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 Storyeditor supports remote storyboarding and remote editing EFSprovides media engineered shared storage
New workgroup permissions, NDI Support, and third-party integrations enhance workflows for admins and video editors
Boston, MA – July 1, 2021 –EditShare®, a technology leader that delivers software to enable collaborative media workflows for storytellers, announced today a number of key enhancements to its EFS and FLOW solutions. As the intelligent media control and management layer for on-premises and cloud, EditShare solutions enable collaborative media production workflows including storyboarding, review and approval, storage management, archiving and distribution.
FLOW Key Enhancements
EditShare customers can watch the FLOW Q2 update video to learn more about the new features and capabilities. NDI and H.265 Scan Support
Support for the growing demand for NDI workflows within FLOW, which is currently in public beta, provides EditShare customers a convenient architecture for distributing video over IP.
Support for H.265 HEVC compression technology widely used in productions around the world offers EditShare customers outstanding picture quality with very low file sizes.
Group Permissions with Support for Projects, Metadata and Channels
Quickly create, delete, and edit groups permissions.
Disable and re-enable entire groups.
Easily promote and track users’ permissions.
Extend permissions on a group basis to projects, metadata templates and ingest channels.
Forced Logout from all FLOW Clients
Disconnect users from FLOW applications to free up licenses, optimizing use for production resources.
Metadata and Mapping
Support for import of .mxf/.r3d file samples for mapping configuration. Key for customers using Avid workflows, reveals internal metadata contained within supported media files, allowing quick configuration of metadata-mapping into FLOW custom fields.
Support for import and mapping of sidecar XML to non-video files, such as still images, enables facilities with large still libraries and other non-video collections to migrate seamlessly to FLOW to be ready for production.
Video Previews Available for Real-time Preview of SDI/NDI
‘Live’ monitoring, configuration, and workflow management.
Support for the preview of live ingest sources in web applications.
Integration with Mobius Vision AI – Facial Recognition
Saves FLOW users time reviewing and tagging content.
Comprehensive database includes thousands of celebrities and public figures.
Ability to augment the database with a custom collection of faces for detection.
Support for the latest Archiware Release
Optimized for large file counts in transfer.
Users can easily archive and restore assets from FLOW tools supporting accurate source path preservation and tape barcode metadata tracking.
EFS Key Enhancements
EFS Control: Advances in our new Web-Based UI with User Groups Support
View user group membership in the sidebar.
View and search media spaces to which each group has been assigned.
Add and remove groups to and from media spaces.
Support for exporting any table view (e.g., the list of spaces and users) as a CSV file.
Active Directory
Support for legacy operation of a single group for all active directory accounts.
Audit and Monitor
View summary of real-time read and write bandwidth data to manage user traffic and prioritize bandwidth for high priority tasks.
EFS Storage Optimization
Default speed for EFS background operations is 20X faster, making the system more efficient when adding a new storage node.
Ability to immediately utilize replication goals for new media spaces without rebooting.
“Our commitment to customer success drives our roadmap,” comments Sunil Mudholkar, vice president of product management, EditShare. “This release of EditShare software enhances support for large-scale installations and complex workflows where customers need greater control without losing the nimble flexibility, making EFS and FLOW even easier to use on a day-to-day basis.”
About EditShare EditShare is a technology leader that enables collaborative media workflows on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid configuration. With customer and partner success at the heart of EditShare’s core values, our open software solutions and robust APIs improve workflow collaboration and third-party integrations across the entire production chain, ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none. The high-performance software lineup includes media optimized shared storage management, archiving and backup, and media management, all supported with open APIs for extensible integration.
Press Contact Cat Soroush Zazil Media Group (e) catherine@zazilmediagroup.com (p) +1 (631) 880-9534
EFS media platform provides video professionals a powerful collaboration and storage solution
Beijing, China – June 23, 2021 – EditShare®, a technology leader that specializes in collaboration, security, and intelligent storage solutions, today announced that it has deployed its EditShare EFS solution at Malanshan Video Cultural and Creative Industry Zone (The Zone). Located in Changsha, China, The Zone is known as a “World Media Arts City” that integrates creativity, culture, and technology into the fabric of its community. As the cultural epicenter of China, The Zone draws filmmakers and artists, boasting a thriving digital media market. The EFS solution, which was installed by EditShare partner Thinktone Technology at the park’s main creative hub, integrates with a wide range of production and post production solutions including key editing applications Adobe® Premiere® Pro, Avid Media Composer®, Apple Final Cut Pro® X and Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve.
