Spring has finally come to Beijing. I can’t tell you how much I looked forward to the feeling of warm sunlight on my face, the happy sound of children playing, and – at last – being able to live my life normally.

I love to go for a run outside. It’s a great start to the day. But for what seems like a long time now, these completely normal things have not been normal at all. 

The Chinese Lunar New Year is a huge event, especially for families, who often travel thousands of miles to be with each other. It’s a country-wide celebration, and probably the biggest movement of the Chinese population each year. So a contagious outbreak like COVID-19 at this particular time, is the worst possible thing that could have happened.

Three days after the outbreak was identified, Wuhan was locked down. Wuhan is more than 1,000 KM from Beijing, but we felt the impact instantly. Within days we were advised not to go out and meet friends, family or colleagues. 

That was January 26th. 

Thanks to modern technology, I did not have to change too much to connect with my friends and family and work from my home. Life could continue by using the internet and the cloud. 

I work for EditShare, a technology company in the Media and Entertainment business. EditShare is headquartered in the USA, with offices in the UK and all over the world including one in Beijing. So, we have a practice of staying close through video and audio conference calls as well as other forms of digital collaboration. Utilizing those tools also helps me be productive in China where our customers are spread over vast distances and we can’t always meet in person. 

Over the last decade there’s been what can only be described as a revolution in production. It used to be that because of the huge files, the low bandwidth and the massive computing power needed, the only way to work was onsite at the production or broadcast facility. 

But now, that’s changed completely. In fact, the whole production and post-production process – logging, editing, transcoding, delivering – is moving into the cloud, with total automation to simplify the workflow. The cloud isn’t “anywhere,” but at the same time it’s everywhere. 

So working at home or remotely is as rich and creative an experience as being in a dedicated facility. And thankfully, my company has set up its own internal business processes to enable the same experiences.

During the shutdown, I was able to work closely with our local channel partner ThinkTone (XinTong) Technology on ways to stay connected to our customers and continue our business activities. We shared best practice information and offered online presentations on how to use the EditShare remote production technology. Our ability to continue collaborating helped our customers. 

As an example, we successfully continued to work on a major customer project. The customer is a Chinese conglomerate and one of the world’s top five technology companies. It has multiple divisions with quite separate functions. The two divisions we worked with are – video and cloud.

The  video division had a major new reality series planned for release in the first half of 2020. The team wanted to be able to distribute the video from the production to all of the many stakeholders for review – without having to be in the same room, building or even city. It was agreed that we would run EditShare software directly on cloud division infrastructure to accomplish this.

The team began the testing of EditShare Flow and EFS running on the cloud at the beginning of 2020 – while we were on lockdown. We held weekly meetings to update the information between each of the interested parties. At times these meetings had up to twenty people across three continents. 

We were able to do this during the lockdown because everyone was able to work remotely – that’s the beauty of the cloud, and I guess it’s the way forward for all of us. 

I was shut inside for nearly two months. I learned to adapt to the current situation, as my business like many others, must move forward during the crisis. And while there have been inconveniences, I am more efficient than ever and better prepared for the unexpected. And the next time a crisis happens, there will be no reason for everything to stop. Because of cloud technology, working at home is now just “working.” 

In China, we have a saying that inspired us during this challenging time: “winter will be over and the spring will come.”  Thank you for reading this. I wish everyone, wherever they are in the world, to stay safe, and I hope spring comes soon to you, too. 

07 APR 2020

FLOW enables secure, modern editorial workflows and collaboration; support in demand for remote workflow design consultancy and finishing services

Boston, MA – April 7, 2020 – EditShare,^®a technology leader that specializes in collaboration, security, media management and intelligent storage solutions, today announced that UK based post-production company, The Finish Line, is using EditShare’s FLOW media management workflow solution to scale its post-production business through remotely enabled workflows. Known for its high caliber finishing services, The Finish Line chose EditShare’s open and collaborative media management solution to create a secure cloud-based media control layer that enables advanced, remote editorial workflows including ingest of rushes, storyboarding, and review and approval.

“Our core business has been based around installing and staffing internal finishing services for production companies. I am always looking at solutions to help us manage our team of creative talent while also ensuring that our clients have a consistent experience that is as good or better than that of a traditional facility,” states Zeb Chadfield, founder and finishing artist, The Finish Line. “Until recently, remote workflows were not commonplace and we spent a lot of time helping production companies migrate over to these services with the intention of helping their budgets to be better utilized.”

The impact of COVID-19 has changed the work dynamic for production facilities and given an urgency to deploying remote work solutions. Chadfield adds, “At The Finish Line we have been working as a distributed business for a long time and are in a position to help companies quickly pivot their operations. Luckily there are very mature tools on the market which are simple to deploy in the cloud like FLOW and QScan from EditShare. We can build all of the technology our clients are used to having access to in traditional facilities but within a virtual environment. We can then automate their ingest processes and provide them with easy and secure access to view their media. They can collaborate with their editors even while they are continuing to shoot or need to stay home because of a global pandemic.”

FLOW seamlessly connects to industry storage platforms, adding a control layer that manages millions of assets and supports a myriad of codecs and resolutions ranging from Standard Definition up to 4K and 8K. Embedded production tools let users search, browse, retrieve, assemble and distribute content with automation capabilities to orchestrate complex migrations and or redundant tasks. The advanced public API enables extensible workflows and integration with leading creative tools. AirFLOW provides secure remote access with the features The Finish Line requires to facilitate finishing workflows across distributed teams and clients, even when the teams are all working from home. Chadfield concludes, “The benefits of working from home are immense, and we will come out of this knowing that we can work effectively from home, even when not forced into it. Everyone should be trying to find ways to enable their teams to work remotely as much as possible.”

The Finish Line fulfills an important post-production need for many production businesses. Its impressive roster of clients includes EditShare customers Argonon Films, Endemol Shine Group, and FremantleMedia.

“The Finish Line’s business model takes the best of all worlds and delivers on the highest standards. Physical walls, geographical and time zone boundaries have no effect on the efficiency and delivery of high quality productions,” states Rob Adams, vice president worldwide sales, EditShare. “Rapidly changing global events have forced a rethink about workflow collaboration. The traditional office, or in this case, the cutting room, is no longer the norm. Zeb is thinking – and working – light years ahead in terms of remote production. We are honored that he is driving this new approach and putting FLOW right at the core of what is likely to be the industry’s next big shift.”

Learn more about The Finish Line and Zeb Chadfield @ EditShare’s “Remote Production: Balancing Work and Self” webinar on April 8, 2020 – https://editshare.live/finishline.

For more information on EditShare’s EFS, FLOW and other solutions, please visit www.editshare.com.

About EditShare

EditShare is a technology innovator in media engineered storage and advanced workflow solutions for storytellers that need collaboration without boundaries. EditShare’s open solutions and APIs enable secure collaboration and maximize efficiency every step of the way. The award-winning product portfolio enables end-to-end workflows, on-premise and in the cloud, through media optimized shared storage, workflow aligned media management solutions, robust APIs, and an Emmy award-winning non-linear video editing application.

©2020 EditShare LLC. All rights reserved. EditShare^® is a registered trademark of EditShare.

Press Contact

Cat Soroush
Zazil Media Group
(e) catherine@zazilmediagroup.com
(p) +1 (631) 880-9534