Jigsaw24 Expands Via24 Cloud Services with Deployment of EditShare’s EFSv
5/13/2020
Provides virtualized production and editing in the AWS cloud with an open architecture enabling flexible editorial workflows and creative choice
Boston, MA – May 13, 2020 –EditShare®, a technology leader that specializes in collaboration, security, and intelligent storage solutions for media creation and management, today announced that Jigsaw24 is the first UK-based EditShare reseller to deploy EFSv, enabling virtualized production and editing workflows in the AWS cloud. EFSv significantly expands multi-vendor remote production and post production capabilities, which is attractive to Jigsaw24’s customers who rely on a broad range of creative platforms for projects.
“We serve a market that has a lot of independent creatives hired for their talent, not the tools they use. Being vendor-agnostic and offering open solutions that allow creative freedom is the cornerstone of our business,” states David Skeggs Head of Business Management, Jigsaw24. “Of all the remote production and media management solutions in the cloud, EFSv is the best at enabling workflows for customers who need to support multiple editorial tools.Creator-focused, EFSv makes it seamless to move from one creative tool to the next with underlying capabilities to build extensive media workflows.”
The EFSv platform supports industry-standard third-party creative tools for editing, audio mixing, VFX and grading with best-in-class security capabilities such as file auditing to propel secure, end-to-end production workflows in the cloud. EFSv native drivers eliminate traditional IT bottlenecks and deliver superior media performance in virtual environments.
Skeggs adds, “It is fundamental for us to not only offer the choice of tools, but to have experience and expertise to deliver that choice within a workflow. We have been involved with EditShare for a number of years, designing comprehensive workflows as well as working in cloud infrastructure to transition customers’ on-premise machine rooms to datacenters in the cloud. The arrival of EFSv will enable us to deploy a broader range of cloud workflows serving viable use cases that were previously not achievable.”
Designed for media workflows, Jigsaw24’s Via24 cloud platform allows users to better manage and control complex and costly technology with a more cost-effective solution. EFSv is a key solution component of Via24, enabling creative workflows from the cloud.
“EFSv is the natural progression from on premise production workflows, by enabling clients to migrate to the cloud and all without the overhead of facilities infrastructure costs,” stated Rob Adams, VP of Worldwide Sales, EditShare. “Jigsaw24’s Via24 infrastructure is showing media clients the way forward by offering tailored cloud production offerings, with EFSv at the center of the solution. The combination of Jigsaw24’s Via24 and EFSv, meets the diverse needs of media customers from independent production companies to remote creative teams and clients looking to migrate to a more flexible business model.”
Jigsaw24 is a leading B2B technology solutions provider and Apple Authorised Enterprise Reseller. With specialists in production, post, finishing, audio and infrastructure, we design, deliver and support end-to-end solutions for some of the UK’s biggest facilities. As an Avid Elite Partner, with top accreditations from manufacturers including Adobe, HP, Blackmagic Design and more, we can advise on everything from Dolby Atmos mixing to cloud-first editing workflows, all the way through to final delivery – all of which you can see live in our Soho demo facility. Jigsaw24 was founded in 1992 in Nottingham, ideally located to provide full nationwide coverage.
About EditShare
EditShare is a technology leader in networked shared storage and smart workflow solutions for the post-production, TV, sports and film industries. Our groundbreaking products improve efficiency and workflow collaboration every step of the way. They include ingest and playout servers, high-performance central shared storage, AQC, archiving and backup software, media asset management and an Emmy award-winning non-linear video editing application.
Press Contact Cat Soroush Zazil Media Group (e) catherine@zazilmediagroup.com (p) +1 (631) 880-9534
April 21, 2020
EditShare Extends Collaborative Editing into the Cloud with New EFSv Platform
Resilient, open, and secure media ecosystem enables individual storytellers and enterprise workgroups to transition on-premise productions to optimized remote production workflows in the cloud; EditShare Customer Success teams ready to onboard customers
Boston, MA – April 21, 2020 –EditShare®, a technology leader that specializes in collaboration, security, and intelligent storage solutions for media creation and management, is making collaborative cloud-based media production possible with its virtualized video editing and storage platform – EFSv. Initially running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure, the open EFSv platform supports industry-standard third-party creative tools for editing, audio mixing, and grading with best-in-class security capabilities such as file auditing to propel secure, end-to-end editorial workflows in the cloud. EFSv native drivers eliminate traditional IT bottlenecks and deliver superior performance in virtual environments. And, by leveraging the EditShare RESTful API, customers and technology partners can easily automate advanced storage management workflows.
