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.”
Joe Briganti, Associate Director of Video in the Film/Video department at MassArt
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.”
Ian Dumas, Student Filmmaker, MassArt
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!”
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March 17 Session 1: 9:00 AM ET (duration 1 hour)
Faced with the realities of remote learning, students of Massachusetts College of Art & Design (MassArt) adopt real world, remote production techniques to complete coursework and graduation projects. Their success proves the efficacy of remote production workflows and paves a path to the cloud for tomorrow’s filmmakers. Join EditShare founder, Andy Liebman and MassArt’s associate director of video, Joe Briganti as they showcase graduating filmmaker Ian Dumas’s thesis work and the EditShare solution that made it possible.
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Webinar Speakers
Dan Schaffer, Director of Partner Strategy and Enablement, EditShare
Andy Liebman, Founder EditShare
Joe Briganti, Associate Director of Video, MassArt
Ian Dumas, Undergraduate Senior – Film/Video, MassArt
**This Webinar Has Passed. Please Fill Out The Form To Access The Recording.
Details
March 17 Session 2: 3:00 PM ET (duration 1 hour)
Faced with the realities of remote learning, students of Massachusetts College of Art & Design (MassArt) adopt real world, remote production techniques to complete coursework and graduation projects. Their success proves the efficacy of remote production workflows and paves a path to the cloud for tomorrow’s filmmakers. Join EditShare founder, Andy Liebman and MassArt’s associate director of video, Joe Briganti as they showcase graduating filmmaker Ian Dumas’s thesis work and the EditShare solution that made it possible.
Access The Recording
Webinar Speakers
Dan Schaffer, Director of Partner Strategy and Enablement, EditShare
Andy Liebman, EditShare Founder
Joe Briganti, Associate Director of Video, MassArt
Ian Dumas, Undergraduate Senior – Film/Video, MassArt
Wednesday, February 17 Session 1: 9:00 AM ET (duration 1 hour)
Join us as we explore using logging and automation to maximize the value and efficiency of your media production workflows. We’ll set the stage, view the architecture in a workflow diagram, and see first hand what it’s like to use day to day. As always, we’ll finish with a Q&A where our Solutions Architects will answer your questions and discuss matching these capabilities to your unique needs.
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Dan Schaffer, Director, Partner Strategy and Enablement
**This Webinar Has Passed. Please Fill Out The Form To Access The Recording.
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Wednesday, February 17 Session 2: 3:00 PM ET (duration 1 hour)
Join us as we explore using logging and automation to maximize the value and efficiency of your media production workflows. We’ll set the stage, view the architecture in a workflow diagram, and see first hand what it’s like to use day to day. As always, we’ll finish with a Q&A where our Solutions Architects will answer your questions and discuss matching these capabilities to your unique needs.
Access The Recording
Webinar Speakers
Dan Schaffer, Director, Partner Strategy and Enablement
David Bourke, Pre Sales Engineer
Boston, MA – January 27, 2021EditShare, a technology leader that specializes in collaboration, security, and intelligent storage solutions for media creation and management, has joined forces with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to deliver best in class media management and storage solutions using HPE ProLiant servers. With its world class platform technology, support, and international logistics capabilities underpinning the solution, HPE provides the perfect foundation by extending industry-leading security, performance and versatility for EditShare’s current hardware needs and future product roadmap, achieving economies of scale.
“EditShare customers can look forward to an increased pace of innovation, while taking advantage of HPE’s forward-looking technology roadmap,” states Sunil Mudholkar, vice president of product, EditShare. “HPE has a deserved reputation for building high performing, dependable and cutting-edge servers and storage solutions. Joining forces allows us to focus on our award-winning open software solutions and push the flexibility, scalability, and performance of media-optimized software technology on standard IT hardware.”
“Digital media content is increasingly growing, requiring reliable and secure compute and storage solutions to efficiently store and manage data. Leading providers such as EditShare are addressing this need for a range of media content production needs,” said Phillip Cutrone, vice president and general manager of Service Providers, OEM and Major Accounts at HPE. “Through our latest OEM collaboration, EditShare is providing customers with reliable, integrated solutions built on HPE ProLiant servers, which are the world’s most trusted compute platforms with industry-leading performance and scalability, to meet growing data demands.”
“As video production becomes a more integral component of every company’s business, it’s important to offer an enterprise level storage and asset management solution that meets these needs. EditShare’s alignment with HP meets these requirements,” states Marci Maddox, IDC research director digital experience strategies.
EditShare will begin shipping its solutions for HPE ProLiant servers on February 1, 2021. For more information on the EditShare solutions visit https://editshare.com/hpe-form.
About EditShare
EditShare is a technology leader in networked shared storage and smart workflow solutions for the production, post-production, new media, sports, and education markets. Whether you need on-prem, cloud, or hybrid solutions, our products improve efficiency and workflow collaboration every step of the way. They include media optimized high-performance shared storage, archiving and backup software, a suite of media management tools and a robust set of open APIs that enable integration throughout the workflow. Customer and partner success are at the heart of EditShare’s core values ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none.
