When we talk about high performance storage, what do we mean?
Most obviously, your content must be stored securely, with at least one and preferably multiple layers of resilience. And you need to be able to access that content quickly, when you need it, and in the form you need it.
Those requirements are the same, whether you are a start-up, a growing business, or the largest production company in the world. This ability to scale is likely to be central to your choice of storage platform, unless of course you are content never to grow as a business, which seems unlikely.
While it may not seem obvious, this is a fundamental part of the design of the EditShare storage environment. We think that this is a really important point: wherever you start, EditShare grows with you.
EditShare EFS 200: A Solid Starting Point
In my recent blog on how much storage you might need as a creative producer, I suggested that a start-up – a YouTuber or a corporate communications department, say – might start with an EditShare EFS 200 appliance. This starts at 24 TB of storage, protected by RAID-6.
It is a network device, accessible by Mac, Windows or Linux clients, so to your editors and other post users it looks like any other storage device. It includes FLOW, a powerful production asset management system that helps you manage and keep track of your content. That means you can create bins and folders in advance, so your editors sit down with their preferred software tools and the material they need is there, organized, connected and waiting.
Flexible Expansion: Adding Storage to Meet Your Needs
As your needs grow, you simply add more disk drives into the chassis, up to a maximum in a single 2U frame of 360 TB. If you need some fast access cache for regularly used material or high bitrate codecs, some of the drives can be SSD.
You can add more devices, either of the same type or one of EditShare’s larger frames. You can put some of your content in the cloud using EditShare FLEX.
The important point is that all you have to do is add the extra storage. Routines built deep in EFS recognize the extended capacity and spreads your material efficiently across it. Loads are balanced equally across devices and RAID groups completely automatically, without the need for intervention and without limiting performance.
Managing Your Content Library with Tiered Storage
As your content library expands, you might want to manage it in a tiered structure, with online storage for active media, nearline storage devices to provide rapid response, and archived storage for completed projects.
Or you might need to open multiple locations, either to provide extra capacity or to service specific projects. To minimize issues caused with network connections between the sites you could put some storage in the remote locations.
Built-in Content Management with EditShare FLOW
EditShare storage management software is augmented with FLOW asset management. FLOW has simple tools to manage all of this, so you determine what content needs to be moved and when. This can be determined automatically by business rules, initiated by operator interventions, or more likely a combination of both. When spare network bandwidth is available, automated routines backup content from remote locations to the central facility or to the cloud.
As I said earlier, this is all baked into the EditShare environment. Whatever the reasons your storage network needs to grow, you simply add the capacity – more disks or more devices – and the software handles the rest, balancing loads and ensuring that it continues to provide the high performance your work needs.
Boston, MA – July 20, 2023 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, is set to introduce EditShare One as its unifying user experience at IBC2023 (Stand 7.A35, 15-18 September). EditShare One gives a single, streamlined experience across all of the company’s high performance production asset management and media storage solutions.
EditShare One boosts productivity by simplifying interactions, with an intuitive user experience at every stage of the creative process. Initial applications include Producer View, for assigning tasks and delivering comments and feedback to the production team, making collaboration simple, even across multiple locations.
EditShare One Transcription View
The AI-integrated Transcription View is a powerful new application that speeds up identifying the key points in large media captures. Users will find Transcription View and other productivity improvements visible in FLOW directly as well as in the FLOW panel in the Adobe® user interface, and Resolve thanks to the seamless integration.
EditShare is already transforming post-production through Universal Projects, which allows projects to be set up, linked to bins, and synchronized with whichever editing software package is chosen. The new EditShare One user interface and its innovative debut applications will deliver even greater productivity and creative control.
“Our users around the world talk to us about the challenge of creating exceptional content within tight time constraints,” said Sunil Mudholkar, VP Product Management at EditShare. “That is why we have put the focus on strong workflows, using automation where it is practical. Now, with EditShare One, we have user experiences which are thoroughly intuitive and consistent, so you are able to sit at any workstation and understand the complete content flow and the state of any project.”
IBC2023 will also see the continuing extension of EditShare core technologies to support the modern media production industry. It is now common for content to be stored at multiple locations, in the cloud, and in remote workstations such as editors working on site or even at home. A single instance of FLOW maps all the content in every location and ensures it is ready. Automated proxy creation and integrated file acceleration ensure that the right media is always to hand.