“Only the cloud can bring the depth of flexibility that’s essential for today’s unusual and disruptive circumstances. Overnight, the advantages offered by the cloud have changed from being ‘nice to have’ to ‘necessary,’” states Sunil Mudholkar, vice president of product management, EditShare. “We have real-world experience successfully deploying EditShare customer workflows to run in AWS and Tencent Cloud. EFSv is the culmination of these successes.” Mudholkar explains the expansive capabilities, “With EFSv, there is no loss of capabilities. Everything, including project sharing, editing, and bin locking, is virtualized. Users can spin up an entire virtual facility in moments, with all the computing power they need to complete real-world projects in the cloud.”
EFSv in action.
Commercially available today, EFSv packages include the workstation and GPU resources required to support teams of all sizes. The EFSv packages also include EditShare’s Flow media management and remote production workflow tools. Flow adds a control layer to virtualized storage pools, with tools to scan, log, search, and organize media, assemble story packages, and move content between object and block tiers of storage and also between cloud and on-premise tiers. Flow’s automation capabilities let users orchestrate redundant tasks and complex workflows, optimizing workflow efficiencies.
The flexible EditShare pricing structure provides customers transparency with options to purchase the EFSv subscription alone or inclusive of cloud services.
EditShare Customer Success Is Here to Help Onboard to the Cloud
EditShare’s 24/7 Customer Success team is available to consult and move client workflows to the cloud. This includes cloud configuration, data migration, workflow design and system automation.
Stuart McGeechan, vice president of customer success, comments on EditShare readiness, “We will walk through the framework, setup, and ongoing management of your production environment in the cloud. We can advise on methods for clustering cloud instances to meet the scale-out variable requirements of bandwidth, storage, and multi-track editing in the cloud. And, we’ll give you a blueprint for starting small and growing as your needs grow. Our team will work with yours to accelerate cloud deployments and increase productivity.”
The EditShare Customer Success team is currently migrating a number of enterprise customer deployments to EFSv environments. For more information on EditShare services, support and upgrades, please contact your local EditShare representative or https://editshare.com/contact.
About EditShare
EditShare is a technology leader in networked shared storage and smart workflow solutions for the post-production, TV, sports and film industries. Our groundbreaking products improve efficiency and workflow collaboration every step of the way. They include ingest and playout servers, high-performance central shared storage, AQC, archiving and backup software, media asset management and an Emmy award-winning non-linear video editing application.
COVID has most of the world following ‘shelter-at-home’ and ‘work-from-home’ protocols. And, it certainly looks like we will be observing some form of social distancing for some time as we cautiously step back into what’s to be the new normal. Of course, for many of us, that means endless Zoom meetings (thank goodness for the stability of Zoom) while we attempt to go on with our daily lives. In between those work and school moments, we are seeking some moments of entertainment. All of this has creators of video content working overtime to do what they love – tell us stories – just in a different way.
Our newscasters are collaborating to deliver the news from their homes. Late night and daytime talk shows are getting creative on entertaining us – inclusive of guest celebrity appearances – from their homes. Somewhere out there, someone is creating a reality TV series about life during COVID. Hopefully they will run the gamut of heartbreaking, funny, emotional and informing stories to share with future generations.
All of this still requires filming, and editing, and producing. Very little of this was done remotely before. We are all learning as we go. While we all step out of our comfort zone a bit, we have the opportunity to take advantage of amazing technologies that are right at hand and turn lemons to lemonade. There is one thing for sure… we are getting good at Zoom.
Several days ago, I was at the end of a long week and sat back to do my weekly status report. I realized that I spent a good percentage of my day on video calls. Internal meetings, webinars – those we produced and those I attended, happy hour with friends, and catching up with the parents. It made me realize that we aren’t really social distancing as much as we are physical distancing. We are using video more than ever before and have an amazing opportunity to capture these moments and share them with the world.
