EditShare Showcases Cloud and Hybrid Media Workflows for Seamless Collaboration at IBC 2022
Automated workflows, quality control and archiving at the center of its Amsterdam show
Boston, MA – July 26, 2022 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, will use IBC2022 (Amsterdam RAI, 9-12 September, stand 7.A35) to showcase how its latest technologies boost quality and efficiency for production and post production. Demonstrations will show how remote working and the cloud can interwork to give creative artists seamless and secure access to the tools they rely on.
Central to this is the ability to use EditShare post-production storage spaces and FLOW workflow tools to synchronize projects across the popular NLE platforms, including Media Composer, Adobe® Premiere® Pro and DaVinci Resolve. The latest release of core FLOW media asset management system allows complex projects to be moved as needed between EditShare media management and whichever edit environment the creative team needs to use.
Having its first showing in Amsterdam will be the latest suite of EditShareFLEX software solutions for out-of-the-box cloud and hybrid workflows. FLEX reflects the powerful business trends in post today, including the migration to a “work anywhere” environment, with ready access to content wherever the creative staff need to be. In adopting video cloud storage and processing, it also meets the move towards an OpEx financial model, with the cloud hosting and storage fees flexing to reflect the level of business.
“The post industry is changing, in part reflecting the changes enforced by the pandemic, and in part because creative talent is looking to shift the work/life balance,” comments Said Bacho, Chief Revenue Officer at EditShare. “What we now present is an eco-system where editors and other post artists can choose their preferred tools, and work where they like, when they like, without it in any way compromising their creativity or limiting the quality, even as we move to 4k and higher resolutions, and to HDR.”
EditShare’s EFS Multi-Site will also be on the booth for the first time this IBC. Multi-Site allows users with multiple locations to leverage built-in file acceleration to synchronize project storage between EFS clusters in different facilities. This ensures that users have ready access to content, wherever they choose to work. FLEX Cloud Sync extends the capabilities of Multi-Site to cloud storage, providing added flexibility in access as well as security in archiving.
For news and sports fast turnaround editing, FLOW supports direct ingest of NDI contribution feeds for immediate editing. Working in conjunction with the Helmut orchestration platform from MoovIT, IBC will see demonstrations of practical high-pressure editing operations linking EditShare storage with Adobe software.
Content security and availability is vital to professional users, and EditShare has added new hardware and software in this area. The new EFS 60NL nearline storage provides 60 drive bays and nearly 1PB of storage in just 4U of rack space. This offers secure storage for large amounts of content which is needed but not immediately worked on, ready to be transferred to the online servers with virtually no delay. The 60NL is also the first hardware platform to utilize the new EFS capability for erasure coding-based storage goals, eliminating the need for hardware based RAID.
Rolling updates to EditShare’s FLOW software platform ensure that the latest raw formats from popular camera systems like RED and Blackmagic Design are accepted, with LUTs imposed in real time, both on full resolution material and on proxies, boosting remote working using intelligent proxy management.
“IBC has always been very important to EditShare, a real opportunity to exchange ideas with our users and partners from around the world,” Bacho added. “The whole team is excited to be returning to Amsterdam, seeing our users and partners face-to-face, and discussing the creative and operational challenges they encounter and how EditShare can provide proven solutions today and into the future.”
See EditShare on stand 7.A35 at IBC2022. For more information on EditShare solutions, please click here to get in touch.
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.
EditShare’s cloud-enabled remote editing and project management technology was recently recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) with a prestigious 2021 Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering.
How EditShare helped the public television content creator to improve its workflow and save money and time
Fast access to content on the Alibaba cloud
Boston, MA – June 9, 2022 –EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, powered the video workflows for the finals of the 2021-22 China Men’s Basketball Professional League (CBA). Working with the international sports department of leading cloud provider Alibaba, EditShare used its FLOW media management tools to allow media companies to upload, download, edit and handle the delivery of the game.
