The Real Requirements for Meaningful Remote Production Workflows
The return of conferences and exhibitions in 2022 has finally given us all the opportunity to sit down and talk to industry professionals from around the world to discuss what’s working and where the current challenges lie.
Many of the conversations I’ve had at these events relate to the industry hot topic at the moment: remote production. This topic takes on many forms depending on the needs of the production and so to tackle them in a single blog would be ambitious (for me to write and for you to read). So instead, I thought I would cover a more specific scenario to show the sort of challenges I’ve heard and illustrate some of the techniques that can be applied to other scenarios.
Take for example a production company responsible for a popular reality TV show. Let’s say it’s set, and shot, in the south of France, although the production company itself is based in Paris, 500km to the north.
Like all reality shows, it generates a huge amount of content from many cameras running non-stop. It also has an extremely fast turnaround, with audiences expecting high production values in programs reflecting the action that took place on site within the previous few hours.
To meet these two requirements, the production company could have set up a large server network on site. Let’s explore some of the implications of this and what alternatives could be used to improve the workflow.
On-Site Production Challenges
In a single storage network scenario the program would have to base a team of editors at the location. This would add substantially to the production budget: these editors, edit assistants and edit producers would need accommodation and food over the months that the program was in production. Space would have to be rented to house the edit suites. Travel costs would be high because editors may not want to be away from home for extended periods of time, therefore they would be constantly rotated in and out.
What the production company needs is the ability to edit story packages, and packages into programs, within the facilities they already have in Paris (close to the homes and favorite restaurants of the editors and producers). However, the content is hundreds of kilometers away.
Bring On The Proxy
I’ve written before about how you should embrace the proxy. When content is ingested into EditShare storage nodes it can automatically generate a proxy, at a bitrate determined by you, but small enough to be regarded as portable.
This means that users anywhere with the right privileges can log in, view the proxies, add comments if necessary, and manage the content. In this application, producers responsible for each story strand could log in, from Paris for example, whether from a computer or tablet, and review all the footage available. They could very quickly identify what material to use and drag it into an appropriate bin. This can all happen in a web browser using the FLOW media asset management system. We are nowhere near an edit workstation yet.
An edit assistant could then go through the selected sequences for the story and set up the bin structure for the editor. Again, this is still in a web browser, at any location, using the proxy.
When everything is ready, the relevant clips are loaded into the edit software. We are completely agnostic: we can preload bins and projects into Adobe® Premiere® Pro, Avid Media Composer and Da Vinci Resolve. The editor can start cutting straight away.
Stay In Sync
With EditShare EFS we recently introduced a new feature called Swift Sync. This is designed to synchronize content between multiple locations. It incorporates file acceleration which can move media files, over a leased line or a VPN tunnel, as much as ten times faster than Rsync.
It also is extremely flexible in what it synchronizes. In an application like the reality show example, there may still be too much raw content to reliably move, even after the selections have been made. We have smart segmentation in mind during this process as it’s not necessary to synchronize absolutely everything. The key is to synchronize what’s required, automate and optimize. So the editor can cut on the proxies, and only when the story is complete, will Swift Sync move the required clips with handles. It can even conform the edit in the server node at the location and just move the finished story as one file.
Savings Abound
This is the architecture that can deliver huge operational savings for the reality show, while maintaining quality and boosting productivity. The same ideas are applicable for other situations too.
You do not need to have physical storage nodes in both the remote location and back at base. One or both of them could be in the cloud, using EditShare FLEX software and the AWS Backbone to move material as needed.
If you are shooting a drama in 4K Ultra HD, or even higher resolutions using RED cameras, it might even be most efficient and cost-effective to edit using proxies and deliver the selected raw clips back to base on disk drives using FedEx.
At EditShare we see our mission as supporting producers to create amazing everywhere. Proxy workflows are a practical and very flexible way of achieving that.
Want to find out more? click here to book a demo, or a chat with your local EditShare team member.
EditShare supports new storage and workflow design for popular reality show
Boston, MA – December 7, 2022 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, has supplied a very large post production storage platform to market-leading Chinese television production company BKW. The EditShare environment, developed and implemented by local dealer and system integrator ThinkTone, supports multiple concurrent editors working on a popular reality television project.
