Tour De Force
Born out of sheer determination and passion, 3P Studio has earned its place in Australia’s creative landscape as one of the industry’s hardest working boutique post-production houses. Founded and led by artisan Haley McDonald, 3P Studio’s eclectic portfolio of post-production work includes desirable commercial brands such as Subway, Allianz, Isuzu Motor Company as well as iconic and defining shows like Sesame Street.

“There are a few projects that we are particularly proud of at 3P Studio and one that stands out is the work we did with Brisbane-based advertising agency, Carbon Creative, for the Australian Department of Premier and Cabinet’s ‘Stop the Hurting: End Domestic Violence’ campaign,” comments McDonald. “It was the first large-scale national campaign that we undertook in the studio; it was an honor that they selected 3P to work on such an important campaign.” A testament to their quality and influence, 3P Studio was recognized for their outstanding work on the “Stop the Hurting” campaign, receiving a silver medal in the Brisbane Advertising and Design Awards.

Humble Beginnings Leads to a Local First
With almost two decades of experience in the media and entertainment industry, McDonald has worked for some of Australia’s largest post facilities. Passionate about her craft, McDonald always knew that working as a creative storyteller was her true path. “I got my love of TV from my late father. I never had a bedtime as a child and he used to let me watch TV with him whenever I wanted. This led to a lifelong obsession of working with media and creatively telling stories. On the flip side, I got my work ethic off my mum, who worked in a hospital laundry for 30 years. I grew up in a housing commission until I moved to Brisbane when I was 18 and worked in a supermarket there until I saved enough money to go university and study film.” Drive and passion work hand in hand and proved to be incredible assets to McDonald as she forged her own path in a male-dominated industry.

It was after the birth of McDonald’s son in 2013 that life took an unexpected change and really challenged her commitment to being an artist. “I had left for maternity leave in 2013 to have my first child, Dash, who is now eight. When I came back to work after six months, my position had been made redundant and I no longer had a job to return to.” While most would see this as a devastating blow, McDonald turned it into the opportunity of a lifetime. “For some time I had wanted to open my own shop. But, like most people, I had a mortgage, daycare and other bills. So, venturing off on my own was just too risky, but with no job in hand, I had nothing to lose. It was my chance to follow a dream and I gave it everything I had.” Starting out as a freelance editor and designer, McDonald took every job that came her way. “I would never say ‘no’ to a job. I would never say I was booked. I would just say, ‘Yes, no problem, I can do that.’ Even if I had three jobs in one day, I would just take them and work out how I was going to deliver. Eventually, I started hiring people to help as I took on more demanding projects. Since I had been in the industry and was so well connected, I was able to get projects out the door with a very high degree of quality thanks to very talented colleagues. This, of course, translated to very happy clients and exceptional word of mouth marketing.”

Working 7 days a week, McDonald transformed the busy freelance business into one of Brisbane’s few woman-led post-production houses. “I bought my office in 2016 and took six months to fit it out. On Christmas Eve 2016, they handed me the keys to the office and they went, ‘There you go.’ And as 1st of January 2017, 3P Studio was officially in business.”

Purpose Built for Business and Creative Content
McDonald built the stunning boutique facility from the ground up. And the chic design took into account installing an EditShare shared-storage solution in late 2017. “When we were wiring the office I made sure I had the cable runs and all the infrastructure shared down the track. I always knew that I wanted to install EditShare because I had used it before, and I really liked the way it supported the content flow. We just needed to save for the investment.” For the first six months, the team worked off the old hard drive system where they had RAIDs that were backing up to other RAIDs overnight and doing mirroring for redundancy. “So, we’d put a project in motion and eventually come to the point where someone would say, ‘Oh, that operator needs to use the project on that,’ meanwhile someone else also needed to use it too, then we’d copy off the data onto another drive and it just became unmanageable so we made the leap to EditShare.”

McDonald quips that she could have purchased other gear, but the EditShare scale-out shared storage nodes were the solution to power her successful business. “I could have gone out and purchased a Mac Pro and hooked it up to a couple of hard drives. Would it have done the same thing? To a certain degree, but it hasn’t been tried and tested like in EditShare. After talking with the guys at EditShare and getting the rundown of the specs and performance reports, investing in EditShare gave me the peace of mind I needed. In addition, my previous experience with using EditShare on very demanding projects assured us that this system would take a beating and keep performing.”