This got me thinking – could we bring together the world of video conferencing and video production so that anyone can craft stories from all this new material we are capturing. Quickly editing together Zoom recordings of a webinar into bite-sized highlights, creating an education package from a Zoom classroom (removing the five minute chaos half way through when one student spilt drink over their laptop) and helping news agencies quickly pull together different recordings to formulate a heartwarming interview (without the “you are on mute” prompts).
With this in mind, I started playing around with the combination of Zoom and EditShare’s Flow media management tool. I thought – what if we could give any creator/producer an easy way to ingest all their recordings, index the associated metadata, and easily combine them into a timeline to produce a story – all in the cloud. After all, we know how to do this. We do it all the time. Just usually with different inputs.
The video I’m sharing with you here is the culmination of those efforts. If you want to simplify the process of telling stories with EditShare’s Flow and Zoom recordings, we have an integration ready for you to try.
So, get in touch. Let us work with you. Let’s create amazing, together.
Spring has finally come to Beijing. I can’t tell you how much I looked forward to the feeling of warm sunlight on my face, the happy sound of children playing, and – at last – being able to live my life normally.
I love to go for a run outside. It’s a great start to the day. But for what seems like a long time now, these completely normal things have not been normal at all.
The Chinese Lunar New Year is a huge event, especially for families, who often travel thousands of miles to be with each other. It’s a country-wide celebration, and probably the biggest movement of the Chinese population each year. So a contagious outbreak like COVID-19 at this particular time, is the worst possible thing that could have happened.
Three days after the outbreak was identified, Wuhan was locked down. Wuhan is more than 1,000 KM from Beijing, but we felt the impact instantly. Within days we were advised not to go out and meet friends, family or colleagues.
That was January 26th.
Thanks to modern technology, I did not have to change too much to connect with my friends and family and work from my home. Life could continue by using the internet and the cloud.
I work for EditShare, a technology company in the Media and Entertainment business. EditShare is headquartered in the USA, with offices in the UK and all over the world including one in Beijing. So, we have a practice of staying close through video and audio conference calls as well as other forms of digital collaboration. Utilizing those tools also helps me be productive in China where our customers are spread over vast distances and we can’t always meet in person.
Over the last decade there’s been what can only be described as a revolution in production. It used to be that because of the huge files, the low bandwidth and the massive computing power needed, the only way to work was onsite at the production or broadcast facility.
But now, that’s changed completely. In fact, the whole production and post-production process – logging, editing, transcoding, delivering – is moving into the cloud, with total automation to simplify the workflow. The cloud isn’t “anywhere,” but at the same time it’s everywhere.
So working at home or remotely is as rich and creative an experience as being in a dedicated facility. And thankfully, my company has set up its own internal business processes to enable the same experiences.
During the shutdown, I was able to work closely with our local channel partner ThinkTone (XinTong) Technology on ways to stay connected to our customers and continue our business activities. We shared best practice information and offered online presentations on how to use the EditShare remote production technology. Our ability to continue collaborating helped our customers.
As an example, we successfully continued to work on a major customer project. The customer is a Chinese conglomerate and one of the world’s top five technology companies. It has multiple divisions with quite separate functions. The two divisions we worked with are – video and cloud.
The video division had a major new reality series planned for release in the first half of 2020. The team wanted to be able to distribute the video from the production to all of the many stakeholders for review – without having to be in the same room, building or even city. It was agreed that we would run EditShare software directly on cloud division infrastructure to accomplish this.
The team began the testing of EditShare Flow and EFS running on the cloud at the beginning of 2020 – while we were on lockdown. We held weekly meetings to update the information between each of the interested parties. At times these meetings had up to twenty people across three continents.
We were able to do this during the lockdown because everyone was able to work remotely – that’s the beauty of the cloud, and I guess it’s the way forward for all of us.
I was shut inside for nearly two months. I learned to adapt to the current situation, as my business like many others, must move forward during the crisis. And while there have been inconveniences, I am more efficient than ever and better prepared for the unexpected. And the next time a crisis happens, there will be no reason for everything to stop. Because of cloud technology, working at home is now just “working.”
In China, we have a saying that inspired us during this challenging time: “winter will be over and the spring will come.” Thank you for reading this. I wish everyone, wherever they are in the world, to stay safe, and I hope spring comes soon to you, too.