Love Actually is the most popular reality show on the Tencent Video streaming platform in China, and is available globally on Tencent’s WeTV service. 12 Young people live in the same large house for a month, and the show tracks their relationships as they develop. As well as activity in and around the house, the show tracks its participants as they go out and about daily activities such as food shopping.
The nature of the production means there are more than 100 cameras shooting simultaneously, generating enormous amounts of content and demanding powerful post production facilities. BKW looked at the state of the art in reality television production workflows worldwide. EditShare was able to bring considerable experience to these discussions, and the system design was tailored to the specific needs of Love Actually.
The system, developed by ThinkTone and EditShare, is built on the EFS450 shared storage solution, with 13 nodes and around 2 petabytes of storage, all available online. To enable the fast turnaround show to follow multiple simultaneous stories, there are 56 edit workstations across three production rooms. The show’s producers opted for a stylish, glossy look to the show, with the addition of highly stylized graphics.
“Reality television is growing exponentially in China, so to really win and keep an audience, you have to keep delivering the best insights, action and storylines,” said Xu Bing, CEO of BKW. “EditShare and their Chinese partner ThinkTone were willing to work with us to optimize not just their technology but our workflows to ensure we can deliver exciting and engaging programmes, quickly and efficiently. The result is that Love Actually is extremely successful.”
Said Bacho, Chief Revenue Officer of EditShare commented, “The challenge for reality television programmes the world over is that they generate massive amounts of content, which has to be turned into compelling television virtually instantly. To do that cost-effectively while supporting the creative look and feel of the show demands a very special production environment: not just secure and stable storage and effective asset management to track the content, but the huge bandwidth required to deliver it to large numbers of editors working together. Built on EditShare’s storage and workflows, BKW’s Love Actually is the model for reality television the world over.”
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.
Video arm of leading Dutch newspaper migrates to automated workflows
Boston, MA, December 5, 2022 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, has provided a content storage platform to De Telegraaf, the largest daily newspaper in the Netherlands, and part of Mediahuis Nederland BV. The new system provides journalist-driven editing for the paper’s online video services.
De Telegraaf were keen to move to a system built around Adobe® Premiere® Pro for editing and graphics. Local systems integration company, Fofic Media Solutions, which had provided much of the existing camera systems at De Telegraaf, suggested that investing in an EditShare platform would provide significantly lower lifecycle costs, and could also provide the Adobe support they required.
“Support for Adobe editing was very important to us because that is the preferred software our video journalists and editors like to use and they can do so easily on their laptops, even remotely,” said Patrick Knopjes, Operations Manager Video of Mediahuis. “When they saw the possibilities with the EditShare system and how it integrates with Adobe, they knew immediately it was what they needed.”
The new system at De Telegraaf is built on an EFS300 storage node with 96TB capacity, together with an ARK LTO-8 tape drive and autoloader for archiving. I/O is an RTMP stream, using VBOX connectivity. The included FLOW asset management software provides all the automated workflows, including the ability to track content so that if material has not been used for a specific period, the media manager gets an automated email prompt to move it to the archive.
“Working with EditShare, we were able to demonstrate that not only was the new in-house system superior in functionality, it was so reliable and easy to use that the video staff at De Telegraaf would not need continuing support,” said Frank van den Nieuwenhuizen, Account Manager at Fofic Media Solutions. “We showed them that, using FLOW, both the workflows and archiving were all fully automated, allowing the video staff to concentrate on their stories. The editors loved working with Adobe, the management loved the secure automation, and the financial team saw the cost benefits of having everything in-house.”
Said Bacho, Chief Revenue Officer at EditShare, added “Asset and workflow management requirements come in all shapes and sizes. This was a very specific set of requirements, for a video production arm in a busy news operation. We could show straight away how we could deliver precisely what De Telegraaf wanted to achieve, in a completely intuitive and cost-efficient system and in a very fast turnaround – less than 3 months from initial requirements review to on-air.”
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.
Brazilian broadcaster adds storage, control and cloud sync
Boston, MA, November 29, 2022 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, has greatly extended its storage and content management system at Rede Evangelizar é Preciso, the religious broadcaster in Brazil. As well as boosting operational performance, the new installation also allows Rede Evangelizar to migrate its archive from LTO tapes to the cloud.
