EditShare and MoovIT have formed a global alliance to deliver an integrated workflow solution with ‘under the hood’ administration and media management for Adobe enterprise workgroups. The workflow features EditShare’s EFS and FLOW for high speed shared storage and media management and MoovIT’s Helmut workgroup administration tools, designed specifically for Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Media Encoder, and Audition.
The combination is unbeatable. Here’s why.
Adobe is often the default choice for content creators worldwide. But, what’s lacking is large scale workflow automation and management. EFS, FLOW, and Helmut, together coordinate and simplify the complexity of large-scale workflows, keeping Adobe professionals comfortable within their sphere of familiarity while boosting efficiency and providing tools for enterprise-level media orchestration.
The EFS shared storage and FLOW media management combination ensures assets are available in real-time for any large-scale workgroup collaboration. Across these enterprise workflows, there are many intricate steps that must be followed to optimize asset sharing and collaboration. However, real-world experience tells us that things don’t always happen by the book. Media can come from any location, in any unexpected or unapproved format. The assistant editor drops in some cool stock FX clips they found online but forgets to put them on the shared storage. The freelance editor is working on a different Adobe software version or OS up until delivery day. The editor chooses the wrong export settings or uploads the file to the wrong client.
Adobe users working in a collaborative production environment most likely experience one or more of these headaches. Software versions that are not compatible with each other, content that was not put in the correct folder, nor on the correct shared storage project, or in the right format and codec and so on. In smaller Adobe workgroups, this type of housekeeping can be managed manually. In larger workgroups, the day to day editing and VFX fragments are amplified. The bigger the group, the more manual clean up required until it becomes unstructured chaos that is unmanageable. In these situations, an additional layer of administration is needed – utilizing the Helmut tools in combination with EFS and FLOW.
Helmut offers customizable project templates that enable a facility to pre-determine the best in-house workflow and standardize those processes across all projects. Users can pre-determine elements such as storage locations, codecs, ingest and export presets, and project-based tiered storage workflows. For example, if an editor drags media directly from a downloads folder, Helmut will ensure it’s flipped to the appropriate codec and placed in the correct shared folder, making it available to all editors in the right format. No downtime – the editor can start working immediately. And for administrators and facilities management, have project-based control over storage locations, render nodes and archive systems from one user friendly dashboard.
The MoovIT and EditShare core technologies are tightly integrated via APIs to dramatically improve large-scale Adobe workflows. Working as a seamless technology solution, Helmut, together with EFS and FLOW creates the consistency necessary to be able to quickly scale workflows of any size. Helmut and FLOW maintain a continuous dialogue across all stages of the workflow, efficiently keeping assets and metadata connected with projects for an optimized, orchestrated media production environment.
And this combination is fully customizable.
FLOW is an open platform with a robust set of APIs that can deeply connect with the following Helmut capabilities to supercharge your workflow:
Automated Project Management & Format Standardization – Streamline workflow administration and file delivery specifications across workgroups using pre-set templates to standardize key project management elements such as scratch disk location, fps, raster size, directory structure and bin layout. Underlying conversion engine ensures Adobe project files, regardless of the version they were created in, are universally compatible.
Offload Rendering – Leveraging your existing infrastructure, Helmut can offload render intensive projects such as encoding and graphics.
Searchable Database – The missing link for many broadcasters and large media workgroups, Helmut will index projects including folder structures, metadata, assets and sequences into a searchable database with data visualised in a dashboard to easily identify and locate content.
Automated Administration Tasks – Create metadata driven rules to automate housekeeping functions such as delete, move, archive and manage projects and project-related assets.
The team at MoovIT have designed Helmut tools with simplicity in mind. Easy deployment with straightforward templates and under-the-hood file migration do the heavy lifting for you!
Helmut UI snapshot – configure permissions for users and projects
Helmut UI snapshot – organize your Adobe projects, content and folders for archive
Creatives are working at full steam, with deadlines getting shorter and projects becoming ever more complex. Various industry reports indicate that creatives spend up to 20% of their time on administrative tasks or one day a week. Eliminating administration bottlenecks and freeing creatives up from mundane tasks is what this winning combination offers. If you are in an Adobe workgroup and you need to collaborate on projects with multiple stakeholders, located on premise or dispersed across different locations, the powerful combination of Helmut, EFS, and FLOW can supercharge your Adobe workflow.