“IBC brings the media industry’s leading creative people together“, Mudholkar added. “We are excited to show how we’re continuing to develop our platform to meet their real day-to-day challenges. More new introductions to the EditShare line up will be announced next month, so watch this space.”
Demonstrations of EditShare’s proven storage solutions and workflow software can be seen at IBC2023, on stand 7.A35.
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.
Three tier storage provides rapid access and security
Boston, MA, July 19, 2023 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, has a continuing relationship with PROGRESS.film, one of the biggest theatrical distributors in Europe and owner of vast archives of historical film. As well as supporting in-house production, the EditShare storage network is closely integrated with AI technology from Veritone to build a platform to monetize the archive.
PROGRESS was founded in East Berlin in 1950 and, until the fall of the Wall, was the only film distributor in East Germany. Today it holds the complete film heritage of East Germany, along with exclusive collections from East and West Europe, Vietnam, Ukraine, the US and more. The archive runs to more than 26,000 films.
Part of PROGRESS is a production company, LOOKS.film, specializing in historical documentaries. Original footage shot by LOOKS is also added to the archive, becoming a resource for film-makers of the future. LOOKS selected EditShare as the best platform to support its production activities, and parent company PROGRESS recognized that the flexibility, security and power of the EditShare solution was ideal as the foundation of its archive projects.
The goal was to create workflows which would enable the team to bring online vast amounts of film at multiple locations across Europe, and link it with excellent metadata in part generated by AI software. By integrating the EditShare storage network with a highly automated commerce platform from Veritone using APIs to build a seamless solution, PROGRESS provides archive access to film-makers everywhere, with a cost-effective license and delivery workflow.
Gunnar Dedio, CEO at PROGRESS
“We acknowledge that our archive represents a unique library of unmatched historical and cultural significance,” said Gunnar Dedio, CEO at PROGRESS. “We wanted to make this as widely available as possible, by giving film-makers simple online access to search through our archive, select the footage they need, and to create a license and download their content. “After extensive technical trials, we identified the two best players in the field, EditShare and Veritone,” he continued. “They worked together on the APIs which enabled us to create the powerful, seamless system we have today.”
At the heart of this system is the three-tier storage network from EditShare. At the top layer is an EFS server with a total of 120TB of storage, providing fast and agile access for online users including eight editing suites. Supporting that is another EditShare disk structure providing 320TB of nearline storage, making all content in current use readily accessible, and providing a buffer layer to move content in and out of archive.
The third tier is an EditShare ARK LTO8 tape library. Currently this has around a petabyte of storage but can continue to grow, and provides secure backup as well as highly resilient long-term archiving. EditShare FLOW asset management manages all levels of storage and generates proxies as required, and runs on its own servers.
“This scope and significance of the archive project at PROGRESS is huge,” said Said Bacho, chief revenue officer at EditShare. “But it is achieved with standard building blocks from EditShare: server nodes, nearline storage and tape archives, brought together with FLOW software. We are very proud of this project, and it shows clearly what can be achieved with technology based on open standards and simple APIs.”
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.
Avid Media Composer is one of the leading edit software packages in use today, and has some unique features that indexes media so that it can be referenced in projects without knowing the exact path to the media. This can be extremely helpful on large projects but does require a specific media ingest process.
The way that Avid handles content is that each file is given a unique ID reference (known as a Media Object or MOB ID). Ingested media is wrapped into the Material eXchange Format (MXF), and the ID is saved as part of the MXF metadata. The whole of the familiar Avid workflow depends upon this.
On a simple project, the editor sorts material as the content is ingested, and it is automatically formatted and ready to go. But in a busy post environment, this is an inefficient way of working. Most obviously, it ties up an expensive editing workstation and related facilities simply to ingest content. It is also a manual process, so an edit assistant is needed to control the ingest.
EditShare’s integrated production asset management software layer, called FLOW, provides a number of automated tools to simplify this process. The idea is to help users streamline their workflows so they become more productive.
For Avid users, an important tool in FLOW is the ability to create Avid format files, complete with unique ID burnt into the MXF data. This is done not in the Avid workstation but on FLOW servers As soon as the editor sits down to work, all the files are ready in the right format.
Not only is this not taking up edit workstation time, but it can also be completely automated. Set up a watch folder, and new content will be automatically prepared as it arrives on the storage.
More than that, FLOW and its Universal Projects software tool allow you to organize material into universal bin structures that can be synchronized into Media Composer and other editing tools. An editor or edit assistant can structure the bins to suit the specific requirements of the project. All this happens in a web browser that can be accessed by anyone wherever they are located without tying up the suite.