Press Contact Cat Soroush Zazil Media Group (e) catherine@zazilmediagroup.com (p) +1 (631) 880-9534
FLOW and EFS provide campus-wide cloud-based media management and open storage for renowned educational institution
Boston, MA – December 3, 2020 – EditShare®, a technology leader that specializes in collaboration, security, and intelligent storage solutions, today announced that the UK’s National Film and Television School (NFTS) is standardizing its post-production, content delivery, and storage operations on EditShare’s EFS open shared storage solution and FLOW media management platform. By replacing its aging shared-storage platform with a mix of on-premise and cloud-based technologies, the prestigious NFTS, one of the world’s leading film, television and games schools, will increase productivity and more efficiently manage and share the content being created by staff and students.
Founded in 1971, and based at Beaconsfield Studios in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England, the School offers more than 30 post-graduate level courses across the film, television and gaming disciplines, including camera operations, directing, cinematography, sound, script supervision, and production accounting. The school realized it needed to update its current system, while implementing open, logical, and automated methods of file and project management.
NFTS has always taken pride in its earlier reputation as a “slightly anarchical” community of filmmakers, but just as that culture over time settled into a more organized and formalized environment, its technology and production infrastructures needed to follow suit, according to Doug Shannon, head of IT for NFTS.
“When I began here, there was no network,” said Shannon, who brought a professional background in post-production when he joined the School 20 years ago. “Everyone simply passed hard drives around by hand. We needed greater consistency and a more open production environment. Initially we moved to simple, departmental servers. Then, five years ago, we first moved to dedicated shared editing storage, but that system had come to the end of its usable life, with the support contract becoming unsustainably costly. It was time to move on.”
In addition to continually enhancing productivity and efficiency, NFTS is focused on giving its students a diverse educational experience with hands-on access to the latest generation of production tools used by professionals today.
“We aim to emulate real life as much as possible,” Shannon said. “Our students come here already knowing what they want to do, so they work with teams of specialists, much like any professional environment. It’s less about technology and more about helping people work to achieve their best within each role.”
NFTS was looking for an open media management and storage foundation to easily allow the use of multiple creative editorial and finishing tools. The School will use EFS and FLOW to support a range of connected solutions for editing, grading, animation and more.
“Companies have realized they have to be open,” Shannon said. “The proprietary world is gone. For us, openness was both an assumption and a requirement.”
He added that the EFS and FLOW systems help production teams adapt quickly to the different camera systems NFTS uses from Arri, Sony, RED and Blackmagic. “For example, FLOW supports formats in a clever way and doesn’t have to break up RED files into blocks.”
Security and remote collaboration were also key factors, especially with the school and the rest of the world still in some phase of COVID-related lockdown. “We needed something to help us work beyond our physical boundaries and give us the ability to look at rushes when working remotely,” Shannon said, adding the virtualized version of FLOW and AirFLOW are the perfect match for the school’s fast-turnaround production and review cycles. EFS underpins the on-premise and remote production workflow with best practice security file tracking to answer who did what and when.
With the EFS system in place, total shared editing storage at NFTS has increased from 490TB to 2.2PB, more than enough to meet the School’s current and even future requirements.
“Our enrollment is quite small at 500 students per year and we don’t see those numbers growing exponentially, so it’s an easy equation,” he said. “Most of our workspaces are around 10TB and an average film is 5 to 10 TB, with around 120 films in production and post-production at any one time. Also, using the Ark storage software is the easiest way to back-up an entire project. EditShare gives us a complete media production workflow. Everything you need for a film is there.”
“EditShare has worked alongside universities since its inception and understands the unique and highly diverse needs of faculty and students and have purpose built, yet open, solutions that sustain the academic setting while mimicking a real-world situation,” states Robin Adams, vice president EMEA sales, EditShare. “This insight and crafted solution, paired with EditShare’s cloud innovation, will help teachers and students hurdle the unprecedented challenges this year has brought and continue to connect, teach, learn, and create amazing together.”
For more information on EditShare solutions, please visit the website at www.editshare.com
About the National Film and Television School (NFTS)
Variety’s Top UK Film School 2020 and recipient of the 2018 Outstanding Contribution to British Cinema BAFTA, the NFTS is one of the world’s leading film, games and television schools. NFTS alumni have gone on to win 13Oscars and 145 BAFTAs with graduates including: double Oscar winning cinematographer Roger Deakins (1917) creator of global Netflix hit Sex Education Laurie Nunn and BAFTA winning director, Lynne Ramsay (You Were Never Really Here). The NFTS is a registered charity (313429). For more information see nfts.co.uk
About EditShare
EditShare is a technology leader in networked shared storage and smart workflow solutions for the production, post-production, new media, sports, and education markets. Whether you need on-prem, cloud, or hybrid solutions, our products improve efficiency and workflow collaboration every step of the way. They include media optimized high-performance shared storage, archiving and backup software, a suite of media management tools and a robust set of open APIs that enable integration throughout the workflow. Customer and partner success are at the heart of EditShare’s core values ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none.