EditShare’s open architecture allowed for customization of the FLOW web user interfaces for CBA, providing each registered user with tailored functionality. The crew on site uploaded all the video material to the cloud, where CBA officials, sponsors, rights-holding media organizations and other registered users could search and download content. Comprehensive security restrictions were applied to ensure no unauthorized person could access the videos.
The purpose of the cloud-based distribution platform was to ensure content was available to all entitled users as quickly as possible. To help this, EditShare tailored the web-based user interfaces for all classes of user, in the Chinese language, to make content searches, access and downloads as simple and intuitive as possible.
“The project was overseen by EditShare’s regional partner ThinkTone Tech in Beijing. “The CBA Finals are a prestigious sporting event,” said Pavel Li, Product Director, ThinkTone Tech. “Fans all over the country and further afield were excited to see their favorite teams in action. We were delighted to help our customer exceed audience expectations thanks to the advanced technology provided by EditShare and Alibaba.”
Said Bacho, chief revenue officer at EditShare, added “Live sport does not have time to wait for video distribution systems to catch up – fans want to see the live action and all the replays immediately. FLOW from EditShare provides access to thousands of assets from wherever you are, especially with cloud access like this project with Alibaba. FLOW also supports all the popular editing platforms, so each user can decide for themselves how they want to work with the content, and what is most appropriate for them.”
The last game in the 2021-22 CBA Finals, when Liaoning beat Guangsha 100:82, was held on 26 April in Nanchang, at the end of almost four weeks of intensive competition, with coverage depending on FLOW from 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.
EditShare’s cloud-enabled remote editing and project management technology was recently recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) with a prestigious 2021 Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering.
New facilities boost remote and collaborative production and post for booming Latin American market
Boston, MA – May 31, 2022 –EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, today announced that it is providing powerful media storage and workflow facilities to Administración Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (Antel), the national telecoms business in Uruguay. The service provides a strong and reliable remote and collaborative post environment for users like leading audiovisual production hub REDUCTO, using Antel’s extensive high-speed internet connectivity.
Housed in Antel’s Tier III data center is the EditShare storage system, built on EFS 450 and EFS SSD solid state storage appliances. Total capacity at present is 300 TB, and the connection between the Antel data center and REDUCTO runs across two redundant, geographically diverse 10 gigabit fibers.
The storage is complemented by EditShare FLOW automation and media management to track content, maintain secure redundancy and enable creative users at REDUCTO to track projects. FLOW also allows individual users to work with their preference in edit workstations and other creative tools, with no impact on workflows or storage and archiving.
REDUCTO is an audiovisual production hub with an international reputation. In its Montevideo headquarters, across the city from the Antel data center, it has two production studios and it is the home of 2 post-production facilities, Colour and Boat. The partnership with Antel provides scalable and flexible access to the best editing and colour grading tools, giving it a powerful offering and advantage.
“Latin America is a booming region for video production, and we can provide the connectivity to allow producers to work with the high-quality facilities at REDUCTO from any part of the continent,” said Gustavo Andrés Arbiza Mattos, Telecommunications Engineer at Antel. “EditShare and its innovative storage and workflow architectures enabled us to create a compelling business case for hosting video services. The ability to support very high bandwidth services like uncompressed digital cinematography and Ultra HD, and good scalability both on premise and in the cloud, means that we can respond in an agile way to the growth of the market.”
Thanks to the high-speed connectivity from Antel, REDUCTO is now able to serve the broadcast and media market across the whole of Latin America from its central location. The latest additions to the EditShare environment support resolutions up to 8k, meaning it can deliver services for the movie and events industry as well as broadcast.
Producers can be granted access to the shared storage to view progress without the need to travel to Uruguay. EditShare FLOW provides the security functionality for protected tenancies, allowing REDUCTO to host productions for multiple clients simultaneously and in time, for Antel to offer the same hosting and connectivity service to other media clients.
Mateo Musitelli, Project Manager RC&C at REDUCTO added “Prestige productions demand secure and flexible facilities. EditShare gives us native tools for remote production, fast and intuitive workflows, and the knowledge that the content entrusted to us is always secure and always available. It is a key element in our continuing expansion plans as a leader in the media industry across the region.”