If you are interested in gaining back 20% of your time, reach out to our team today and get an in-depth demonstration.
Customers have long been asking for the ultimate in remote workflow flexibility. Whether that means hiring video editors from distant geographies or simply letting employees and contractors work from home, production houses no longer want to be tethered to their machines. COVID-19 has only accelerated this request. As a part of EFSv, we recently announced the capability to achieve true seamless proxy editing. This patent-pending feature enables the first cost-effective cloud editing infrastructure, overcoming one of the primary objections of migrating media workflows to the cloud.
Cloud editing economics –block storage vs object storage
Until today, the questionable economics of editing in the cloud has been one of the biggest objections to adoption. With EFSv seamless proxy editing, we have dramatically reduced the costs, making cloud editing economically viable for anyone. When we say dramatically better, we mean reductions in the region of 50-75% compared to current cloud editing infrastructure implementations.
When it comes to editing video in the cloud, assuming you plan to use standard applications such as Adobe® Premiere® Pro, Davinci Resolve, Media Composer®, ProTools® or Adobe® After Effects®, you need your shared cloud storage to appear as though it is just another drive attached to your workstation. That is to say, the storage needs to have a filesystem that supports all normal operations such as read, write, seek, modify, The filesystem also needs to use standard mechanisms to tell an application if your username or group has permission to read, write, and lock a file for exclusive use. To protect your media you also need file system auditing to see who is accessing files within your storage. And, of course, you need storage that’s fast enough to play back your media in real time. These are all features that can be realized easily in the cloud using block storage.
Unfortunately, block storage in the cloud is expensive. However, there is a lot of value that cloud providers are bringing on top of standard disk storage. Behind the scenes you are getting file protection and robust security for your data with high performance guarantees.
Being able to utilize object storage in the cloud (like AWS S3) would be much less expensive. However, out of the box, it doesn’t meet the requirements of media creation applications because it lacks the features needed to create a real filesystem and instead focuses on simplicity, scalability, and reliability. By limiting the features of object storage, cloud providers can offer significant cost savings. You only pay for the exact number of bytes you store, rather than reserving a whole block of storage that ends up only being partially used.
But what if you could make object storage appear as a standard filesystem so that you could enjoy the cost benefits and also get it to work with editing, mixing and visual effects applications? In fact, that’s part of what we have done with EFSv — making object storage look exactly like a normal file system, regardless of whether it’s connected to Windows, MacOS or Linux. But there’s still one more challenge to overcome that is specifically problematic for video and audio editing – latency.
Object storage is fine for throughput, and when you play a video from a streaming platform such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, or Disney+, you are almost certainly streaming the video from an object storage solution. These streaming platforms deal with latency (the time it takes to read the first byte of video) by having you wait a small amount of time to watch the first segment of video (you know, that little bit of buffering you see before the video plays) and then, because the videos are generally played linearly, it is always possible to keep ahead of the user, disguising the latency.
While this works for streaming services, such a solution is not acceptable for video and audio editing – by its very nature these are non-linear activities. When you edit video even a small amount of latency will impact your workflow as you attempt to read multiple video files simultaneously and jump quickly back and forth between different files on your timeline.
Current object storage trades latency for resilience and throughput. Indeed most object storage solutions not only have higher latency than is acceptable for video editing, they also have inconsistent latency. So the challenge is to find a way to blend object and block storage into a single filesystem in a manner that lets you have your cake and eat it too — in other words, get the cost savings of object storage but the low latency of block storage that’s needed for editing.
Fixing the headaches of proxy editing
EditShare isn’t the first company to come up with the idea of blending object and block storage. Since people first started editing in the cloud, a common approach to mixing the two types of storage and saving money has been to put high resolution original media into object storage, and then transcode everything to smaller, just good enough low-resolution proxy files for rough editing and store just those proxy files on the more expensive block storage. Because proxies are small, they don’t use up a lot of block storage — and so you save money. Then, at the end of a project, you restore from object storage back to block storage just the files that made it into the final cut and you “conform” your sequence back to high-quality originals.