“Media production is fluid and collaborative. In order to achieve full artistic expression, you need a foundation that connects artists with tools to fuel the creative workflow process,” Alan Dishington, vice president of sales for Asia Pacific, EditShare. “EditShare has always designed products that prioritize creative users with no compromise on technology. Creative professionals are abstracted from the complexity of modern media management while the technology at the heart of the EditShare products is designed to the very best principles of software engineering. All of this is wrapped in the imperative that our systems are open and scalable in order to adapt to future requirements.”
About EditShare EFSMedia Engineered Storage Powering faster EditShare storage nodes and networks, EFS enables media organizations to build extensive HD, 4K, and 8K collaborative workflows. To the end-user, EFS is a fast and flexible, collaborative, easy-to-use, storage space with an incredible throughput performance. To the engineers who manage it, EFS offers a scalable, stable, and incredibly secure media storage platform. Unlike generic IT storage systems, EditShare has written its own efficient drivers for EFS, for use with Windows, MacOS and Linux. Users access more real-time video streams, without the bottlenecks caused by legacy network protocols.The open platform features robust APIs for extensive integration and workflow optimization.
The EFS product line offers solutions for on-premise, hybrid and cloud-based workflows. Other feature highlights include:
EFS Single Namespace – a distributed file system designed to scale at will, while retaining a single namespace across tiered storage.
EFS Native Drivers – native client drivers substantially increase bandwidth and reduce latency across the network.
EFS Auditing – real-time analytics for every nuance of your valuable content’s journey.
EFS APIs – restFul API’s for simple but powerful integration with third party applications and services.
EFS Fault Prevention – distributed file system, writing content and giving protection across multiple nodes that intelligently replicates data as often as needed without negatively impacting performance.
Active directory integration with SSO
EFS High Availability – extreme reliability, and with no single point of failure, facility managers and administrators can have peace of mind in 24/7 environments such as broadcast playout centers.
Support for Industry Creative Applications – support for video and audio editing applications, color grading and visual effects solutions including Adobe, Apple Autodesk, Avid, Blackmagic Design and Sony.
For more information on EditShare solutions, please visit the website at www.editshare.com
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.
Our Director of Business Development, Jeff Barnes, sat down with SVG’s Chief Editor, Jason Dachman, to provided an update on our EFS collaborative storage and FLOW media management solutions and to highlight some of the key partnerships that are strengthening our presence in the sports industry.
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May 12 Session 2: 3:00 PM USA Eastern Time (duration 1 hour)
Join EditShare’s VP of Business Development, Tom Rosenstein, and Lead Pre-sales Engineer, Nathan Rausch, as they outline the pragmatic steps toward a complete end-to-end production workflow in the cloud. Each stop along the way brings maximum value for an incremental investment. We’ll share sample diagrams, demos, and cost comparisons for cloud production workflows to help begin your Journey to the Cloud.
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Webinar Speakers
Dan Schaffer, Director of Partner Strategy and Enablement, EditShare
Tom Rosenstein, VP of Business Development, EditShare
** This webinar has passed. Please fill out the form to access the recording.
May 12 Session 1: 9:00 AM USA Eastern Time (duration 1 hour)
Join EditShare’s VP of Business Development, Tom Rosenstein, and Lead Pre-sales Engineer, Nathan Rausch, as they outline the pragmatic steps toward a complete end-to-end production workflow in the cloud. Each stop along the way brings maximum value for an incremental investment. We’ll share sample diagrams, demos, and cost comparisons for cloud production workflows to help begin your Journey to the Cloud.
Access the Recording
Webinar Speakers
Dan Schaffer, Director of Partner Strategy and Enablement, EditShare
Tom Rosenstein, VP of Business Development, EditShare
