Delivering on the Promise of Virtual Post Production
Lee Griffin, VP Business Development, EditShare
EditShare EFS Swift Link for seamless remote editing and connectivity
Whether you’re in post or finishing, flexibility and remote collaboration have become more critical than ever. Thanks to the pandemic, we have got completely used to the idea of directing a live production or finishing an edit on the kitchen table.
At Editshare, we have always had remote workflows integrated via our AirFLOW application. In fact we won an IBC Innovation Award for this all the way back in 2016. Thanks to continuous development, we have advanced still further the simplification of working from anywhere.
Whether you’re a filmmaker, video editor, or content creator, the ability to work remotely on your favorite craft editor while staying connected to your enterprise shared storage system is truly a game-changer. We want the same creativity whether we are in the facility or working remotely, using whatever tool is best for the job and the team.
This is where EFS Swift Link steps in, revolutionizing the way creative post professionals work. In this blog post, I’ll discuss how one of the latest features of the upcoming EditShare technology release – which includes Swift Link – can enhance any post production workflow, enabling anyone to work from anywhere: simply, with full creative control, and without downloading any media.
The Remote Editing Challenge
Traditionally, post work required everyone to be physically present in the confines of the facility. Today, for a whole host of reasons including tightening deadlines, client demands and the life/work balance expectations of valued staff, remote collaboration is a necessity.
The challenge lies in providing editors and creatives with the same experience they would have in-house, even when they are miles away from the facility. In some instances we have seen editors moving and operating out of different countries.
Enter EFS Swift Link
EFS Swift Link bridges the gap between remote editing and centralized EditShare EFS storage systems – be they on-prem or in the cloud.
Simply and transparently, the EFS client adapts to the network conditions of individual workstations allowing users to maintain a strong connection to the storage network. We’ve been testing this across our offices on different continents, from our homes to the office and even to the cloud and we are impressed by how simple yet powerful it is.
Wherever you are, it gives you access to both proxies and high-resolution media, so you have the resources you need to work efficiently. That depends on understanding the capacity and quality of the data connection between the remote workstation and base, so one of the standout features of EFS Swift Link is its ability to detect network latency automatically.
You don’t need to be a networking expert to optimize the connection: Swift Link does it for you. Performance is consistently good, even on high-latency connections.
And it does this without forcing individual users to change the hardware, the software and the workflows they are used to. No need to invest in new computers or change the way you work, Swift Link seamlessly integrates with your current setup.
How Swift Link Works
The user-friendly interface of EditShare Connect makes it easy to connect to remote EditShare systems. It simplifies the process, eliminating the need for complex configurations. Just get connected to your network and VPN service and the client will do the rest for you.
Once connected, EFS Swift Link uses its automatic latency detection to optimize the connection. Regardless of your location or network conditions, the system adjusts to ensure you experience minimal disruptions and maximum performance.
And of course Swift Link supports multiple locations, so you can design the collaborative workflows you need with team members spread across different locations. Editors can work on the same project simultaneously, review each other’s work, and provide feedback in real time, just as if they were in the same room. All the standard features of EFS are still available, including bin locking, auditing and consistent drive letter naming.
Benefits
Remote collaborative workflows are the goal for many. With EFS Swift Link editors and content creators can work from anywhere, giving them the freedom to choose their working environment, without compromising on functionality, familiarity and collaboration. The result is faster project completion and improved creativity.
It is also the cost-effective solution. Everyone retains their existing equipment and workflows, so there are no costly upgrades, and there is no downtime to learn new tools and workflows, and no resistance to being forced away from the familiar. If an editor is most comfortable in Media Composer (or Adobe Premiere Pro, or Da Vinci Resolve) then use it, embedded in the EditShare Solution.
Performance is boosted. The automatic latency detection ensures that users media transfers are optimized, even on high-latency connections. And security is maintained, thanks to the integrated data protection systems and the permissions structure.
Remote working is fast becoming the new normal, EFS Swift Link is the lifeline for post production professionals.
K-State returns to EditShare based on stability and reliability
Boston, MA, August 30, 2023 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, has upgraded the existing storage network at K-State Athletics, Inc. with more facilities and cloud synchronization. The installation was completed in association with US channel partner, Alpha.