3P Studio installed an EFS 200 single node scale out shared storage solution connecting 10 creative Mac and PC-based workstations over 10-GB Ethernet comprising a mix of Adobe® Premiere® Pro and After Effects®, The Foundry’s NUKE, Maxon’s Cinema-4d, Autodesk Maya, 3D Studio Max, DaVinci Resolve for grading and the premium hero suite, Autodesk Flame Premium while Avid Pro tools is utilized to provide audio post production. With advanced support for project and media sharing, EditShare features helped tremendously with the boutique’s retail clients who, more often than not, required an incredibly fast turnaround. It allowed the team to work simultaneously on projects with one person recording voice-overs while another artist works on the graphics and another edits. “Because the EditShare system is designed for content sharing, it makes the workflow as fast and as collaborative as possible. This means higher quality projects completed on time and of course most importantly, happier clients.”  

A Business in Overdrive
The successful post-production company tripled its staff between the years of 2017 and 2021, requiring an expanded media infrastructure. Upgrading to EFS 450 and adding FLOW and AirFLOW, the team was able to facilitate traditional editorial campaigns and the growing number of fast-turn projects targeted for social, digital, and other marketing channels. McDonald adds, “More and more client requests are project-specific rather than a campaign. While the content still needs to be delivered across all channels, it has a short-shelf life and smaller budget. The pace from start to finish is accelerated. With our expanded EditShare installation, we have a content factory workflow that gives our clients a first-class post-production experience meeting both their tight timeline and budget requirements.” 

The addition of EditShare’s remote media management solution, AirFLOW, to the workflow allowed 3P to offer a “content warehouse” service to its clients. Clients can log in from anywhere, browse through content at their convenience, review work-in-progress and submit project changes. The service removes the burden of clients needing to maintain their own drives or storage servers as all content is stored on the EFS storage platform, maintained by 3P. It also enabled remote collaboration, which was key during the pandemic restrictions.

McDonald notes of the growth, “Our business has reached a point where we need to utilize advanced tools to refine our service offering and delivery. EditShare workflow solutions and creative tools like Adobe have enabled us to make those advancements across our business and deliver a superior level of service.” 

Setting a Great Example
As a woman-run and owned post facility, Haley is in a very rare category. “I am very proud to be a female post house owner and can definitely say there is room for more of us to take the lead! Running my own shop has given me the opportunity to work with female directors, producers and operators and I take great pleasure in collaborating with them in my studio. In addition, I also have the support of a fantastic group of young men who are sound designers, VFX artists, animators and videographers and I am very lucky to have them. I also have the support of loyal clients that have been with me since I started and most of my work comes from word of mouth which is nice.” As for EditShare, we are very proud to be a part of this success story.

University of Hertfordshire, puts EditShare Solutions at the Core of Its Nationally Ranked Curriculum

Key Highlights

Enterprise Ready – IT-friendly and ultra-secure EditShare FLOW and EFS formed the media foundation to support the university’s two media labs consisting of 80 workstations as well as up to 400 Film and TV students who needed to access content remotely. 

Openness – Seamless integration with real-world tools Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid, Baselight, and Final Cut Pro ensured smooth project workflow and student collaboration. 

Future Proof – EditShare remote workflows supported critical remote production and review approvals, metadata entry, enabling students and teachers to do their coursework on campus and off.  

Automation – FLOW automation provided key efficiencies, including, managing the conversions of delivery formats for student project submissions. The consistency ensured access as well as managed storage volumes.

Competitive Proposal – EditShare’s competitive bid and robust offering stood out from the competition.

Background
Located in the picturesque Hertfordshire countryside in England, the University of Hertfordshire has a robust film and TV program with some 400 students. In 2018, the institution achieved the TEF gold rating by the UK government, the highest standard, for its teaching excellence framework. Thanks to its high-quality vocational content, graduates are ready for real-world careers upon entering the creative market.

