While it is definitely a hot topic at the moment, at EditShare we have been helping users create and operate successful cloud solutions for many years.
Those early adopters, and the many who have followed, tend to be organizations who are reasonably cloud-savvy. They are comfortable using EditShare FLEX Cloud Edit software, alongside tools like the Adobe® Creative Cloud suite and Teradici for remote desktop control.
To make the best use of the cloud for post-production, you have to be able to manage the processes and optimize post-production storage. The much-lauded advantage of the cloud is that you only pay for the computing power you use, so you have to be able to rapidly spin up instances as you need them, and equally quickly release them when you are finished.
Some organizations will have the detailed cloud knowledge to be able to implement their own management layer. For teams without this knowledge, we now offer FLEX Cloud Edit+. Essentially, Edit+ takes over the detail of the cloud management so you don’t have to get into its depths.
FLEX Cloud Edit has been around for a number of years, and gives post facilities the ability to edit in the cloud using their preferred software, including Adobe, Apple, Avid, Autodesk, DaVinci and more. What FLEX Cloud Edit+ adds is workstation management capabilities, and integrated file transfer acceleration.
As we are talking to customers, one of the biggest areas of concern about cloud migration is how to get the material up and down from cloud video storage. When you are dealing with the very large files of professional video, it is natural to see transfers as a potential major bottleneck.
To solve this, we have partnered with Data Expedition, a specialist in accelerated communication. Its product CloudDat can push data transfers up to 5 gigabits a second on a single instance, and instances can be stacked when exceptionally high performance is required. The EditShare integration allows for direct upload to FLEX storage for online use or to Amazon S3 for archive or to use with EditShare’s Seamless Proxy Editing feature.
This file acceleration is bundled into a turnkey system and it works out of the box. It also fits into the cloud philosophy in that you pay for it only while you use it: the license is by connected time.
The second major challenge is management of the cloud workstation environment to reduce costs and overheads for management. FLEX Cloud Edit+ integrates the HP Teradici Cloud Access Manager (CAM) to handle the management layer.
As an administrator of the system, the Cloud Access Manager allows you to allocate users to workstations, giving the flexibility to choose from allocating one user to one workstation, through to allowing all users access to a pool of workstations (or any combination between). From the end user perspective, they simply use the standard PC over IP client to connect to the CAM. Once authenticated, the user will be shown the list of workstations they have access to, which workstations are in use and the ability to remotely start a workstation if it is powered off. Not only does this simplify the user experience, it provides significant cost savings – you are only charged for the workstation whilst it is powered on.
FLEX Cloud Edit+ has built-in Active Directory management to support single log-in credentials for all users and functions, which can be used stand-alone or connected to existing Active Directories.
In summary, EditShare has worked with two other industry leaders, HP Teradici and Data Expedition, to build an integrated solution to cloud editing for users who do not want to get into the details of AWS administration. It is a seamless, turnkey experience: a fast on-ramp to the cloud for those businesses who would rather focus on their core creative skills.
Co-sell partnership strengthens bond with cloud market leader
Boston, MA – August 24, 2022 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, announced it has joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Accelerate Program, a co-sell program for AWS Partners that provides software solutions that run on or integrate with AWS. The program helps AWS Partners drive new business by directly connecting participating ISVs with the AWS Sales organization.
Members of the AWS ISV Accelerate program are held to the industry’s highest standards and must undergo a comprehensive architectural and security evaluation to gain acceptance into the program. Proof of customer excellence was also reviewed to validate the successes EditShare customers have achieved across industry verticals. EditShare has an excellent track record in integrating cloud video storage into practical solutions which are used by media organizations from national broadcasters to boutique post houses. In turn, this makes it a proven partner for the AWS Partner Network (APN) Customer Engagement Program.
“More and more media industry leaders are making the transition towards cloud and hybrid production workflows, because they support new ways of engaging with creative talents as well as providing the resilience and security of business continuity,” commented Said Bacho, chief revenue officer at EditShare. “The AWS ISV Accelerate Program gives us another route to provide our FLEX cloud storage and asset management applications to AWS customers.”
