May 26, 2023

EditShare Supports Every Storyteller at BroadcastAsia 2023

Scalable storage and content management on premises, at remote locations and in the cloud

Boston, MA – May 26, 2023  – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, will show visitors to BroadcastAsia 2023 how its storage and workflow systems and solutions fit seamlessly into modern, practical workflows, growing as the user’s needs increase. 

Central to the success of EditShare’s solutions is that it matches its powerful and resilient storage systems with software that provides all the production asset management and workflow controls needed by any media enterprise. The solutions can be implemented centrally, they can embrace remote locations, and they can use standardized cloud storage and processing, to meet the specific needs of each project. Users can start with a single storage appliance and grow seamlessly and without downtime to networks of many petabytes.

Putting creativity and productivity at the heart of the operation, EditShare provides direct support for all popular professional editing platforms, including Adobe, Avid and BlackMagic. EditShare FLOW software ensures material is formatted and packaged to appear as bins in the appropriate workstations, wherever they are, so the editor wastes no time in set-up and preparation. Where needed proxies are automatically generated, and Swift Sync provides file acceleration to move required material.

Content storage can be spread across multiple locations and the cloud, to suit the operational needs of the user. FLOW maps all the content in every location and ensures it is ready, whenever and wherever it is needed. That includes cloud editing, with the preferred software tool running in the EditShare environment in AWS.

“While technology is moving forward very rapidly, we know that our customers want to focus on producing great content to tight timescales,” said Sunil Mudholkar, VP Product Management at  EditShare. “What we will be showing at BroadcastAsia demonstrates that we provide strong underlying automation and intelligence, allowing creatives to focus on the results. We look forward to meeting many of our users from the APAC region and showing them how we continue to develop the most productive and practical infrastructures, whatever the size of the business and however they want to work.”

Demonstrations of EditShare’s proven storage solutions and workflow software can be seen at BroadcastAsia 2023, on stand 6J2-08.

For more information on our solutions, please click here to get in touch.

About EditShare

EditShare is a technology leader that enables collaborative media workflows on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid configuration. With customer and partner success at the heart of EditShare’s core values, our open software solutions and robust APIs improve workflow collaboration and third-party integrations across the entire production chain, ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none. The high-performance software lineup includes media optimized shared storage management, archiving and backup, and media management, all supported with open APIs for extensible integration.

©2023 EditShare LLC. All rights reserved. EditShare® is a registered trademark of EditShare.

Press Contact

Kara Myhill
Manor Marketing
kara@manormarketing.tv
+44 (0) 789 9977222

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Cloud Editing Costs Demystified

Stephen Tallamy, looks into the benefits and cost efficiencies of Cloud workflows with FLEX, Tyrell Cloud and AWS

Like many of you, I’m taking a big breath following an exciting week in Vegas for this year’s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference. As always, NAB provided a unique opportunity for us to connect with industry experts, showcase our latest products, get together as a globally-distributed team, and gather valuable feedback from our esteemed customers and partners. It was a great show – and we enjoyed seeing everyone who made the trip to our booth.

A few key themes seemed to dominate conversations during the show – this is what I noticed that kept coming up at NAB:

Collaborative Workflows: The importance of collaborative workflows in the media and entertainment industry has never been more evident. At NAB, we highlighted our latest innovations in collaborative workflows and shared storage solutions. Our new features, such as universal project sharing, enhanced metadata management, multi-site support and remote editing capabilities, were met with overwhelming positive feedback. We are proud to continue our commitment to providing cutting-edge collaborative tools that streamline media production workflows and foster creativity among teams. We continue to drive forward our strategy of creating amazing everywhere.

Hybrid Cloud-Based Solutions: As our CTO, Stephen Tallamy puts it, “everything seems destined for the cloud… eventually.” But the pace and sequencing of that move is different for every team. That’s still true here in 2023. While some teams are dipping their toes in the water, others are ready to take the plunge but aren’t quite ready to commit to moving all of their workflow to AWS just yet. As a provider of cloud-based solutions, we want to support customers who are ready to start their cloud journey while also acknowledging that the right first step looks different for every team.