Rede Evangelizar, under the guidance of Father Reginaldo Manzotti, was launched in 2011, based in the city of Curitiba, south-west of São Paulo. As its success continued to grow, it extended its in-house production and post facilities, adding its first EditShare servers in 2017.
This major expansion, designed and implemented by EditShare’s local system integration partner CIS Group, includes a FLOW Ingest server and EFS online storage, as well as FLOW asset management, metadata controller and additional production nodes. The integral FLEX Cloud Sync software applications ensure that all media is securely backed up, with archives and restore functionality in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
“We had found our original EditShare installation to be a very powerful tool for us,” said Renan Borges, post production coordinator at Rede Evangelizar é Preciso. “As our productions grew in size and complexity, we needed to boost our operational performance and allow more users access to our content. EditShare and CIS Group readily understood our requirements, and proposed an excellent technical solution, support for the migration, and the ability to move our archive to the cloud which gives us lifecycle cost savings as well as easier operations.”
Said Bacho, Chief Revenue Officer at EditShare added, “CIS Group was able to put together a very attractive package, including long-term licensing and continuing support, it meant we could deliver all the functionality Rede Evangelizar needed, at the right price point, and help them achieve the operational streamlining they sought.”
“It’s important to see that the partnership between CIS and EditShare has brought a level of trust to our customers. With the upgrade of Rede Evangelizar’s system to the new EditShare FLOW tools, we will optimize the end-to-end workflow, offer greater productivity and efficiency, and also guarantee greater production quality,” said Alberto Santana, Territory Account Manager at CIS Group. The extensions to the EditShare architecture at Rede Evangelizar are being installed at the end of 2022, and will go live in the first quarter of 2023.
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.
About CIS Group
Since 1988, CIS Group has been a Media Technology solutions provider & systems integrator with core competencies across the professional services spectrum. Over the years our scope has evolved to include: Consulting & Workflow Design, Integration, Full System Commissioning & Installation, Technical & Operational Training, Maintenance & Support, DevOps, and Managed Services. Focused exclusively on the MediaTech space, CIS has delivered countless solutions aimed at a variety of use cases throughout the Content Supply Chain – including live production, post-production, archiving, and distribution. In relying on CIS’s expertise, our clients have been able to outsource a lot of their technical challenges, and focus their energy and resources on how the technology we implement ultimately delivers business value and creative value to their organizations. Enabling our customers to achieve their desired business goals and operational goals by effectively implementing our solutions is what we mean when we say that customer success is in our DNA.
In an earlier blog, EditShare CTO Stephen Tallamy looked at five top tips for remote editing using Adobe Premiere Pro. Avid Media Composer remains an industry standard and is still hugely popular, so here are five cool takeaways for improving your workflow by using it with EditShare.
1 – Automate Transcodes
EditShare FLOW does a lot more than metadata management. It allows you to offload routine tasks to avoid using up edit workstations for things that can be better done elsewhere.
Use FLOW for ingest, whether from a delivered file or direct from the camera cards. You can store the raw footage, and at the same time prepare the content in the MXF Op-Atom wrapper that is a native format for Media Composer managed media.
FLOW supports all the latest versions of raw formats, and as well as rewrapping, you can transcode to the house codec, which might be DNxHD, or XDCam, or whatever you choose.
Easily track automated processes
2 – Prepare Bins Online
You can set up the bin structure before you get to the Avid workstation too. A core part of the Universal Projects software in FLOW is that it allows you to work from a central view of a project inside of FLOW and then synchronize that project to a range of editing systems, including Media Composer.
Working in a web browser, you can go through all the input material and organize it into logical structures such as folders for rushes, subclips and shot lists. This can be supported by automation when you need it, for example creating rules to create bins per day, to organize by metadata such as tape/scene information or even write a rule to ignore any clip that is less than three seconds long (or whatever duration you think is likely to be unusable).
Assistant editors, directors and producers can work collaboratively to review the dailies and only offer the editor the preferred takes. Once ready, all the work can be automatically synchronized into Media Composer bin files.
By doing all this in FLOW, it means you are transferring less material to the editing workstation, with all the bins set up and populated for the editor to start the creative work immediately.