K-State Athletics, as part of Kansas State University, has become one of the forefront collegiate athletic programs in the country, coming off a 2022 Big 12 Football Championship and an Elite Eight NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament appearance. K-StateHD.TV, the official video department of K-State Athletics, provides comprehensive linear, web, and social coverage of all 16 men’s and women’s sports activities, as well as providing elements and production for third-party media companies from across the nation.
Since 2016, K-StateHD.TV’s broadcast and video board control rooms have used shared storage from EditShare. Now, as part of a major expansion of its capabilities, K-State Athletics has greatly expanded and upgraded the server network for K-StateHD.TV.
“We have been very pleased with the stability of the EditShare servers we have been using since 2013,” said Andy Liebsch, Director of Video Services at K-State Athletics. “As we looked to the future, we wanted to make sure our servers were equipped to handle our increasing storage needs. We also wanted to provide a more robust solution for legacy content and backup. Alpha and EditShare provided the solution, and a seamless integration and transition program.”
The new installation adds both online and nearline storage on site, and it now provides for storage and backup in the cloud, using EditShare FLEX Cloud Sync. Also installed as part of the upgrade were additional servers for the EditShare FLOW asset management database, which has opened up automated ingest and media acquisition.
Darren Whitten, senior account executive at Alpha, added “This is a long-standing and growing relationship. The people at K-State have benefited from the flexibility and stability of EditShare over a period of many years, and we have kept them informed about the continuing developments, including the ease of adding cloud for backup and archiving through FLEX. Downtime is also a challenge in the crowded college sports calendar, so the fact that we could get in at the right time and install the new hardware quickly was also a great selling point.”
Said Bacho, CRO at EditShare said “As well as showing how our products fit seamlessly into modern workflows, this project also shows the benefits of our comprehensive distribution channel. Darren and his colleagues at Alpha stay in close touch with the team at K-State, so they understand what the college needs to achieve. That means we can roll out the right solution at the right time.”
The upgraded and enhanced storage network went online in August 2023.
For further information on all EditShare solutions, please visit the website at www.editshare.com
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.
EditShare adds to AWS expertise after recently joining the AWS ISV Accelerate program
Boston, MA – August 24, 2023– EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, continues to demonstrate the strength of its offering in cloud and hybrid solutions, with large numbers of successful client systems in use. This continuing success has led EditShare to achieve Amazon Web Service (AWS) Media & Entertainment Competency status.
EditShare joined the AWS Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Accelerate Program a year ago, which affirmed its success in delivering practical cloud storage solutions. Achieving AWS Media & Entertainment Competency status further solidifies that the company follows architectural and operational best practices, is being actively used by customers in product environments, and customers advocate for the solution.
“This is another great accolade for our technical and applications teams,” said Stephen Tallamy, CTO of EditShare. “What it tells potential users is that we will deliver a solution that meets their operational requirements, makes optimal use of the cloud environment, and will be secure and resilient. With EditShare FLEX, our award-winning cloud technology, has reached a new level of maturity and adoption of media workflows that unlock the benefits of AWS services and applications tailored for media professionals,” Tallamy continued. “Post houses, production companies, broadcasters and creative agencies have realized that, by combining on premises and cloud technology, they can deliver real value to their clients and into their programs, while achieving operational savings through remote working and distributed workflows.
“This additional recognition from AWS means we are at the cutting edge of cloud and hybrid systems architecture. We look forward to continued growth in delivered systems around the world, and an ever-strengthening bond with our colleagues and peers at AWS,” said Tallamy.
The AWS Media & Entertainment Competency designation is the way to differentiate AWS Partners that have engineered their solutions and demonstrated the ability to deploy and operationalize these solutions repeatedly, at scale. Finally, and most importantly, they have a list of customers that have successfully deployed the solution on AWS.
AWS is enabling scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions from startups to global enterprises. To support the seamless integration and deployment of these solutions, AWS established the AWS Competency Program to help customers identify AWS Partners with deep industry experience and expertise.
EditShare will be showcasing it’s FLEX Cloud Solutions at the upcoming IBC Exhibition in Amsterdam, Hall 7, Booth A35 and also on the AWS booth Hall 5, Booth C90.
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.
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.
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.