“Participation in the AWS ISV Accelerate program is more than just signing a form,” Bacho added. “A company is invited to join when it has demonstrated both the technical strength of the solutions and their relevance in the ecosystem, through multiple sales and significant revenues. This is an important accolade for the EditShare platform, and we are proud to be a part of this program.” EditShare’s cloud and hybrid technologies for storage and workflow can be seen at IBC2022 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.
Storage and asset management for broadcast and post facilities
Boston, MA – July 26, 2022 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, is exhibiting alongside its local partner CIS Group at SET Expo 2022 (22 – 25 August, Expo Center Norte São Paulo, stand 81). The company will present a demonstration of integrated post production workflows supporting multiple edit software systems.
EditShare’s robust and reliable tools used by content creators around the world include its EFS networked shared storage and FLOW workflow and media asset management system, that easily integrate with leading editorial tools such as Adobe® Premiere® Pro and DaVinci Resolve. Through a partnership with AWS, EditShare also offers a seamless route to cloud and hybrid architectures for scalable, remote operation and storage protection applications.
On the EditShare demonstration area at SET Expo will be an EFS300 storage node running the FLOW workflow software. FLOW’s practical tools allow users, locally and remote, not only to access their content on the shared storage, but to edit using any of the popular edit platforms. FLOW even synchronizes between the platforms, allowing users to move between edit users. The workflow also provides browse resolution proxies, allowing remote editing even over modest internet connections.
“FLOW is a proven, simple and flexible set of workflow tools,” said Cristiano Barbieri, EditShare regional sales director LATAM. “Users can catalog, browse, collaborate, edit, archive and manage all assets from a single layer user interface. It is the perfect partner for the high performance EFS storage appliances.”
Visit EditShare on the CIS Group stand 81 at SET Expo 2022. 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.
There is no right or wrong way to post produce a project: there is no right or wrong software package for each part of the process. How you choose to complete the work is down to a number of factors, not least individual preferences.
Except that for most organizations, they are locked into a specific toolset because that is the only way they can move projects around and work collaboratively. Everyone using the same suite of software applications may limit the operators, but it means projects can be (reasonably) seamlessly exchanged.
At EditShare we wanted to take a fresh approach to this. Our users told us that it would be great to have more flexibility. This is why we created Universal Projects, which allows you to move between platforms as easily as possible.
The idea is that you can start a project in any tool – including EditShare FLOW to set up bins and even rough cuts – and work in any other.
In the real world it may be unlikely that a single project will be worked on by multiple editors each using different NLEs, so you might ask why we have devoted our development efforts to this. But there are real-world use cases.
Imagine, for instance, working on an episodic series at an Avid post house. During the edit, the production company or broadcaster needs to start on the marketing campaign, and the in-house trailer editor prefers Premiere Pro. Having to go back to the raw footage and start the search for clips from scratch is clearly not an economic option. Being able to look into the programme edit, browse bins for each episode, and with key moments tagged by the producer, saves days of effort and leads to a much better result. When the pressure is always on to deliver things faster, this is a big benefit.
The idea of being able to share projects between platforms is sound. What does it mean in practice? Inevitably, there are differences between platforms.
FLOW is the EditShare media management platform. In 2021 we introduced FLOW Panels – plug-ins – for Adobe® Premiere® Pro and for DaVinci Resolve, which were very well received. The Panels provide a means of accessing FLOW media management from within the familiar editor user interface.
FLOW panel connected directly into the Adobe® Premiere® Pro UI
More importantly, it is a simple means to swap bin structures, content, and all the metadata around the edit. Where it can, this is all maintained completely automatically. So you can create a project structure in advance in FLOW and have it pop up ready when you log in to your editor. If you add bins or sub-divide timelines or make any other structural changes, these are immediately reflected back into FLOW, and are available to any other user who logs in.
