EFS, FLOW and Helmut Supercharge Adobe Project-based Workflows
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.
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Join us as we highlight a trio of EFS and FLOW features, scheduled for release at the end of August, 2020. We’ll glimpse the future of thin web clients in FLOW, review enhanced visibility and control over your EFS user accounts and media, and explore how our customers benefit from deeper integrations with collaborative platforms like zoom.
** This webinar has passed. Please fill out the form to access the recordings.
Join us as we highlight a trio of EFS and FLOW features, scheduled for release at the end of August, 2020. We’ll glimpse the future of thin web clients in FLOW, review enhanced visibility and control over your EFS user accounts and media, and explore how our customers benefit from deeper integrations with collaborative platforms like zoom.
** This webinar has passed. Please fill out the form to access the recordings.
Efficient and powerful production workflows leverage EditShare technology and automations, enabling creators to focus on telling their stories. By partnering with MoovIT and their Helmut suite of Adobe workgroup project management tools, we enhance FLOW media management to handle more of the mundane, error prone, and overly complex steps of your production workflow. Join us to explore the benefits of FLOW and Helmut for Adobe creators, from simple automations to a complete workgroup optimization platform.
Part 2 of a 5 Part Series introducing EditShare’s FLOW Asset Management and Remote Video Collaboration.
AirFLOW brings all the media sharing capabilities of the FLOW production MAM to secure multi-team multi-location productions. Its simple and intuitive web-based interface lets collaborators located anywhere in the world search, log, organize and play media content; and also upload and download content directly to and from EditShare central storage systems. Producers on the go can keep an eye on projects and view rough cuts and fine cuts on a device of their choice whether it’s a laptop, tablet or smartphone, making it easier than ever to work with talent located anywhere in the world. Reviewer comments, which are written to the FLOW database in real-time, can be timecode-tagged, giving editors back at home base concrete creative direction. Organizations with multiple facilities can search for and exchange material from any of their sites. And thanks to easily customizable metadata templates, AirFLOW can be deployed to support diverse workflows such as review and approval, outsourced transcriptions, marketing archival material for sale to third parties, and proxy editing with relinking to high-resolution files.
Key features:
Platform independent, no client software installation required, simple and intuitive user interface Browse, search and organize content in media spaces, projects, folders and sequences Load custom metadata templates and view and enter clip metadata Download proxies and/or high-resolution files individually or in batch through web browser Edit remotely using downloaded AirFLOW proxies locally in NLE, then relinking to high-resolution media onsite
Part 1 of a 5 Part Series introducing EditShare’s FLOW Asset Management and Remote Video Collaboration.
A New Layer of Intelligent Media Management for Your Storage
EditShare FLOW is a software-defined media asset management suite, designed to manage millions of media and non-media assets across multiple tiers of post-production storage. Whether you’re an edit assistant, producer or an online editor, FLOW’s unique workflow capabilities enables teams located across the globe to connect, communicate, and collaborate effortlessly with a comprehensive tool set for every team member. And as a software solution, FLOW can be installed on your own hardware, offering the ability to scale as and when you need – from two users up to hundreds of team members.
FLOW scans and indexes your storage devices, providing a single unified view of all your content regardless of where it is actually stored – online, nearline, offline (tape) or cloud, making it easier than ever to manage multiple pools of storage.
For production and post-production environments, FLOW efficiently manages your content and seamlessly integrates with other content creation applications such as NLEs or Color Grading applications. With support for any frame rate, format and scaling up to 8K, FLOW can ingest, index, tag, organize, edit and deliver content from anywhere in the world. And with Automation, FLOW can simplify the most complex of tasks by automating entire workflows.
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.
Press Contact Cat Soroush Zazil Media Group (e) catherine@zazilmediagroup.com (p) +1 (631) 880-9534
Airbus and Boeing are the two top airliner manufacturers. Their planes are by far the most frequently seen in the skies. Yet Airbus pilots can’t fly Boeing aircraft without extensive retraining and vice versa. The vast majority of pilots spend their entire careers flying one brand or the other, but not both.
It’s easy to understand why pilots prefer to stay with their chosen aircraft manufacturer, and it’s equally easy to see why video editors remain loyal to their chosen editing systems. It’s the investment in time and money spent learning the product. It’s the muscle memory. It’s the experience and the know-how. It’s an editor’s confidence that she or he can get the job done for the customer. It’s being productive. It’s being able to sleep at night.
Workflow changes
Most editors are reluctant to make big changes to their workflows. That’s understandable – a stable, dependable workflow is a wonderful thing. And yes, experience and knowledge matter here too.
Sometimes though, things have to change. Occasionally the industry pivots to a new set of requirements that demand a new way of working. And when it does, the experience can be painful.
Why is it painful? Even with the best intentions, and the best technology, it’s very likely new skills will be required. Some people simply don’t like change. They are happy with the status quo and their feeling is “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. But it’s always wise to review working methods: can we make the production process easier, better and faster by implementing new workflow procedures?