This is a real boost to productivity because it separates organization from creativity. Much of the content preparation and Avid file format conversion happens automatically. Bin structures, markers, subclips and sequences can all be managed from a browser (or even automated). Then all of this appears on the Media Composer screen so the editor can start working right away.
For any busy facility, this is a perfect application of technology. Everything that can be automated is: no one needs to manage file ingest transcoding and rewrapping. Processes that need to be prepared in advance are: content is selected; bins are created and populated; the timeline is set up.
And there is nothing in the way of the creative process. No preparation, no waiting for file conversion or transfers. The editor simply focuses on making the content as good as it can be.
Remote and high throughput post for busy broadcast facility
Boston, MA, June 27, 2023 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, continues to work with Red Pepper Pictures, now adding a powerful EFS 450 storage system at the company’s Johannesburg headquarters. The EditShare media storage and management systems are also accessible from Red Pepper’s other facility in Cape Town, South Africa.
Red Pepper is a production and post business serving broadcasters, advertisers and corporate clients, in Africa and globally. Focused on creativity, across all their activities the company generates more than 4500 minutes of content each month.
This level of business calls for highly tailored workflows as well as carefully controlled storage and media management. This is particularly true in the case of high profile, fast turnaround reality television like the “Housewives” reality franchise, “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”, “Big Brother” and a popular Afrikaans music reality show “Die Kontrak”. Red Pepper initially invested in EditShare storage in 2013, and has scaled its facilities since then, most recently adding the powerful EFS 450 system, designed for demanding bandwidth applications.
EFS is a software-defined storage ecosystem built on commodity hardware and designed for practical workflows, with the ability to scale from a single storage node to an enterprise cluster, with a single namespace for simple management. The EFS 450 incorporates fault tolerance and very high bandwidth, with intelligent data distribution to ensure the timely support of large numbers of users.
It incorporates EditShare’s FLOW media management software with dedicated, redundant metadata servers. The workflow toolset is particularly important when multiple editors need access to content simultaneously, in applications like fast turnaround editing of programs with a very large number of sources.
“We turned to EditShare because we needed something that could manage high throughput, fast turnaround edits,” said Christian Nenkov, Head of Post Production Operations at Red Pepper. “We found that it could do the job far better than anything else on the market. Our staff are all comfortable with the EditShare toolkit, and it makes sense to continue to invest in it as our business grows.”
Protea is EditShare’s partner in South Africa, and provides the sales, installation and support for Red Pepper. “They are a really busy company, with some huge productions on their slate,” said James Macpherson of Protea. “FLOW lets them set up customised workflows for complex reality shows, and it is simple to add remote access to and from Lagos and Cape Town. We are pleased to continue this strong relationship with Red Pepper.”
“We’ve seen substantial growth in the region over the past two years thanks to Protea. Their ability to highlight the key end user workflows and requirements so that we can provide the right solution has been critical in the successful deployment of this and many other systems,” commented Said Bacho, CRO at 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.
Many content creators find themselves facing the need for organized, secure, shared content storage for the first time. You might be a successful YouTuber, or perhaps a growing corporate communications business.
The common factor is that you have an increasing archive of material which you need to organize. Efficiency means you need to reuse some of that material. Location shooting is expensive; you will wear out your welcome if you keep calling up the CEO to ask about shooting some B roll every time you need it.
Keeping Track of your Assets
So you need to know what you have and how to find it. Keeping track through stick-on labels on USB drives or on camera cards, or at best an Excel spreadsheet, is not a scalable solution. Storing the material on USB disk drives on a shelf is increasingly impractical. And, of course, there is the question of content security: if the shot you are looking for is only on one disk drive and it goes faulty, what can you do?
What you need is a solution which will provide very secure, very resilient storage with asset management so you can search your archive.
You may think that EditShare storage systems are for big production companies, and certainly we do supply some of the biggest in the world. But the good news is that our platform is designed to be scalable, so you can start with something small, confident that it will grow as your business does.
Avoiding Data Loss
And however small you start, you will always have the highest levels of protection for your content. Automatically, within the storage device, RAID protection tuned to the needs of video content will ensure that your material is protected.
Working Out What You Need
The question, then, is how much storage do you need? There are a number of online calculators (https://www.omnicalculator.com/other/video-size, for instance) where you can put in your video format, frame rate and length of the recording and it will tell you how much data you have.