Avid Media Composer takes a slightly different approach and lacks the simple hooks for tight, cross-platform integration. But it would not be a very valuable cross-platform integration if it did not include Avid. So we have now brought Media Composer under the Universal Projects umbrella.
We think we are pioneering the universal projects concept. We are certainly the first to be able to integrate Avid technology and workflows into cross-platform collaborations.
Our implementation respects Media Composer’s way of working, like locking bins when a user has logged into a project. To allow it to be always available to other collaborative users, we implemented a routine that automatically generates a copy of the structure which is then reconciled again when the original user logs out or publishes.
This works in conjunction with the Avid Attic, so projects are backed up both here and in FLOW, ensuring each user can always access the history of a project as well as the latest version.
In effect, EditShare FLOW appears as another user in the Media Composer environment. It becomes a very powerful edit assistant, either manually through other portals into FLOW or automatically.
Sync between FLOW and Media Composer respecting bin locking
The original Universal Projects links are already available; the complete system including Media Composer integration is currently in advanced beta trials with a number of organizations from boutique post houses to major national broadcasters.
Whatever the application, it gives you an overview of every project and a means of planning and optimizing workflows. As a side benefit, it also helps engineers plan for future expansion, showing where the bottlenecks are in projects, and facilitating data-lead decisions about where to optimize workflows.
Ultimately, it is part of the new metadata revolution, whereby a strong, common, resilient set of information is used to drive complex workflows and automated processes from the camera to the screen.
Want to find out more? See it in action at IBC, book a meeting or a demo here, or request a follow-up
Latest investment includes storage, automated workflows, quality control and archiving
Boston, MA, July 28, 2022 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, has extended its shared video storage solution at Ba Ria – Vung Tau Radio and Television Station (BRT), including the platforms for archiving and increased automation. The new facilities also include an additional four 160TB EditShare EFS-300 storage nodes to add capacity for production requirements.
BRT is the broadcaster for Ba Ria – Vung Tau Province, in the south-east of Vietnam. It has been using EditShare storage for a number of years. Now, with production and transmission demands increasing greatly, it has become necessary to provide automated media management and quality control functionality to boost workflows.
The new installation calls upon the functionality available in the EditShare FLOW media management and workflow software. This gives BRT the ability to manage remote log-ins and to automate content flows through production to delivery. New material arriving at the station must pass local conformance checks and quality control, and thanks to FLOW’s AirFLOW and FLOW Automation, these can now be performed remotely if required.
Ever-increasing amounts of content, completed and in production, meant that it was important to add archiving capabilities, and the extension includes EditShare ARK. This includes LTO-8 tape drives and associated software to ensure automated archiving against business rules, and speedy recovery when required.
“EditShare has proven an excellent storage platform for us, that helps us to be more proactive and flexible during production, playout and storage and we particularly like the system’s flexible user permissions” said Mr. Le An Thi – Technical Manager at Ba Ria – Vung Tau Radio and Television. “As our production and broadcast demands have grown, we have recognised that we need to adopt more automation to reduce the amount of manual work, while also ensuring that we maintain our high standards. After researching the various products in the marketplace, EditShare was quickly identified as being the best option and they have been able to provide a complete solution – from ingest to storage to playout, including the facilities we need for file quality, transcoding and censorship.”
Based on the end-user’s requirements and initiatives, Editshare’s partner, Danmon Asia with its headquarters in Hanoi – Vietnam, designed the system in conjunction with application engineers from EditShare.
“We are very pleased that we have been able to work with BRT again, to automate their workflows and provide cost-effective content management,” commented Said Bacho, Chief Revenue Officer at EditShare. “This is a great example of the flexibility of our architecture, in that it allows users to start with accessible storage and add functionality and automation as they need it, while always preserving the investment at each stage. We are also grateful for the expertise and understanding of our local partner on the ground, Danmon Asia Ltd.”
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.
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.