At NAB, we showcased our latest advancements in hybrid cloud-based editing, media management, and storage solutions. Our hybrid cloud offerings give customers the flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency they need to meet the evolving demands of modern media production – sometimes that means a mix of on-prem and cloud, both in storage and media asset management. We’re excited about the possibilities that hybrid cloud-based technologies bring to the industry, and we’re committed to expanding our solutions to help customers stay ahead of the curve. If you’re thinking about a potential hybrid cloud strategy, we have more examples than ever about ‘what good looks like’ that we’d be happy to share.

We were also surprised by the number of those who have multiple EditShare deployments and are interested in connecting those workflows to create global efficiencies. This is an area where we are innovating and making investments, and we’re pleased that these investments were validated by the customers we spoke with. We’re going to continue investing here – check out our CTO, Stephen Tallamy, discussing our thinking on where hybrid is headed from the NAB floor here.

AI-Driven Media Management: Artificial intelligence (AI) has reached peak hype status, but it’s also transforming the way media assets are managed and monetized. At NAB, we demonstrated our latest AI-driven media management tools that leverage machine learning and automation to streamline media workflows, enhance search capabilities, and optimize media asset organization. Our customers were impressed with the increased efficiency and productivity that our AI-powered solutions bring to their operations.

While I was at NAB I also participated in the SET Future of Broadcast panel. Fernando Bittencort, former CTO of Globo moderated the panel.  He kicked off the panel by reading the response he got when he asked ChatGPT “What is the future of Broadcast?”. We can debate the quality of ChatGPT’s answer to his question, but the fact that this is even possible should cause us to stop and recognize two things: (1) The world has changed, and (2) our industry is not exempt. The possibilities  for what it can do – from search ability to documentation to customer support to how we test our products – the limit of how we apply AI and machine-learning technology to the problems media creators face. And I’ll leave it to smarter guys than me to talk about the limits and governance that should be placed on it.

The most encouraging part of NAB? Our industry is back. We had 120 channel partners in attendance from all around the world. We had more than double the product demos vs. 2022.  Leads and opportunities coming out of the show were also up. Things are moving in the right direction.

As we reflect on this year’s NAB conference, we are energized by the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. We remain committed to our mission of Creating Amazing Everywhere by empowering media professionals to create, collaborate on, and deliver exceptional content.

Thank you for your continued support of EditShare. We look forward to spending more time together in 2023.


Augments presence with customers & partners in the region and sponsors inaugural Manufacturer Awards

Boston, MA – May 04, 2023  – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, will showcase its latest productivity and creativity developments at CABSAT 2023 (stand S1-E20, Dubai World Trade Centre, 16 – 18 May). This will be the company’s largest presence at CABSAT to date. Underlining its commitment to the event and to the MENA region, EditShare is also supporting BroadcastProME’s inaugural Manufacturer Awards at the show as a silver sponsor. 

The demonstrations will show what can be achieved with EditShare’s market leading EFS storage devices, available both as on premises servers and as cloud technology. The creativity and workflows are provided by FLOW, the software layer which provides asset management and system control. 

The strong movement in production and post at the moment is towards decentralization: remote production; multi-site post; and hybrid on premises and cloud storage. The latest developments from EditShare reflect these changes, including FLEX for fast cloud implementations and Multisite, which provides the intelligence to ensure that media is available where it is needed, moving content from location to location, or from the center to a remote worker, to minimize downtime. 

Also boosting productivity is direct support for all the popular professional edit packages: Adobe, Avid, BlackMagic and others. Material relevant to each project will appear as bins in the right workstations, wherever they are, eliminating set-up time and waiting for content transfers. Swift Sync from EditShare provides file acceleration to move material as quickly as possible, over any path. 

