EditShare Boosts Performance and Connectivity with Further Technology Launches at IBC2023
EFS storage solutions now include NVMe; Swift Link increases throughput tenfold
Boston, MA – August 16, 2023 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, will launch a significant raft of technology upgrades and new functionality at IBC2023 (Stand 7.A35, 15-18 September). In addition to the new user interface, EditShare One, announced in July, the company is adding NVMe capabilities to provide ultimate performance in intensive workloads, and Swift Link, bringing up to 10x improvement in performance between remote workstations and EFS systems that are located on-prem or in FLEX cloud environments.
Large and busy facilities place heavy demands on storage systems, particularly when content is in demand by multiple users. To provide a very high performance cache in this sort of environment, EditShare now offers the ability to use NVMe (non-volatile memory express) solid-state storage.
Based on the latest Gen11 platform from HPE, the NVMe module has 24 drives per node, with user-selectable capacities. EFS supports multiple nodes, so users are free to construct the storage architecture that best meets their business and productivity requirements. This new platform gives systems architects extremely high levels of performance, without sacrificing the protection and reliability that is central to the EditShare approach.
Users now routinely expect EFS storage architectures that bridge multiple facilities and link to the cloud, but also provide access from remote locations and for creators working at home. Swift Link provides a massive speed boost for remote clients connecting over a VPN or other high latency connection – boosting throughput by as much as 10 times.
Users at home or on a remote location connected via VPN can preview and edit both proxies and high-res media, just by using EditShare Connect, with built-in Swift Link and its automatic latency detection. EFS optimises the connection around the network latency, delivering much more flexibility for remote users without changing the equipment they use or the way they work. The user doesn’t need to know that they are on a high-latency connection, EditShare Connect will determine that for them and make adjustments accordingly.
EditShare continues to achieve the highest possible security levels. The new release now ships with Ubuntu 2020, and is beginning to introduce SAML (security assertion markup language) within the SSO (single sign-on) authentication for externally-facing FLOW applications. Together, these provide practical and very effective protection against cyber-security attacks.
“Our goal is always to make it easy for creative people to produce their best work,” said Sunil Mudholkar, VP Product Management at EditShare. “But alongside the practical tools, we recognize the ongoing need to enhance the underlying technology to ensure that we deliver industry-defining levels of performance, reliability, and security. Our rolling program of software upgrades allows us to consistently improve our offering, and at IBC we will showcase new functionality like NVMe and Swift Link, while also being available to discuss future enhancements and security boosts.”
Demonstrations of EditShare’s proven storage solutions and workflow software can be seen at IBC2023, on stand 7.A35. Click here to book a demo or a meeting with us at the show.
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.
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.
London post house uses EditShare Universal Projects to move work through the facility
Boston, MA, August 1, 2023 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, recently provided a large-scale storage network for Directors Cut Films, a leading London post house specializing in long-form content, with a particularly strong reputation in documentaries and entertainment. The new installation, which replaced a proprietary storage system, provides seamless transfer of projects between all the operational rooms.
Directors Cut, based in central London, currently houses 34 offline Avid suites, five online editing rooms which support Adobe® Premiere® Pro and DaVinci Resolve as well as full-featured Avid, three audio suites and a large grading theater with Baselight 2. With the increased demands of Dolby Vison® and Dolby Atmos®, when looking for a new storage network, it was vital that it should not only provide the capacity and bandwidth to support all these rooms, it had to provide the ability to move projects from stage to stage, and from software package to software package, seamlessly and transparently.
“EditShare showed us the ideas behind Universal Projects,” said Mark Manning, managing director of Directors Cut. “They demonstrated that they could move not just the material but everything involved in post, including bin structures, from room to room, machine to machine, including in and out of Avid, something no other 3rd party vendor can do.”
The EFS storage system itself provides more than a petabyte of usable storage. It consists of five nodes each of 256 terabytes, configured to provide the highest levels of resilience and eliminating any single point of failure. The resilience built in also includes duplicated metadata controllers and high speed, fiber ethernet switches. A sixth EditShare node is also included, in a high security environment, to provide external access for receipt of content from locations, for remote log-ins, and for delivery.
FLOW, the EditShare production asset management platform, is a vital part of the workflow structure. This is visible to clients, who use it to prepare material, monitor progress and review and approve cuts. FLOW provides open interconnectivity, allowing clients to tag and prepare content using standard tools like Excel, with FLOW managing those inputs and translating it into assembling the right content in the right format for each editor.
“The EditShare offer was precisely what we needed,” said Manning. “It gives us secure storage, the convenience of client-accessible asset management, plus the big bonus of streamlined workflows across all our rooms using Universal Projects. We would probably be counted as a lighthouse customer for Universal Projects – we have certainly contributed a lot of thought and direction during its development – and it has very powerful functionality, ahead of anything else we found out there.”
Said Bacho, CRO at EditShare added “We are really pleased with the success of the installation at Directors Cut, because it does exactly what we set out to achieve. Everyone in the creative team at Directors Cut is remarkably talented: we have given them a central architecture which automates all the tedious tasks around post, so they can just focus on the story.”
Directors Cut has acquired the complete system on a five year subscription. This includes all the necessary hardware from HPE, together with warranties covering the whole period, as well as all software updates. “Our experience is that some post houses still like the capex model; others – like Directors Cut – can see the financial benefits which a long-term deal brings.”
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.
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.