Sync between FLOW and Media Composer respecting bin locking
3 – Work From Anywhere
The ingest processing, as well as storing the raw footage and transcoding to the house edit format, can also generate proxies, at a maximum bitrate determined by you. Proxies make it practical to view the content, in real-time, from anywhere with a web browser and a reasonable internet connection, on any device.
The producer and director might be on location but can still review dailies in exactly the same way that they used to, as soon as the content is ingested, rather than waiting for large files (or rush prints) to be delivered. The post facility could carry out automated sorting, the director could choose the best takes (on an iPad), and the edit assistant could set up and load the bin structure, all at the same time, from different locations.
Again, the key point here is that editors and edit suites are expensive entities and overheads for production teams. You want as much of their time as possible to be devoted to telling the story, and not wrangling data and waiting for timely transfers. This is a real boost to productivity.
4 – Bin Locking Support
Media Composer users will be familiar with the collaborative features available when using shared storage systems.
Bin locking is central to the Media Composer way of working, which allows users to share bins and projects, but provides a secure locking mechanism to ensure only one person is working on a file at a time. EditShare EFS supports this locking through AvidStyle spaces, allowing users to work with a familiar workflow whilst taking advantage of the other features of EFS and FLOW.
When using FLOW Universal Projects, bin locking is respected by FLOW itself when it updates bins, ensuring users don’t lose their work. Working in combination with the Avid Attic location, history of bin changes is retained as well, so if you ever need to go back to a previous version of a bin, it’s there for you.
5 – Review, Grade and Deliver Anywhere
Once you have completed the edit and rendered the output to the house master format, the next stage involves sending the file back to EditShare FLOW, where it is ingested and given its new identity and metadata.
At that point, a fresh proxy is generated. Everyone who is entitled to review the finished cut can then log in to view it and make comments, from anywhere and on anything that supports a web browser.
The project file is then ready to be transferred across to the colorist. If you grade on DaVinci Resolve, it will appear with all the project information, thanks to EditShare’s Universal Projects. If you are a Baselight post house, then you can mount the EditShare storage network as a source and directly access the file.
Once the project has been graded and signed off, you can leave the creation of all the deliverables to the automated processes in FLOW to handle. Again, it saves using an expensive and in-demand edit suite to do vital but uncreative and repetitive transcoding and rendering tasks.
At EditShare, the goal is to help you create amazing everywhere. I hope these tips help you get the best out of your post production resources by using the powerful intelligence in the combination of EFS and FLOW.
For more information on how you can optimize your Media Composer workflows, click here to get started.
Storage and workflow network supports multiple editing system vendors
Boston, MA, October 17, 2022 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, has delivered a comprehensive post-production storage platform to the Sharjah Government Media Bureau (SMGB) in the United Arab Emirates. The new system provides unified, one-touch workflow access allowing SMGB to expand its activities and meet its goal of migrating to 4K UHD.
The new system is built on EditShare’s EFS 300 storage architecture and is fully redundant. It includes online and nearline storage, and archiving to an Ark LTO tape library, all incorporated in the same workflow engine and accessed by EditShare FLOW asset management software.
The system replaces a post-production and storage network which was tied to a single vendor. One advantage of the EditShare FLOW architecture is that it is agnostic to post-production tools: SGMB was keen to support multiple edit platforms on the network, to allow users to select the tools they are most comfortable with.
“With our previous system reaching end of life, it gave us a chance to define what we really needed from a broadcast media storage network,” said Maher Kazmouz, Manager, Media Department for His Highness Ruler of Sharjah. “Key goals were the ability to work at 4K resolution and HD, to be flexible in the file formats and creative software tools we use, and to have a single point of control from ingest to archive. EditShare showed they could meet all our requirements and provide us with capability for future expansion.”
The system was implemented by Broadcast Solutions Middle East, a systems integrator and EditShare channel partner. “Sharjah Government Media Bureau were impressed by the flexibility and reliability we could offer with EditShare technology,” said Laurent Mairet, Managing Partner at Broadcast Solutions Middle East. “They also appreciated that, along with our active local support, EditShare has a strong presence in the Emirates so they could be confident that should an issue arise, it would be solved immediately.”