“The Middle East is a really important, and very successful, region for EditShare, thanks in no small part to our dedicated Channel Partners” commented Said Bacho, CRO at  EditShare. “We always ensure that we have a strong demonstration of our latest capabilities at CABSAT, and the conversations we have with the media community in the region are very important to us, guiding future developments. 

“As the leading storage and asset management specialists, we know how important it is for the industry to maintain strong innovation in creative tools and the rest of the content chain,” he continued. “When CABSAT and Broadcast Pro ME magazine set up a Manufacturer Award program, we wanted to give it our full support, which is why we are the silver sponsor. I look forward to seeing the innovations which the awards will spotlight.” 

Demonstrations of EditShare’s proven storage solutions and workflow software can be seen at CABSAT 2023, on stand S1-E20.

For more information on our solutions, please click here to get in touch.

About EditShare

EditShare is a technology leader that enables collaborative media workflows on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid configuration. With customer and partner success at the heart of EditShare’s core values, our open software solutions and robust APIs improve workflow collaboration and third-party integrations across the entire production chain, ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none. The high-performance software lineup includes media optimized shared storage management, archiving and backup, and media management, all supported with open APIs for extensible integration.

©2023 EditShare LLC. All rights reserved. EditShare® is a registered trademark of EditShare.

Press Contact

Kara Myhill
Manor Marketing
kara@manormarketing.tv
+44 (0) 789 9977222

Continuing developments driven by user experiences

Boston, MA – April 25, 2023  – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, is bringing its latest productivity and creativity developments to the Media Production & Technology Show (stand D40, Olympia London, 10 – 11 May). All the new functionality is designed with user experiences in mind for even greater creative freedom and simpler workflows.

EditShare provides both powerful content storage devices and the management layer to control workflows and track assets. This allows media to be stored on premises, at multiple locations and in the cloud, ensuring that users can work the way that is most convenient for them.

FLOW is the asset and workflow management software, supplemented with FLEX for fast cloud implementations. New at MPTS this year is Swift Sync, which gives users a way to share media across different EFS storage systems, with FLOW multi-site software automating the tasks of generating proxies and ensuring content is available where it is needed.

A major boost for productivity and creativity is the ability to support all the popular professional edit packages – Adobe, Avid, BlackMagic and others – directly. Editors will see the material relevant to their project appear as bins in the edit software, eliminating set-up time and the wait for material to transfer. Thanks to EditShare’s unique Universal Projects cross-platform tools, edit assistants can create bins and even rough cuts without even knowing which edit software will be used to finish the job.

“The great value of an event like MPTS is the chance to show just how sophisticated and supportive our architecture really is,” said Said Bacho, CRO at  EditShare. “We have time to talk through a user’s real requirements, and show how our software can be used to link EditShare storage nodes and deliver the workflows, securely and productively. Ultimately, our users just want to get on with creating their work, and our continuingly evolving software automates the underlying management and transfers to achieve just that.”

Demonstrations of EditShare’s proven storage solutions and workflow software can be seen at MPTS 2023, on stand D40.

For more information on our solutions, please click here to get in touch.

About EditShare

EditShare is a technology leader that enables collaborative media workflows on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid configuration. With customer and partner success at the heart of EditShare’s core values, our open software solutions and robust APIs improve workflow collaboration and third-party integrations across the entire production chain, ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none. The high-performance software lineup includes media optimized shared storage management, archiving and backup, and media management, all supported with open APIs for extensible integration.

©2023 EditShare LLC. All rights reserved. EditShare® is a registered trademark of EditShare.

Press Contact

Kara Myhill
Manor Marketing
kara@manormarketing.tv
+44 (0) 789 9977222

Major South African production company adds third storage network

Boston, MA, April 05, 2023EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, has added a third EFS-300 storage solution at Homebrew Films in Cape Town, South Africa. Homebrew is a leading producer of high quality television for the home and international markets.

