July 19, 2023

PROGRESS Builds Massive Archive Preservation and Monetization System with EditShare

Three tier storage provides rapid access and security

Boston, MA, July 19, 2023EditShare®, 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
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.”

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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.

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