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.
EditShare’s cloud-enabled remote editing and project management technology was recently recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) with a prestigious 2021 Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering.
Flexible, cloud-enabled workflows facilitate remote working and transform creative story telling
Boston, MA – May 25, 2022 –EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, is using its presence at Broadcast Asia (1 – 3 June, Singapore Expo, stand 5F3-01) to highlight its latest enhancements for production and post production. Headlining the stand will be the new suite of FLEX software solutions for cloud and hybrid workflows.
FLEX reflects the powerful business trends in post today, including the migration to a “work anywhere” environment, with ready access to content wherever the creative staff need to be. In adopting cloud broadcast media storage and processing, it also meets the move towards an OpEx financial model, with the cloud hosting and storage fees flexing to reflect the level of business.
“The Asia Pacific region is an important territory to EditShare and we can’t wait to attend the show in person and meet with our local customers and partners face-to-face once again,” comments Said Bacho, Chief Revenue Officer at EditShare. “We’re especially looking forward to demonstrating how FLEX can greatly simplify how teams may choose to work and the benefits that this can bring.”
Broadcast Asia will provide an opportunity for visitors to see the latest developments following their launch at NAB 2022. These are all aimed at simplifying the creative experience while providing even greater content security and availability.
A great example of workflow streamlining is the enhanced project synchronization with NLEs, including Media Composer, Adobe® Premiere® Pro and DaVinci Resolve. This allows complex projects to be readily moved between EditShare FLOW media management and the NLE environment.
Also added to FLOW is the ability to support the latest RAW format updates for RED and Blackmagic Design camera systems, and impose LUTs in real time, both on full resolution material and on proxies.
FLOW can now also ingest NDI contribution feeds and immediately present them for editing, ideal for news and sports fast turnaround editing. To make the workflows as slick as possible, EditShare has been collaborating with MoovIT on its Helmut 4 orchestration platform, and will demonstrate how they work together to make Adobe and EditShare the perfect environment for high pressure operations.
Content security and availability is vital to professional users, and EditShare is adding new hardware and software in this area. The EFS 60NL is a new device, aimed at nearline storage, and providing 60 drive bays in 4U of rack space. Within the EditShare environment, nearline storage is ideal for content which is needed but not being immediately worked on, ready to be transferred to the online servers with virtually no delay.
Adding to the security and sharing concept, EFS Multi-Site allows users with multiple locations to leverage built-in file acceleration to synchronize project storage between EFS clusters in different facilities. This ensures that users have ready access to content, wherever they choose to work. Cloud Sync extends the capabilities of Multi-Site to cloud storage, providing added flexibility in access as well as security in archiving.
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.
EditShare’s cloud-enabled remote editing and project management technology was recently recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) with a prestigious 2021 Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering.
New installations in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt and Turkey increase the presence of EditShare open solutions in the region
Boston, MA – May 18, 2022 –EditShare®, the leading supplier of creative and collaborative media workflows for storytellers, continues to deliver powerful solutions for major projects in the Middle East. The company is proud to have been involved in an installation at Expo 2020 Dubai, which won the prestigious “Innovative Project of the Year” trophy at the 2021 Broadcast Pro awards, and has also delivered solutions to customers in Saudi Arabia and Sharjah.
EditShare has provided its broadcast media storage and workflow tools to one of the largest smart cities in Saudi Arabia. And in Sharjah, the Government Media Bureau has also invested to support its production of a broad range of video content and delivery over multiple platforms.
Each system sees EditShare FLOW media management and EFS storage solutions providing streamlined editorial workflows. With its completely open approach, the EditShare video content management system allows each user to support a mix of Adobe® Premiere® Pro, Avid Media Composer, DaVinci Resolve and other professional post production tools seamlessly within tailored workflows.
EditShare worked in conjunction with its local distributors including, among others United Broadcast & Media Solutions (UBMS) to design, install and support these two applications and their customers.