We’re so excited to be heading to Amsterdam! On Thursday 8th September we’ll be holding a short meeting followed by a drinks reception in the Koelschip room at the very top of the Heineken Experience. Please join us to hear the latest on what we’ll be doing at the show, have a drink or two and chat with our team.
In the media industry right now, a lot of people are publishing opinions on the cloud. But they tend to focus on the features of the cloud, not the benefits.
We are all very aware of the features offered by outsourcing storage and processing. It is scalable, so you can turn things on and off, giving you the agility to try new things. But what are the things you might want to turn on and off? What, in short, are the benefits.
Take the case of a post house. You have a building, a fixed amount of space for which you pay rent. In that you build some facilities – edit suites, grading rooms, audio mixing and so on – and equip it with the necessary hardware and network connectivity. That is the limit of what you can offer, short of taking on more space, paying more rent, and buying more hardware.
If you are in a market, like London or New York, which expects city-centre facilities, it may not even be possible to expand. It will certainly be very expensive.
Today, if a regular and important client comes in with a large and interesting project, they may well say they want to edit from their location. Or the set. Or from the editor’s home. Blocking out an edit suite for the project, knowing that the room will be empty and the editor working over Teradici – looks like a poor use of your expensive real estate and resources. The client will certainly want to negotiate a discounted rate, but all you are saving is the runner’s time making cappuccinos. Rent, business rates, power and all the other overheads will still be there.
You could, of course, say that they can be in the building or they can be on the other side of the world: the rate for the edit suite is always the same. The client would then most likely shop around and either find someone else to do it for them, or potentially put something together on Amazon Web Services (AWS) themselves. Either way, you’ve lost this project, and perhaps the client, forever.
Or maybe you are a broadcaster, and your commercial team win the rights to a high profile sporting event. Suddenly you are asked to add a huge amount of editorial capacity, for a short time. Taking the conventional approach of building the extra edit suites – buying hardware and converting office space to creative rooms, even renting OB trucks – is not commercially viable if it is all going to be redundant the day after the event finishes.
Perhaps you want to experiment with augmented reality in one of your studios, because someone wants to try it on a pilot production which may turn out to be a one-off or may become a series. To support it, you need to add a lot of processing and storage for design and rendering, in order to create the virtual elements and give the show the wow factor.
These are the sort of opportunities for which the cloud can deliver real benefits. This is why we talk about scalability in the cloud, about being agile enough to add facilities and functionality quickly when you need it, without heavy capital investment which may never be amortised.
But the cloud is a great leveller. If we agree that you can do all these things in the cloud, then any disruptor could come in and win these sort of contracts from a blank sheet of paper.
The reason that the cloud opens up these opportunities for established businesses is that you already have proven strengths. The cloud just gives you the added capacity. To take advantage of it, you must move your existing business to be cloud-ready.
Importantly, you are not abandoning anything you already have today. Your capital investments, your business reputation, your physical location and working environments: they all stay exactly as they are, carrying on winning you business.
Now is the time to start building some experience in the cloud, no matter how small, so that you have the wheels greased, you have the systems in place so you are ready to go when the call comes. People across your business need to become comfortable with the cloud, allowing you to confidently guide clients who want to take advantage of your remote capabilities, or your pop-up extended functionality.
The reason that we call our cloud video storage and asset management platform FLEX is that it is built, from the ground up, to be completely flexible for both on the ground and in the cloud. That includes the ability to scale up and down, in compute as well as storage, without any changes to the user interface or working environment.
Making a small investment to start your experiments with FLEX in the cloud will help you realise just how simple it is to operate, how to add capacity as you need it, where it shines, and what changes you made need to adapt your workflows.
Armed with that knowledge and understanding, you now have a big advantage in the marketplace, because you’re ready to ramp up capabilities on demand. Your cloud experience becomes a demonstrable asset when pitching. You can punch well above your weight, simply because you can turn on the capacity you need at any time.
That is the real benefit of the cloud: it allows you to step up to any business opportunity and deliver creative quality, whatever the requirement and wherever the location.