15 APR 2020
Media workflow experts build advanced, secure editorial workflows and remote productions with EditShare media engineered shared storage and management solutions
Boston, MA – April 16, 2020 – EditShare,®a technology leader that specializes in collaboration, security, and intelligent storage solutions for media creation and management, today announced that CIS Group has joined the EditShare Channel Partner Program. Known for its exceptional consultative approach to media workflow design and system integration, CIS serves all media verticals including entertainment, broadcast, news, corporate, houses of worship, and digital agencies across the Eastern United States and Brazil. In addition to leveraging EditShare’s software defined storage, asset management and cloud solutions to build open and highly scalable media workflows, as a part of the partnership, CIS offers a special EditShare-based Remote Editorial Core bundle. The NLE-agnostic offering enables a variety of remote production workflows including advanced proxy editing.
“CIS Group’s greatest asset is its institutional knowledge of media workflows. This is especially crucial as their customers seek guidance in leveraging the real benefits of APIs, cloud and AI capabilities for building agile on-premise and remote productions,” states Greg Lawler, Vice President of Sales, EditShare. “With EditShare’s open and highly extensible platform, CIS can design and deliver truly transformative workflows that not only simplify the art of storytelling but also offer companies entirely new ways to use their valuable media assets to engage, entertain, communicate and educate.”
Under the new channel partner program, CIS has access to the full product portfolio of EFS media engineered shared storage and FLOW media management tools, including SaaS and perpetual licensing models for on-premise, hybrid, and cloud configurations. CIS will also work closely with the EditShare customer success teams, enabling them to architect robust, multi-vendor tailored production and distribution workflows that achieve new levels of productivity.
“The opportunity to utilize emerging technologies like cloud and AI to reinvent your operation and ultimately expand your business has brought forth an interesting era. If capitalized on correctly, the opportunities are endless. However, with all the hype and promises, it’s important to have a clear path forward,” comments Matt Silva, CEO, CIS Group. “EditShare brings that clarity and they do so on every level. They have clear core values, clear principles they abide by and they are clear on what their solutions can do with regards to expansion through APIs, cloud and AI. For a channel partner, that clarity translates into a confidence that you can design media infrastructures that propel entirely new media workflows for your clients. EditShare is the brand we trust to transform our clients’ vision into reality.”
EditShare’s longstanding strategic relationship with CIS Group has grown over the years and today represents a wide range of shared customer successes, including news outlets like The Wall Street Journal, regional broadcast stations in the United States; multi-site operations across London, New York, and Singapore; and large corporate brands like Ashley Home Furnishings.
“It’s clear that EditShare has stepped into their customers’ shoes and designed the solutions from their unique perspective and needs. They understand the pressure points and opened EditShare solutions to integrate with tools our customers want to use, adding out of the box capabilities like auditing and health performance that offer tremendous transparency and peace of mind,” Robson Fernandes, Director of Engineering and Professional Services, CIS Group. “EditShare’s concern for the customer experience can also be seen in the incredible effort they put in educating and supporting their channel partners. We are responsible for the design and delivery of their solutions and their training and support ensures that the entire process is a great experience, from our very first encounter to every single one thereafter.”
Established in 1988, CIS Group’s history includes a lot of evolution as a result of the team’s desire and ability to always stay ahead of the curve. CIS Group’s mission is to enable story tellers to share their experiences with their audiences by providing them with the most effective media workflow solutions for their respective production goals, and by supporting their technical and operational requirements post-delivery. Covering both Brazil and the United States extensively, CIS is considered a reference in the systems integration space as a result of its specializations in content production & post-production, solutions for broadcast & news, workflows for asset management systems, acquisition, shared storage, media services, graphics and multi-platform distribution on-premise or in the cloud. Headquartered in Florida, USA, CIS has offices in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo); New York, USA; and Porto, Portugal, serving markets globally. Learn more at www.cisgroup.tv.
About EditShare
EditShare is a technology innovator in media engineered storage and advanced workflow solutions for storytellers that need collaboration without boundaries. EditShare’s open solutions and APIs enable secure collaboration and maximize efficiency every step of the way. The award-winning product portfolio enables end-to-end workflows, on-premise and in the cloud, through media optimized shared storage, workflow aligned media management solutions, robust APIs, and an Emmy award-winning non-linear video editing application.