Said Bacho, Chief Revenue Officer at EditShare, added “Together with Broadcast Solutions, we provided a complete turnkey system, from the hardware to the 10 gigabit ethernet switches as well as all the software and open interfaces to third-party devices. Most important, we provide an environment completely agnostic to editing software, so it is easy for SGMB to add Adobe® Premiere® Pro to their Media Composer functionality, with simple integration into FLOW. This allows editors to concentrate on creating great content without the need for time dedicated to setting projects up and finding and moving material. It is this level of intuitive workflow support that sets EditShare apart.”
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.
After a few years sitting in front of a screen on seemingly endless Zoom calls, I’ve spent most of this year in airplanes, on the road, and in front of partners and clients. And after a few particularly busy weeks of travel, I finally took a moment to look back on our first in-person IBC show in three years.
Like any good trade show, this year’s IBC was exciting, eye-opening, exhausting, and a little indulgent all at the same time. We won’t talk about the lines at Schiphol trying to leave Amsterdam! After some reflection, I wanted to share a short summary of what I took away from IBC, in one word, one theme, and one feeling.
One Word: Optimism
The only thing that people on planet earth do more than consuming video is working and sleeping and people are watching more video than ever before, and that trend is creating big opportunities for our creative clients. However, if you look across the economic climate, there’s a lot of heaviness out there too. The specter of a potential recession, a rising interest rate environment, and armed conflicts around the world are creating a lot of concern, and the need for many in our industry to do more with less. Despite that turmoil, I saw example after example at IBC of technology solving problems that enable creators to bring compelling content to subscribers faster and more efficiently. I see a real opportunity for our industry to come together and partner across our environment to solve the hard problems that need solving. Business models are changing from perpetual to recurring models. The industry is moving towards the cloud. As an industry, we need more innovation, more automation, and more simplification. Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I’m also hoping to see a little less of vendors beating down on price and more examples of innovation that helps creators do what they’re really great at: Making more cool movies, TV, and content.
Maybe this is a stretch of the concept of optimism, but I can’t tell you how good it felt to connect with people I’ve only had a chance to meet with virtually, and how much I’m looking forward to doing more of it in 2023. More than once I found myself closing a conversation on the floor with a handshake and a “good to see you again”, only to realize (or, on a few occasions, to be politely reminded) that I had only ever met the person over Zoom. Some of these folks have been customers of EditShare for multiple years now, and we are having our first in person introductions. So many of us still have so much catching up to do.
Our week in Amsterdam reminded me how much I’m looking forward to more of those connections later this year. For those of you joining us at NAB New York, or our channel partner training programs in Watertown, Basingstoke, and Thailand, I look forward to seeing you in November!
One Theme: A more flexible approach to Cloud
Cloud has been a hot topic for our channel partners and customers for some time now. But this year’s conversation around Cloud is noticeably different when compared to a few years ago. The conversation has shifted from “should we move to the cloud” or “I’m never going to the cloud” or “I just don’t get the cloud” to “I’m in the cloud” or “I need to know you can take me to the cloud when I’m ready” or “I don’t believe in the cloud, but… convince me because I might be wrong”.
At our last in-person IBC show in 2019, I remember a lot of “in or out” cloud conversations. Our industry was conceptualizing the cloud at that time as a full commitment, “either-or” proposition. You either kept everything local, or you moved it all into the cloud. There was no middle ground. That’s not the case anymore. Even the language people use to talk about the cloud is changing. The stuff we labeled “cloud” before is now much more likely to be referred to as “hybrid workflows.”
That’s a small shift, but almost everyone on our team noticed it. As we debriefed the show and discussed the changing perspectives on the cloud, the word that kept coming up was “flexibility.” Creative teams have different appetites, different needs, and are starting from different places as they consider how to equip their people. Some of our best conversations at IBC centered on how creators can make the “right first move to the cloud”, and helping our customers diagnose where they are and what they’re ready for in their cloud journey. My biggest takeaway? There’s no one right answer. Teams can and should take a flexible approach. But flexible approaches can also be daunting – there are so many options to consider. Having a framework to lean on sure seems to help. We have some good thinking to share here. Our CTO, Stephen Tallamy, will also be sharing some of his evolving point of view on a more flexible journey to the cloud in an upcoming IBC recap, and I encourage you to keep an eye out for that in a few weeks.