Based in Atlantic Studios, Homebrew provides a complete production service, with its own 4k Ultra HD studio with audience seating as well as outside broadcast and single-camera shooting capabilities. It has long-standing contracts with leading broadcasters in South Africa, producing soap operas, drama, documentaries and popular entertainment shows. It is the home of MasterChef South Africa, and the installation of the third storage network was prompted by the start of work on the game show Deal or No Deal.

EFS is the open storage solution from EditShare. It is a software-defined 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. It incorporates EditShare’s FLOW media management software with dedicated metadata servers, and ensures content flows are managed and prioritized to deliver against the practical demands of busy facilities.

“EditShare has served us well over the last three years, and we were confident to continue investing,” said Jaco Loubser, CEO of Homebrew Films. “As we grow, remote editing and workflow automation tools become ever more important, and EditShare supports those well.”

The installation was provided by Protea, EditShare’s channel partner in South Africa. Protea’s James Macpherson said “We have a strong relationship with the team at Homebrew, and they know they can turn to us at any time for backup and support. In turn, we know we get the same level of support from EditShare, so this is a really solid offering for them.”

“We appreciate Protea’s ongoing support in delivering EditShare’s innovative solutions to Homebrew Films” added Said Bacho, CRO at EditShare. “Our EFS storage solution, in combination with Protea’s expertise, ensures that Homebrew’s growing media production needs are met with speed, scalability, and reliability.”

For more information on EditShare solutions, please click here to get in touch.

About EditShare

EditShare is a technology leader that enables collaborative media workflows on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid configuration. With customer and partner success at the heart of EditShare’s core values, our open software solutions and robust APIs improve workflow collaboration and third-party integrations across the entire production chain, ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none. The high-performance software lineup includes media optimized shared storage management, archiving and backup, and media management, all supported with open APIs for extensible integration.

EditShare’s cloud-enabled remote editing and project management technology was recently recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) with a prestigious 2021 Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering.

©2023 EditShare LLC. All rights reserved. EditShare® is a registered trademark of EditShare.

Press Contact
Kara Myhill
Manor Marketing
kara@manormarketing.tv
+44 (0) 7899 977222

Storage network allows iconic production to grow and develop

Boston, MA, March 16, 2023EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, has supplied two post-production storage nodes to the production responsible for This Old House, US television’s hugely popular restoration show which focuses on the crafts that go into renovating buildings. The show reaches audiences of tens of millions of enthusiastic fans and has 21 Emmy® Awards and 119 nominations.

This Old House started in 1979 and is now in its 44th season. Based in its own facilities in Concord, Massachussetts, the company was recently acquired by the streaming platform, Roku and has seen a huge upsurge in activity.

Working with EditShare’s channel partner T2|Computing, This Old House recently installed two EFS300 160TB storage nodes. The initial goal was to supplement the existing storage and asset management system with a more flexible, more dynamic store to meet the workflow and throughput challenges of the expanded output.

Michael Svirsky
Post Production Manager, Roku Inc.

Michael Svirsky has been overseeing post-production systems and solutions at This Old House for 16 years. “The Roku acquisition has driven a rapid expansion with new shows and more output,” he said. “The result is that we need new workflows and much greater accessibility to our media.

“EditShare understands the requirements for post today, which is one of our main reasons for choosing them and to move increasingly towards the workflows that they can offer us,” he continued. “Reliability is also very important to us: when you have a huge number of assets and over 1,000 episodes you cannot risk the slightest chance of anything disappearing.”

Said Bacho, CRO at Editshare, added “This Old House has been making programs for four decades, and using shared storage for 16 years, but Michael Svirsky and his team recognize that they have to continually develop and refine their workflows to ensure they are delivering the best creativity in the most ordered way. They also face the challenge of originating in 4k, and even 8k, so the storage demand is growing exponentially.

“They are a great team to work with. I am very pleased that we have been able to provide the agile storage they need, and we’re looking forward to helping them with new, dynamic ways of working in the future.”

For more information on EditShare solutions, please click here to get in touch.