If, for instance, you are planning a five-minute video, and you expect a 10:1 shooting ratio. Your acquisition format is ProRes 422, 1080p/50. The raw footage is going to come out at a little under 100 GB. Add some extra for edits and renders.
Then multiply by the number of projects you have now, and how many you plan in the immediate future – the next year or two. That will give you the capacity to aim for.
The EFS 200 is designed for this sort of production capacity. You can start with as little as 24 TB of storage – room for a couple of hundred of our sample project including room for RAID protection – and you can scale it up to 360 TB simply by adding disk drives as you need them. It automatically manages distributing the data so nothing is lost and no time is wasted.
It is a network device, so whether you are using Mac, Windows or Linux you will see it as a connected device, directly accessible from your favorite edit software. There is no need to learn anything new. Better, because it is on the network, you can have multiple editors working on multiple projects simultaneously, without loss of performance.
Having this sort of content management gives you security, it boosts productivity, and it helps you manage your precious assets. You can start with the right size for your business as it currently stands, confident you can grow in the future without issues, even if your ambition is to be one of the most successful production companies in the world.
Scalable storage and content management on premises, at remote locations and in the cloud
Boston, MA – May 26, 2023 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, will show visitors to BroadcastAsia 2023 how its storage and workflow systems and solutions fit seamlessly into modern, practical workflows, growing as the user’s needs increase.
Central to the success of EditShare’s solutions is that it matches its powerful and resilient storage systems with software that provides all the production asset management and workflow controls needed by any media enterprise. The solutions can be implemented centrally, they can embrace remote locations, and they can use standardized cloud storage and processing, to meet the specific needs of each project. Users can start with a single storage appliance and grow seamlessly and without downtime to networks of many petabytes.
Putting creativity and productivity at the heart of the operation, EditShare provides direct support for all popular professional editing platforms, including Adobe, Avid and BlackMagic. EditShare FLOW software ensures material is formatted and packaged to appear as bins in the appropriate workstations, wherever they are, so the editor wastes no time in set-up and preparation. Where needed proxies are automatically generated, and Swift Sync provides file acceleration to move required material.
Content storage can be spread across multiple locations and the cloud, to suit the operational needs of the user. FLOW maps all the content in every location and ensures it is ready, whenever and wherever it is needed. That includes cloud editing, with the preferred software tool running in the EditShare environment in AWS.
“While technology is moving forward very rapidly, we know that our customers want to focus on producing great content to tight timescales,” said Sunil Mudholkar, VP Product Management at EditShare. “What we will be showing at BroadcastAsia demonstrates that we provide strong underlying automation and intelligence, allowing creatives to focus on the results. We look forward to meeting many of our users from the APAC region and showing them how we continue to develop the most productive and practical infrastructures, whatever the size of the business and however they want to work.”
Demonstrations of EditShare’s proven storage solutions and workflow software can be seen at BroadcastAsia 2023, on stand 6J2-08.
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.
Like many of you, I’m taking a big breath following an exciting week in Vegas for this year’s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference. As always, NAB provided a unique opportunity for us to connect with industry experts, showcase our latest products, get together as a globally-distributed team, and gather valuable feedback from our esteemed customers and partners. It was a great show – and we enjoyed seeing everyone who made the trip to our booth.
A few key themes seemed to dominate conversations during the show – this is what I noticed that kept coming up at NAB:
Collaborative Workflows: The importance of collaborative workflows in the media and entertainment industry has never been more evident. At NAB, we highlighted our latest innovations in collaborative workflows and shared storage solutions. Our new features, such as universal project sharing, enhanced metadata management, multi-site support and remote editing capabilities, were met with overwhelming positive feedback. We are proud to continue our commitment to providing cutting-edge collaborative tools that streamline media production workflows and foster creativity among teams. We continue to drive forward our strategy of creating amazing everywhere.
Hybrid Cloud-Based Solutions: As our CTO, Stephen Tallamy puts it, “everything seems destined for the cloud… eventually.” But the pace and sequencing of that move is different for every team. That’s still true here in 2023. While some teams are dipping their toes in the water, others are ready to take the plunge but aren’t quite ready to commit to moving all of their workflow to AWS just yet. As a provider of cloud-based solutions, we want to support customers who are ready to start their cloud journey while also acknowledging that the right first step looks different for every team.
