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.”
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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/
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Press Contact
Katharine Guy
katharine.guy@editshare.com