About EditShare

EditShare is a technology leader that enables collaborative media workflows on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid configuration. With customer and partner success at the heart of EditShare’s core values, our open software solutions and robust APIs improve workflow collaboration and third-party integrations across the entire production chain, ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none. The high-performance software lineup includes media optimized shared storage management, archiving and backup, and media management, all supported with open APIs for extensible integration.

EditShare’s cloud-enabled remote editing and project management technology was recently recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) with a prestigious 2021 Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering.

©2023 EditShare LLC. All rights reserved. EditShare® is a registered trademark of EditShare.

Press Contact
Kara Myhill
Manor Marketing
kara@manormarketing.tv
+44 (0) 7899 977222

There is no doubt that, with ChatGPT making waves with immediate writing capabilities and stable diffusion enabling creatives to create incredible imagery based on simple prompts, artificial intelligence is the hot topic of the moment. Making sense of it all is quite a challenge, especially for us in the media and entertainment industry.

The talk at the moment is about the “creative” capabilities of AI. But that raises a lot of ethical questions for content producers. Who is in charge of the work? Where are the boundaries between fact and AI generation? What are the intellectual property implications? When AI can create completely convincing images from a brief text description, what is truth, and when does it matter?

These ethical dilemmas can make media businesses a bit uneasy, but let’s not forget that AI can be a lifesaver in some areas. It’s like this: people are great at the fun, creative stuff, while computers excel at the dull, repetitive tasks. AI is just another example of this age-old truth.

It’s all about the metadata

Asset management is the way we find stuff in our content stores. We describe the content using metadata, and the more detailed the metadata, the easier it is to find what we are looking for. Indeed, with really good metadata – and maybe some AI help in the search – we may find content that will take our productions off in a new, unexpected and delightful direction.

At EditShare, we’re all about helping you keep track of your content. Whether you’re producing blockbuster movies or TikTok videos, our FLOW asset management software bundled with our storage systems is the way to go. One fundamental truth with all asset management platforms is the better the metadata the easier it is to find the raw material to tell your story.

The real timesaver: Intelligent software

Completing good, detailed metadata is a time-consuming business and sometimes, it is not an especially rewarding task – which can lead to human fatigue and, in turn,  errors. Spending hours or even days in a darkened room manually tagging hours of video can be tough, but it is needed if you want to be sure you can later find the people, places and items you need; to sort the best takes from the OK; to find new and informative B-roll to tell the story.

But computers are good at repetitive tasks, so this is an ideal application for AI. If the software is intelligent enough, it can reliably tag objects, people, locations, and even emotions. It can process audio, transcribe the speech and lock the script to timecode, so that users can quickly jump to the part of the clip they need. Processing audio and video together helps fine tune the script tracking and understanding of emotions.

This all sounds great in theory – a real timesaver at the point of ingest, and throughout the extended life of the content. But can it be done in practice?

FLOW AI for Superhuman Vision

At EditShare the team studied the market, and saw that a start-up based in Berlin had all the right vision coupled with an incredibly powerful technology stack. The company is called Mobius, and their AI platform is called Superhuman Vision, which is pretty much what we wanted to achieve.

Facial recognition

So we have integrated it into our FLOW asset and workflow management system. We call the add-on FLOW AI. It adds yet another layer to our already highly automated environment. FLOW AI can process content for keywords in a scene, automatically tag people based on facial recognition and improve the post environment with intuitive scene and  detection algorithms. 

One of the operational considerations in AI is that it has to be trained to know what you know. FLOW AI is supplied with a lot of basic knowledge already in its database: as soon as you plug it in it can recognize more than 5000 objects, emotions, actions and even 10,000 famous people. And you can teach it more – you can add people to the database, for instance, and it will index them every time they appear in your archive.

Detailed image analysis

FLOW AI also includes intelligent support when searching for content. User requests can be very specific or quite vague, and the retrieval system will suggest relevant clips beyond the usual, so that stories become more interesting.