Rayan Nasser, Sales Director at UBMS said, “Our customer, the largest smart city in Saudi Arabia, has some of the most advanced media operations in the Middle East, attracting and hosting world-class content creators and distributors. “EditShare’s ability to integrate key editorial tools removes the bottlenecks of proprietary systems, enabling us to offer clients the full range of post-production services using their preferred creative tools, while giving them the reassurance of outstanding support from us as an EditShare partner.”
Said Bacho, EditShare’s Chief Revenue Officer, comments, “With a Dubai-based regional team in place, EditShare has established itself as a trusted vendor in the Middle East whose innovations have provided customers with a wide range of possibilities for integration with the editorial tools and production systems they want to use.
“Media companies demand multi-vendor workflows that can be tailored to their specific production needs,” adds Bacho. “What is so attractive to our users is that we absorb the complex technical demands, eliminating bottlenecks and ensuring that the creative teams enjoy a seamless, intuitive experience – leaving them free to concentrate on making great content.”
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.
EditShare’s cloud-enabled remote editing and project management technology was recently recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) with a prestigious 2021 Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering.
Tour De Force Born out of sheer determination and passion, 3P Studio has earned its place in Australia’s creative landscape as one of the industry’s hardest working boutique post-production houses. Founded and led by artisan Haley McDonald, 3P Studio’s eclectic portfolio of post-production work includes desirable commercial brands such as Subway, Allianz, Isuzu Motor Company as well as iconic and defining shows like Sesame Street.
“There are a few projects that we are particularly proud of at 3P Studio and one that stands out is the work we did with Brisbane-based advertising agency, Carbon Creative, for the Australian Department of Premier and Cabinet’s ‘Stop the Hurting: End Domestic Violence’ campaign,” comments McDonald. “It was the first large-scale national campaign that we undertook in the studio; it was an honor that they selected 3P to work on such an important campaign.” A testament to their quality and influence, 3P Studio was recognized for their outstanding work on the “Stop the Hurting” campaign, receiving a silver medal in the Brisbane Advertising and Design Awards.
Humble Beginnings Leads to a Local First With almost two decades of experience in the media and entertainment industry, McDonald has worked for some of Australia’s largest post facilities. Passionate about her craft, McDonald always knew that working as a creative storyteller was her true path. “I got my love of TV from my late father. I never had a bedtime as a child and he used to let me watch TV with him whenever I wanted. This led to a lifelong obsession of working with media and creatively telling stories. On the flip side, I got my work ethic off my mum, who worked in a hospital laundry for 30 years. I grew up in a housing commission until I moved to Brisbane when I was 18 and worked in a supermarket there until I saved enough money to go university and study film.” Drive and passion work hand in hand and proved to be incredible assets to McDonald as she forged her own path in a male-dominated industry.
It was after the birth of McDonald’s son in 2013 that life took an unexpected change and really challenged her commitment to being an artist. “I had left for maternity leave in 2013 to have my first child, Dash, who is now eight. When I came back to work after six months, my position had been made redundant and I no longer had a job to return to.” While most would see this as a devastating blow, McDonald turned it into the opportunity of a lifetime. “For some time I had wanted to open my own shop. But, like most people, I had a mortgage, daycare and other bills. So, venturing off on my own was just too risky, but with no job in hand, I had nothing to lose. It was my chance to follow a dream and I gave it everything I had.” Starting out as a freelance editor and designer, McDonald took every job that came her way. “I would never say ‘no’ to a job. I would never say I was booked. I would just say, ‘Yes, no problem, I can do that.’ Even if I had three jobs in one day, I would just take them and work out how I was going to deliver. Eventually, I started hiring people to help as I took on more demanding projects. Since I had been in the industry and was so well connected, I was able to get projects out the door with a very high degree of quality thanks to very talented colleagues. This, of course, translated to very happy clients and exceptional word of mouth marketing.”
Working 7 days a week, McDonald transformed the busy freelance business into one of Brisbane’s few woman-led post-production houses. “I bought my office in 2016 and took six months to fit it out. On Christmas Eve 2016, they handed me the keys to the office and they went, ‘There you go.’ And as 1st of January 2017, 3P Studio was officially in business.”