Adobe UI accessing content via FLOW panel and toggling proxy with high res content
Unfortunately, this kind of proxy workflow is fraught with problems.
Just ask anyone who has ever had to proxy edit a project. First, there are inevitably shots that don’t look great in the proxy version, and it’s really frustrating to have to wait for the conform to find out a shot isn’t any good. Second, it’s impossible to create accurate effects that match colors when you are dealing with proxy files. Third, it’s no fun to have rough cut and fine cut screenings based on your proxies because these screenings will never give the best impression. Fourth, at the end of an edit, it takes time to copy high-resolution files back to block storage and if your project is coming down to the wire, every minute counts. And finally, there’s nothing worse than conforming an edit and getting a “media offline” or “nothing relinked” message when you attempt to relink back to the original.
It’s probably safe to say, no one loves the offline and conform workflow. While it is not a ‘broken’ system, it’s far from ideal. And it doesn’t even save as much money as it could, because at the end of the day you still have to copy at least some content back to expensive block storage.
A seamless proxy workflow designed for everyone
The EFSv seamless proxy editing feature solves all these problems. It is open — we have yet to find a NLE that it doesn’t work with — and fundamentally, it changes the economics of editing in the cloud.
EFSv lets you put your high-resolution files into cost-effective object storage but makes those files appear as if they are on a normal mounted block storage file system. At the same time, EFSv provides the scalable high performance block storage needed for low-latency access to proxy files and renders. Proxies can be generated by our FLOW media management system, or by your own tools. Both high-resolution and proxy versions are accessible at all times to your media creation application. And when you import clips into NLEs such as Premiere Pro using our new FLOW panel, the panel “teaches” the application about the existence and location of both high-resolution and proxy versions, so you can toggle back and forth between versions any time you want. While you won’t be able to play back your whole timeline from the object storage — mostly because of the latency — you can nonetheless view the original high-resolution clips at any time (including for color correction), and when it comes time to rendering your timeline for a screening or for the final deliverables, you just toggle to (or link back to) the originals and hit the render or export button. There’s never anything to copy or restore from object storage. Instead, you render directly from object storage — a process that is not slow, by the way. The momentary latency you get when first accessing a file and that can frustrate timeline playback won’t make any noticeable difference for rendering.
Our new system not only works with cloud workstations you connect to by advanced remote desktop software such as Teradici, but it also works spectacularly over a VPN — so if you want to keep working from home with the editing application running on your own workstation or laptop, this is also an option. You can get the same proxy/high-resolution toggling — and this even works with macOS-based workstations (something you cannot run in any cloud today). And if you need to download proxies instead of working with them “in place” from central storage, that’s supported too.
There’s a reason we refer to this as “true” seamless proxy editing — because it is truly seamless.
For creatives, the new system eliminates any compromises on quality or workflow, and for the people who look after the finances, the news is equally good. Better. Faster. Cheaper.
Cost savings – it’s BIG.
The savings you get with EFSv seamless proxy editing are tremendous. For example, you may have a media library of about 100 terabytes for a project — consisting of a little over 2,000 hours of original media assuming you’re using a 100 Mb/s codec. With traditional block storage , storing this content for editing would cost about $4,500/month. On top of this, you’ll require fairly powerful storage and workstation instances to handle the bandwidth of this high-resolution content. Suddenly, cloud-based editing may stretch outside of your budget. In fact, in many cases, your high-resolution codec will be of a higher bit-rate; for example many ProRes codecs exceed 500 Mb/s.
Seamless proxy editing resolves these issues. By taking down the content to a lower bit rate for editing we can reduce your block storage needs down to the 2-4 terabyte range, a factor of 25x or more. In this scenario, your total storage costs (object and block) will come down to something closer to $1400/month. And since we will be editing proxy files, less expensive compute instances can be used for storage management and NLE workstations. Your high-resolution files will continue to be stored in cheaper storage tiers, where they can be accessed instantly by the NLE with no additional workflow effort required. An added bonus – with your high-resolution files residing in object storage, you can easily take advantage of cloud-based AI tools such as automatic object recognition and audio transcription, and also share your files with partners who may be doing other work on the project.