Obvious applications are systems with a high throughput of content, like newsrooms and sports broadcasters. Say a golfer hits a hole in one: you can quickly find all the other times this golfer has done it; or it has been achieved on this hole; or even disastrous triple bogeys at the same place.

It is a powerful tool for other users, too. Say you are producing a multi-part drama serial, and you need some cutaways to manage the pace of the story. By framing your request by mood, weather, time of day or people in shot, you can help the editor by offering clips that will match and flow seamlessly. For post houses versioning content for different markets, it can help by identifying the points which may need conformance editing, like nudity or swearing.

The partnership with Mobius is already proving very worthwhile. The algorithms in their software not only save time but offer more accurate, richer results, and as users get into the capabilities of FLOW AI, the benefits continue to grow. Object detection is just one string to our AI capabilities, with other integrations including speech to text and translation, but that’s something for a future blog!

It is said that AI is a powerful tool when used to support human decision-making. That is why we see FLOW AI as a great enhancement for our storytelling platform.

Want to find out more? click here to book a demo, or a chat with your local EditShare team member.

Continuing enhancements deliver a great leap forward for productivity

Boston, MA – February 2, 2023  – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, will use NAB2023 (booth N2100, Las Vegas Convention Center, 16 – 19 April) to unveil its latest productivity and creativity enhancements. The continuing development of EditShare core functionality is targeted at creative freedom and simpler, more resilient and secure workflows. 

EditShare’s workflow solutions are driven by its market-leading EFS Storage and FLOW media management – these are combined in FLEX for fast cloud implementations. By integrating post-production storage on premises, at multiple locations and in the cloud, connectivity is at the heart of the workflow and serves multiple market verticals and applications in broadcast, production, post, education, sports, news, corporate/enterprise, and houses of worship.

Swift Sync gives users a way to share media across different EFS systems in the cloud, on prem or in between. Users can select all or some of their media spaces in any location and bring it into their workspace, whether they are in a facility, working at a remote location or using cloud editing via a desktop emulator. FLOW provides support for multiple streams of multiple codecs. In addition the latest EFS release delivers as much as a 60% increase in throughput for certain codecs/configurations from the previous hardware/software.

Editors use the tools of their choice because FLOW and FLEX integrate with software from Adobe, Avid, BlackMagic and others without having to change screens. Included in this spring release are a number of features and improvements to our FLOW Panel for use with Premiere® specifically. Collaborative teams can easily connect with each other using EditShare’s unique Universal Projects technology, providing a seamless means of exchanging projects between post production users and platforms. 

EditShare’s advanced set of open APIs means it’s easy to integrate tools from partner companies and third-party vendors, whether that is capture software from Cinedeck, workflow orchestration from Helmut, cloud hosting from AWS, AI capabilities from Audimus and Mobius, NRCS systems and more, many of which will be demonstrated at the show.

To ensure that mission critical content flows – like channel playout or fast turnaround editing – are never compromised, users can now manage storage access  bandwidth to guarantee quality of service for each workstation, user or group with EditShare’s new bandwidth control capabilities in EFS. The latest release also moves to streamline and simplify still further the new web user interface in FLOW, and to make FLEX Cloud Edit+ easier to deploy through intuitive user interfaces without the need for cloud specialists.

“At EditShare, our goal is always to let creative users get on with the storytelling, by making the technology transparent” said Sunil Mudholkar, VP Product at  EditShare. “The more we make the infrastructure & services intuitive to use – whether it is on premises, in remote locations or in the cloud – then the greater the availability, the reliability and the productivity. That is what our users tell us they want, and that is what we are striving to deliver.”

The latest versions of all of EditShare’s proven storage solutions and workflow software can be seen at NAB2023, on booth N2100.

For more information on our solutions, please click here to get in touch.

About EditShare

EditShare is a technology leader that enables collaborative media workflows on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid configuration. With customer and partner success at the heart of EditShare’s core values, our open software solutions and robust APIs improve workflow collaboration and third-party integrations across the entire production chain, ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none. The high-performance software lineup includes media optimized shared storage management, archiving and backup, and media management, all supported with open APIs for extensible integration.

