local arts and the editing community. Briganti was an advocate for shared storage and oversaw the arrival of the school’s first collaborative system in 2010, donated by EditShare. Until then, “sneaker net” was the default mode for data transfer. Students brought their own hard drives and often they didn’t work or wouldn’t mount.

The EditShare system also solved the significant problem that students often simply didn’t have enough storage. The new workflows made possible with the shared and collaborative storage confirmed Briganti’s own conclusion that storage itself is the key to post-production, and the fact that it was working so well over a network showed that this was not only a viable technology but a desirable one.

The new set-up, compared to the old way of doing things (essentially walking while holding a drive, which made it very hard for students to collaborate), was amazing.

Students were blown away when they saw you could start a project on one system and pick it up on another. It really changed the dynamics. It quickly became an essential part of our day to day operations.

Across the estate

The Film and Video faculty at MassArt is comparable to the scale of a large post-production house, with grading, editing, and audio suites all needing powerful computers. EditShare sits in the middle of these, connecting each of the systems.

Students can use Avid Media Composer, Premiere Pro, or their DAW (audio software) and fluidly share their project files. It’s an ideal set-up for teaching, with all the materials exactly where they’re needed so that staff can focus on teaching. And, students can concentrate on technique and craft, rather than resources.

For Briganti, the addition of shared storage with EditShare changed the whole dynamic.

“With EditShare you can put some material on the system and everybody can access it. Nobody has to wait for a presentation to load or have it hang. It’s just there. EditShare is an essential part of our operations. I couldn’t work without it now. It’s exciting for me because we’re a teaching school and a post-production house. It’s been very good with EditShare.”

EditShare FLOW arrives in 2020

The pandemic and the subsequent shutdown in March 2020 meant that many students continued their studies either in a hybrid or remote setting. At first the school turned to WeTransfer but Briganti said “it was an awful way to work with video – we needed to find a way for students to remotely access their video in our local EditShare drives.”

Students shooting in the college’s studios on campus are able to upload to EditShare locally. Utilizing the FLOW media management solution makes that same material available from the cloud so that when they’re at home, they can edit without returning to the college.

“Some of our students are shooting at very high resolutions like 4K and 6K. They definitely don’t have the storage at home for that size of file, so they upload it into our EditShare server here and as soon as they do that, it’s available to them from any location. FLOW and AirFLOW solves the two problems of storage and working remotely”, said Briganti. “And this way of working isn’t just for the pandemic: it’s going to be our standard way of working into the future”.

Moving to the cloud

Briganti liked EditShare’s approach to cloud migration. With a vast range of options, from EFSv, which is the whole system, virtualized in the cloud, to traditional local shared storage, he saw, as an educator, a huge opportunity. EditShare’s cloud technology could extend his courses to students – potentially anywhere in the world – who can’t make it into the classroom. “We’d love to connect to artists around the world: not everyone can afford to live in Boston!”.

The pandemic has altered the curriculum. Some students will not return to full-time in class learning they may do more of their work online. Some students find it easier to access the curriculum and the project-based work from home. More importantly, this applies whether you’re halfway around the world, or are a short distance away. “Thanks to FLOW, we now have the ability to bring a world class film and video education to everyone”.

An ideal workflow

Senior Ian Dumas working on his thesis project relied on EditShare’s hybrid workflow to achieve his vision. A big believer in community filmmaking, Ian collaborated with friends using a wide range of equipment to create the film. A hybrid between narrative and experiential, Ian’s film is a character study of a close friendship shot over several days and evenings. The narrative was shot in 6k and other visuals in 4k, resulting in 3 TB of content. Without access to EditShare, Ian would have had to significantly alter his project. “When you have technology at your disposal you should explore new ways to use it. So I wanted to shoot this film in 6k on a Blackmagic Cinema Pocket Camera I had access to. However, COVID threatened to significantly derail my project,” said Ian. “Without access to the shared storage, I couldn’t even open the files on my laptop. EditShare allowed me to approach the project exactly the way I wanted too. I was able to use AirFLOW to offload my high resolution media to the EFS storage at school and FLOW to create mp4 proxies for my laptop. This was huge as I was able to start storyboarding and editing at home with the high resolutions safe at school.”

Briganti loves this way of working, and so do the students. “Ian’s really diving into it. He’s going to see where it takes him. When he’s done with the edit, he’ll take it into a craft editor like Avid Media Composer or Premiere Pro using XML and then come into the college when it is safe to grade and conform. I think this is going to be the norm from now. It really is pretty cool!”