EFSv with seamless proxy editing not only makes cloud editing affordable for the first time, it also creates the opportunity for new cloud-centric workflows to make your media projects more efficient. Learn more.
6/4/2020
Industry’s most resilient and scalable media optimized file system features new advanced API and cloud capabilities with a focus on security, speed and openness
Boston, MA – June 4, 2020 –EditShare®, a technology leader that specializes in collaboration, security, and intelligent storage solutions for media creation and management, announced today the general availability of EFS 2020, powering faster EditShare storage nodes and networks on-premise, in the cloud and in hybrid configurations. The media-optimized file system features security improvements at every layer and enhanced performance across the board. In addition to the powerful storage management tools built into EFS, the new RESTful API opens the door for customers and technology partners to automate advanced storage management workflows in a secure environment. Fully compatible with the latest version of FLOW, EFS enables media organizations to build extensive collaborative workflows, shielding creative personnel from the underlying technical complexity while equipping technical teams with a comprehensive set of media management tools.
“EFS is a highly scalable architecture that has been designed from the ground up to fuel collaborative media workflows, enabling customers to utilize the creative toolset of their choice. Our latest release continues to expand the open platform with cloud configuration options and advanced RESTful APIs that supports interfacing with other business processes within an organization such as billing systems or infrastructure management,” states Sunil Mudholkar, vice president of product management, EditShare. “Our customers and technology partners can now integrate business logic to automate day-to-day storage operations on the industry’s most performant and secure storage environment with the same great collaborative editorial workflows EditShare is known for.”
A More Secure and Open Foundation On-Premise and In the Cloud EFS delivers support for cloud workflows including AWS, Tencent Cloud, and others. Combined with its established Access Control List (ACL) capabilities and advanced API, EFS 2020 is a major milestone that gives IT managers and administrators fine grained control over content, folder structures, and content flow, enabling them to better collaborate across multi-site and multi-project operations. Mudholkar explains, “The advanced APIs of the EFS 2020 release support scripting of file permissions changes within ACL media spaces both on-premise and in the cloud. This means our customers can design sophisticated traffic management workflows with media and project permissions controls where multiple locations and thousands of users can connect to the same project, with access to content and assets configurable at the user level. The deep level of control keeps everyone connected so they can collaborate without exposing the entirety of the project content to everyone.”
In addition to a new operating system that includes the very latest security protection, the 2020 release of EFS features file auditing, the first real-time purpose-built content file tracking solution for media workflows. Designed to track all content movement, changes, and deletions, EFS File Auditing, which is a standard component of all systems, provides a complete, user-friendly activity report with a detailed trail back to the end-user answering the important question of “who did what and when.”
Customer Success Moving to EFS 2020 Listening and understanding the needs of customers is a core value of EditShare. With outstanding Net Promoter Score (NPS) results from both customers and channel partners, EditShare is an industry leader when it comes to customer and partner satisfaction. This sentiment can be seen in new EditShare customers as well as existing customers who are moving from their existing EditShare platforms to EFS 2020 and taking advantage of EditShare cloud and API capabilities. “EFS 2020 offers the big enterprise storage and media management features we need to better manage our operation with a very user friendly approach. The combination of simplicity and power is key when you have 100 plus people with varying skill sets in production creating more than 60 podcasts and videos shows on a weekly basis,” comments Chase Butler, senior editor and graphics, Barstools Sports. “It allows us to use any tool or workflow we require to get our projects done, including remote production and access, which was critical during the COVID-19 shutdown. It’s a resilient platform that we can expand on and in any direction or situation.”
Focused on innovation and accelerating the delivery of new features to the market, EditShare has moved to a product release model with delivery of major updates at least once per quarter ensuring EditShare customers receive new features that deliver the capabilities they require to run their business. Contact your EditShare representative to upgrade to EFS 2020.
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.