©2023 EditShare LLC. All rights reserved. EditShare® is a registered trademark of EditShare.

Press Contact

Kara Myhill
Manor Marketing
kara@manormarketing.tv
+44 (0) 789 9977222

Technology has the ability to shape the way we work, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. With the introduction of new technology, such as cloud-enabled editorial tools, it can be an opportunity to consider a better way of working. 

The Evolution of Video Workflows: From Bespoke Hardware to Cloud Operations

It is worth reminding ourselves that up until maybe 10 years ago, all the equipment we needed for media production depended upon bespoke hardware. You bought a box to do a job, and your workflows were defined by the boxes you owned and how you connected them together. That applied whether you were shooting in the field, in the studio, or in post.

The twin-pronged revolution came when processing power developed to be able to handle video in real time, and when standards were established to share content as data files, replacing SDI (which of course also required bespoke hardware). By opening the option to use standard hardware and open standards, video workflows became more accessible and the ability to process video in software made these workflows more flexible.

Virtualizing Post Tools: The Benefits of Cloud Editing

The next step was to virtualize the software, and build systems on microservices. In simple terms, we have moved from connecting boxes that we happen to have into assembling the precise functionality we need, in precisely the order we need. With the infinite scalability of the cloud, the architecture can flex to do what we want without the requirement for large capital investment.

And that is why we have the opportunity to take a completely fresh approach. We need to decide what it is we are actually trying to achieve, and how best to do it.

Take editing, for example. Online editing has meant a largish room in a post house, with room for clients to sit around. That costs a lot in real estate, and power, and catering, and security, on top of the salary for a top editor and the cost of the equipment.

It is the way we have always done it, because it was the only way we could make it work. But if we are starting with a blank sheet of paper, is it the best way?

Collaborating Remotely: Enhancing Productivity and Saving Time and Money

At EditShare we talk a lot about how post tools, like editing, can be virtualized alongside the storage network and asset management platform. These are the industry standard tools that editors expect: tools from Avid, Adobe, DaVinci and others. With remote desktop access technology such as PCoverIP, the editor will work exactly the way they are used to, whether the processing and storage is in the machine room in the basement or in an AWS data centre hundreds or thousands of kilometres away.

The logical extension of that is that the editor doesn’t have to be in the expensive edit suite in the city centre post house. They can be anywhere which is convenient for them. The idea of editing high-value content on someone’s kitchen table has always been a security nightmare, but with cloud editing the video never leaves the central, controlled environment in the cloud.

But of course an editor rarely works in complete isolation. Producers and clients want to know what is going on, and directors may well want creative input. That is why the expensive edit suites have large couches for all these collaborators. And having everyone in the room may be right for some projects.

But for others, producers, directors and other collaborators will need to understand progress and approve material, without watching the whole process. With cloud-based tools it is easy for remote contributors to securely access proxy versions of rushes and cuts for comment. . If you need real time collaboration, there is no reason why you cannot use Zoom as the communication tool.

That saves time for producers and the rest, who are not sitting around while the dull parts of the job happen. They focus their attention where it matters most. And they save time and money by not travelling to the post house.

Balancing Work and Life: The Importance of Staff Welfare in Cloud Operations

The travel point is becoming increasingly important. Commuting every day, only to sit alone in a darkened room until late into the evening to meet a deadline can be demotivating and sap creativity and productivity. Connecting with people in person undoubtedly improves a quality of life, so it’s a balance of travelling when it counts. With the ability to start work in one location and continue somewhere else helps address work/life balance whilst still keeping to commitments. .

The cloud could, and should, be transformative for video creatives. It should be boosting staff welfare, business economics, and creative collaboration. That is why it is important to draw up a list of what is important to your facility, and fit the technology around it.

Want to find out more? click here to book a demo, or a chat with your local EditShare team member.