Even slight differences can act as major roadblocks if they’re not well thought out. Bigger changes stop workflows in their tracks. Old production methods used to run without the user having to think about them, while new methods bring unwanted problems that suddenly loom ahead like an undocumented mountain range.
Mandatory media management
When Adobe’s NLE, Premiere, was first introduced in 1991, there were few, if any, competitors. As you’d expect, Adobe’s video editing software has changed radically since then. Computers are thousands of times faster. Storage is hundreds or thousands times bigger. And it needs to be, because acquisition, post production and display resolutions – and hence file sizes – have increased around eighty times since the ‘90s.
On top of all of this, video consumption has exploded, with new outlets, destinations and video-capable devices appearing so fast that it’s hard to keep track of them.
What’s more, tapes were physical. Every tape had a number and a location – probably on a shelf. They were tangible and simple to track. After the transition to digital, we started dealing with digital files. These had abstract naming conventions that were not obviously related to the content. As drives became bigger, content became more unstructured – and therefore harder to track.
This is the background to the story of how media asset management (MAM) systems have become crucial to virtually any size of post production facility, where it’s common for editors to collaborate on larger projects, and for storage to be shared and centrally managed.
It’s the inevitable result of complexity. Without effective media management, on all but the smallest projects, there would be chaos.
Adobe’s focus on video production has culminated in today’s Premiere Pro, which is used everywhere including Hollywood, where $100m+ blockbusters like Terminator Dark Fate and Deadpool have been cut on Adobe software. Partly to achieve scalability, but also to allow “best of breed” third party inclusion, Adobe has responded to this level of success by creating an accessible architecture where external software can appear though extension “panels” within the Adobe UI.
The above image showcases its new Flow panel connected directly into the Adobe Premiere Pro UI.
Meeting in the middle
EditShare’s FLOW Panel for Premiere Pro is a portal between two worlds. On one side is enterprise-level media management and on the other is the creative world of editing and post production with Premiere Pro. Two different specialties, each with an essential job.
Editors have their own set of priorities. Their skills marry productivity with artistic and aesthetic choices. Understandably, they are reluctant to step outside their optimized personal work environment.
The FLOW panel allows editors to stay inside their productive zone. To an editor, it is instant access to the power and scope of FLOW, without having to leave Premiere Pro. An immediate connection to their media from a shared and collaborative storage system without having to learn a new user interface.
Let’s have a closer look at why interfaces grow up differently, and why our FLOW panel is such a big leap for Adobe users.
The above image showcases its new FLOW panel connected directly into the Adobe Premiere Pro UI.
Center of gravity
Every successful company has its area of expertise which you could see as a “center of gravity”. EditShare is media management, collaborative storage, ingest, logging, and scalability (on premise and in the cloud). Adobe’s is all about editing, VFX, audio and easy interchange between these disciplines within the Adobe environment (between Premiere Pro, After Effects and Audition, for example).
This means each company has a differently evolved, separately optimized user interface. And, this is what defined the challenge of building the FLOW panel. Specifically – how do you present a significant element of FLOW functionality from within the Premiere Pro interface?
In technical terms, much of the heavy lifting was already done. Adobe has a developer partner program with a very deep, wide ranging SDK. EditShare also has well developed, published APIs.
So the tools were there for a reliable and stable connection. It was then a question of selecting the aspects of FLOW that editors would need to have the most direct connection with.
The panel will continue to evolve, but it already has some remarkable time saving features. It gives Premiere Pro editors the ability to search for content and get direct and instant access to all their media spaces on the EditShare video content management system, to see content that may have been archived long ago on LTO tapes or cloud video storage, see all metadata associated with each clip – user markers, automated audio transcripts, AI-assisted object recognition information, and more. Simply select and import media directly from the FLOW panel into a Premiere Pro project. Instantly switch between proxy and full resolution. Never leave the Adobe UI to find the clips you want.
Designed by editors for editors
The FLOW panel was designed by editors, for editors. Editors save time by not having to switch working environments. No duplication of effort. Most of all, there is a true and friction free round trip from Premiere Pro to FLOW and back again. The FLOW panel has a powerful core functionality, but it is full of thoughtful touches. For example, if you’re searching for some media in a tree of folders, the panel will remember where you were the next time you have to go back there. You don’t have to start again from scratch. There’s also the flexibility to switch between high resolution files and proxies. If you’re in the field and you find you don’t have the high resolution material to hand: the system can automatically download the fully editable proxy version to a local drive of their choice.
The continuous connection between your Adobe project and FLOW makes it possible for other remote users to review your footage, adding markers and comments on the fly, while you’re working in Premiere Pro.
Technical and artistic co-operation
EditShare’s FLOW Panel for Premiere Pro is the result of openness by both companies.The FLOW panel is an editors-first interface within Premiere Pro. It provides the maximum efficiency with the minimum friction.