One Feeling: Pride
I walked out of IBC feeling proud. Proud of what our product can do, proud of what we’ve accomplished this year, but most of all, proud of the people on our team.
I won’t lie. I like to win. After being awarded a technical Emmy this spring, EditShare took home a Best of Show award for our Universal Projects approach at IBC. The team was elated. Being recognized for innovating in a room full of innovators is the kind of recognition you hope for in this industry. It’s validation for all the work we’ve done to translate what we hear from our customers into how our products work and what we choose to build next. It felt great.
But like I said, our win isn’t what I’m most proud of. What makes me most proud is simply how our team showed up. Every company out there talks about culture. But anybody who visited the EditShare booth got to experience ours and feel just how special our team is. They got to see firsthand how EditShare’s core values make this not only a great place to work, but also how they inform our product decisions and corporate strategy, and how they help us simplify storytelling for hundreds of clients around the world. We dig deep. We are all around athletes. We have deep customer empathy. We are humble. We win together. We’re EditShare. We are excited and optimistic about today and the future.
We’re looking forward to seeing many of you as we continue the [tradeshow tour] in Q4 and into 2023. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to drop us a line if there’s anything we can do – or if you’d like to hear more of what’s standing out for us so far this year.
Hope to see you soon.
Cloud-ready network forms bedrock of major new investment program
Boston, MA, September 21, 2022 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, has supplied a FLOW asset management system to Brazilian production company Fabrika. The powerful new facilities are central to Fabrika’s bold plans to move into major productions and its own OTT streaming channel.
As well as producing its own content, Fabrika also provides the content storage facilities for the Office of the Presidency of the Republic of Brazil. With this, the company made the decision to invest in its own asset management facilities, as early as 2007.
With a shift in business model towards commercial production as well as long-form television, and plans for OTT services, Fabrika recognized the need for powerful new facilities and turned to systems integration company CIS Group and EditShare’s FLOW to help fulfil this requirement. Its first channel, the education-focused Cientik, will be launched in September 2022.
“We needed a new asset management platform, with more agility and good integration with cloud solutions,” said José Luiz Nogueira, Partner and Founder of Fabrika. “CIS has been our consultant and partner for many years, and we turned to them to support us in defining our requirements and the purchase decision.”
“CIS works regularly with EditShare, and when we tested their FLOW asset management system it was clearly the best choice for Fabrika,” added Nogueira. “It is a high performance, scalable solution, and it offers a complete orchestration of workflows and work processes. CIS and EditShare could point to successful deployments around the world, and we were very confident they could meet our requirements.”
The new installation at Fabrika is built on the EFS300 storage nodes, with FLOW asset management software tuned to the requirements of post-production workflows. It was installed by CIS in August and is now in use across all of Fabrika’s departments.
“What we have delivered to Fabrika is a compact and cost-effective solution that allows them to catalog, browse, collaborate, edit and archive, all from a single layer of user interface,” commended Said Bacho, Chief Revenue Officer at EditShare. “It is more than just asset management: it provides the complete post production ecosystem, allowing users to edit from wherever they are.”
Ricardo Freitas, Service Account Manager at CIS Group, stated, “As admirers and partners of Fabrika for quite some time, and on multiple fronts, we were well-equipped to understand Fabrika’s unique requirements, and operational preferences. Upon defining priorities and use cases, we were able to architect a solution, leveraging the capabilities of EditShare FLOW, in order to provide Fabrika with an ideal tool for their content management, editorial, and archiving needs in a secure, reliable, and scalable manner. With these workflows, Fabrika’s producers and editors will be enabled to create more content quicker, driving operational efficiencies by decreasing overall time-to-delivery”.
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.
About CIS Group
Established in 1988, CIS Group’s history includes a lot of evolution as a result of the team’s desire and ability to always stay ahead of the curve. CIS Group’s mission is to continue to be a true digital media solutions integrator to serve the content production market. Covering both Brazil and the United States extensively, CIS is considered a reference in the systems integration space as a result of its specializations in content production & post-production, solutions for broadcast & news, workflows for asset management systems, acquisition, shared storage, media services, graphics and multiplatform distribution on-premises or in the cloud. Headquartered in Davie, FL, CIS has offices and field presences in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo); Boston, MA; and Charlotte, NC, serving markets globally.
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.