Purpose Built for Business and Creative Content McDonald built the stunning boutique facility from the ground up. And the chic design took into account installing an EditShare shared-storage solution in late 2017. “When we were wiring the office I made sure I had the cable runs and all the infrastructure shared down the track. I always knew that I wanted to install EditShare because I had used it before, and I really liked the way it supported the content flow. We just needed to save for the investment.” For the first six months, the team worked off the old hard drive system where they had RAIDs that were backing up to other RAIDs overnight and doing mirroring for redundancy. “So, we’d put a project in motion and eventually come to the point where someone would say, ‘Oh, that operator needs to use the project on that,’ meanwhile someone else also needed to use it too, then we’d copy off the data onto another drive and it just became unmanageable so we made the leap to EditShare.”
McDonald quips that she could have purchased other gear, but the EditShare scale-out shared storage nodes were the solution to power her successful business. “I could have gone out and purchased a Mac Pro and hooked it up to a couple of hard drives. Would it have done the same thing? To a certain degree, but it hasn’t been tried and tested like in EditShare. After talking with the guys at EditShare and getting the rundown of the specs and performance reports, investing in EditShare gave me the peace of mind I needed. In addition, my previous experience with using EditShare on very demanding projects assured us that this system would take a beating and keep performing.”
3P Studio installed an EFS 200 single node scale out shared storage solution connecting 10 creative Mac and PC-based workstations over 10-GB Ethernet comprising a mix of Adobe® Premiere® Pro and After Effects®, The Foundry’s NUKE, Maxon’s Cinema-4d, Autodesk Maya, 3D Studio Max, DaVinci Resolve for grading and the premium hero suite, Autodesk Flame Premium while Avid Pro tools is utilized to provide audio post production. With advanced support for project and media sharing, EditShare features helped tremendously with the boutique’s retail clients who, more often than not, required an incredibly fast turnaround. It allowed the team to work simultaneously on projects with one person recording voice-overs while another artist works on the graphics and another edits. “Because the EditShare system is designed for content sharing, it makes the workflow as fast and as collaborative as possible. This means higher quality projects completed on time and of course most importantly, happier clients.”
A Business in Overdrive The successful post-production company tripled its staff between the years of 2017 and 2021, requiring an expanded media infrastructure. Upgrading to EFS 450 and adding FLOW and AirFLOW, the team was able to facilitate traditional editorial campaigns and the growing number of fast-turn projects targeted for social, digital, and other marketing channels. McDonald adds, “More and more client requests are project-specific rather than a campaign. While the content still needs to be delivered across all channels, it has a short-shelf life and smaller budget. The pace from start to finish is accelerated. With our expanded EditShare installation, we have a content factory workflow that gives our clients a first-class post-production experience meeting both their tight timeline and budget requirements.”
The addition of EditShare’s remote media management solution, AirFLOW, to the workflow allowed 3P to offer a “content warehouse” service to its clients. Clients can log in from anywhere, browse through content at their convenience, review work-in-progress and submit project changes. The service removes the burden of clients needing to maintain their own drives or storage servers as all content is stored on the EFS storage platform, maintained by 3P. It also enabled remote collaboration, which was key during the pandemic restrictions.
McDonald notes of the growth, “Our business has reached a point where we need to utilize advanced tools to refine our service offering and delivery. EditShare workflow solutions and creative tools like Adobe have enabled us to make those advancements across our business and deliver a superior level of service.”
Setting a Great Example As a woman-run and owned post facility, Haley is in a very rare category. “I am very proud to be a female post house owner and can definitely say there is room for more of us to take the lead! Running my own shop has given me the opportunity to work with female directors, producers and operators and I take great pleasure in collaborating with them in my studio. In addition, I also have the support of a fantastic group of young men who are sound designers, VFX artists, animators and videographers and I am very lucky to have them. I also have the support of loyal clients that have been with me since I started and most of my work comes from word of mouth which is nice.” As for EditShare, we are very proud to be a part of this success story.
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
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!”