At NAB, we showcased our latest advancements in hybrid cloud-based editing, media management, and storage solutions. Our hybrid cloud offerings give customers the flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency they need to meet the evolving demands of modern media production – sometimes that means a mix of on-prem and cloud, both in storage and media asset management. We’re excited about the possibilities that hybrid cloud-based technologies bring to the industry, and we’re committed to expanding our solutions to help customers stay ahead of the curve. If you’re thinking about a potential hybrid cloud strategy, we have more examples than ever about ‘what good looks like’ that we’d be happy to share.
We were also surprised by the number of those who have multiple EditShare deployments and are interested in connecting those workflows to create global efficiencies. This is an area where we are innovating and making investments, and we’re pleased that these investments were validated by the customers we spoke with. We’re going to continue investing here – check out our CTO, Stephen Tallamy, discussing our thinking on where hybrid is headed from the NAB floor here.
AI-Driven Media Management: Artificial intelligence (AI) has reached peak hype status, but it’s also transforming the way media assets are managed and monetized. At NAB, we demonstrated our latest AI-driven media management tools that leverage machine learning and automation to streamline media workflows, enhance search capabilities, and optimize media asset organization. Our customers were impressed with the increased efficiency and productivity that our AI-powered solutions bring to their operations.
While I was at NAB I also participated in the SET Future of Broadcast panel. Fernando Bittencort, former CTO of Globo moderated the panel. He kicked off the panel by reading the response he got when he asked ChatGPT “What is the future of Broadcast?”. We can debate the quality of ChatGPT’s answer to his question, but the fact that this is even possible should cause us to stop and recognize two things: (1) The world has changed, and (2) our industry is not exempt. The possibilities for what it can do – from search ability to documentation to customer support to how we test our products – the limit of how we apply AI and machine-learning technology to the problems media creators face. And I’ll leave it to smarter guys than me to talk about the limits and governance that should be placed on it.
The most encouraging part of NAB? Our industry is back. We had 120 channel partners in attendance from all around the world. We had more than double the product demos vs. 2022. Leads and opportunities coming out of the show were also up. Things are moving in the right direction.
As we reflect on this year’s NAB conference, we are energized by the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. We remain committed to our mission of Creating Amazing Everywhere by empowering media professionals to create, collaborate on, and deliver exceptional content.
Thank you for your continued support of EditShare. We look forward to spending more time together in 2023.
Augments presence with customers & partners in the region and sponsors inaugural Manufacturer Awards
Boston, MA – May 04, 2023 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, will showcase its latest productivity and creativity developments at CABSAT 2023 (stand S1-E20, Dubai World Trade Centre, 16 – 18 May). This will be the company’s largest presence at CABSAT to date. Underlining its commitment to the event and to the MENA region, EditShare is also supporting BroadcastProME’s inaugural Manufacturer Awards at the show as a silver sponsor.
The demonstrations will show what can be achieved with EditShare’s market leading EFS storage devices, available both as on premises servers and as cloud technology. The creativity and workflows are provided by FLOW, the software layer which provides asset management and system control.
The strong movement in production and post at the moment is towards decentralization: remote production; multi-site post; and hybrid on premises and cloud storage. The latest developments from EditShare reflect these changes, including FLEX for fast cloud implementations and Multisite, which provides the intelligence to ensure that media is available where it is needed, moving content from location to location, or from the center to a remote worker, to minimize downtime.
Also boosting productivity is direct support for all the popular professional edit packages: Adobe, Avid, BlackMagic and others. Material relevant to each project will appear as bins in the right workstations, wherever they are, eliminating set-up time and waiting for content transfers. Swift Sync from EditShare provides file acceleration to move material as quickly as possible, over any path.
“The Middle East is a really important, and very successful, region for EditShare, thanks in no small part to our dedicated Channel Partners” commented Said Bacho, CRO at EditShare. “We always ensure that we have a strong demonstration of our latest capabilities at CABSAT, and the conversations we have with the media community in the region are very important to us, guiding future developments.
“As the leading storage and asset management specialists, we know how important it is for the industry to maintain strong innovation in creative tools and the rest of the content chain,” he continued. “When CABSAT and Broadcast Pro ME magazine set up a Manufacturer Award program, we wanted to give it our full support, which is why we are the silver sponsor. I look forward to seeing the innovations which the awards will spotlight.”
Demonstrations of EditShare’s proven storage solutions and workflow software can be seen at CABSAT 2023, on stand S1-E20.
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.