The popular film and TV program recalibrates its curriculum every 5 years to ensure students are taught the latest techniques using modern filmmaking and video production technology. Just ahead of the COVID-19 shutdown, the university began its anniversary validation, selecting EditShare which supported multiple production and post-production workflows taught at the school, including remote-working workflows. Little did they know what lay ahead and how that investment in the future would enable them to keep the creativity flowing during a global pandemic.  

Widening the Opportunities to Learn
Principal lecturer, with a body of work that includes major motion pictures, Howard Berry brings a wealth of experience to the classroom. An Avid Certified Instructor, Apple Certified Master Trainer, and Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve Certified Trainer, Howard is also a savvy technologist who led the campus wide upgrade which coincided with the university’s course re-validation. Berry explains, “When we began the validation exercise, we had three different pathways that students could take: film and TV, documentary, film and TV fiction, and film and TV entertainment. People move from genre to genre, so we revised and consolidated to a unified film and TV production with a heavy emphasis on post-production. The new path would cover the range of productions as well as picture editing, color grading, visual effects, effects and, most importantly, the workflow side of things, giving students a more well-rounded education.” With the various productions consolidated into one track, Berry selected the EditShare EFS and FLOW solution to support the multiple workflows and various post-production tools used throughout the course. The open platform supported the university’s strategy for an integrated workflow that mapped back to real-world productions and provided a central shared storage platform to safely house content and easily manage student permissions from an administration module designed for educators.

Efficiency Through Automation
FLOW automation is key to streamlining the film and TV Program’s submission process. Berry explains the efficiency it has brought to the process, “FLOW hosts folders for all the student assignments. When they submit their QuickTime and finished version files to the EditShare system, FLOW automation scans the file and moves them into a folder only the lecturers can see. If the file is not in the right format, it will be scanned and transcoded. It also timestamps the submissions, so we know that the coursework was submitted on time.” Berry adds, “Some of the coursework is actual paperwork which is supposed to be submitted via the web portal, but students often hedge their bets and send it everything through FLOW, and FLOW automatically filters their PDFs into another folder. It’s a fantastic system where we can see all the relevant submitted files all the time. And it runs in a web browser, making it even easier for me to manage and share with my colleagues.”

Flip to Remote Production Overnight
The EditShare installation had been done just ahead of the pandemic, which enabled the film and TV department to continue its coursework after the world shut down. Key to the success of the remote production was EditShare’s FLOW, AirFLOW and FLOWStory. FLOW media management provided the media management foundation with AirFLOW and FLOWStory providing cloud-based editing, review and approval. Berry explains just how important these features became during the pandemic. “Without FLOWStory, the only option was to have students come into the university lab to work on their edits. During a pandemic the thought of having to go this route was not an option and our labs were closed for half of the year. FLOWStory was a light install that ran on Windows and Mac and would allow the students to edit from anywhere. It was perfect.” Berry adds, “As the students dived deeper into the application, they discovered that it could do 4k multi-camera editing and export the EDL directly into an NLE. And of course, AirFLOW gave us the important remote review and approval capabilities. Just incredible that we could slip into remote working so quickly. Weekly edit reviews, where staff and students would usually have to gather together, became easy with AirFLOW remote viewing and review markers added to the timeline with notes that the students could instantly see and act upon.” 

It’s All About Flexibility
For Berry, production has typically been rigid with required specifications and hardware.  With EditShare, the restrictions of connecting with other systems and geographic boundaries have been lifted. It allowed them to be adaptable to extremes. One degree project this year, “My Hundred Brothers and Sisters”, has involved students at a partner film school in Poland filming on behalf of Hertfordshire students who couldn’t travel abroad. The footage was sent from Poland over the internet, and the editor of the project was able to save it directly onto their dedicated 2TB EditShare space – instantly making it available to the director to review, the assistant editor to log and add metadata, and for transcripts to be prepared before the cut. The whole team could see the footage remotely any time they wanted to access it. Berry concludes, “We have many students who cannot return to campus because of the pandemic for one reason or another and they are still doing the coursework, they are still doing the training, and they are still able to learn because we are using EditShare. It’s an amazing gift of being able to do what we want and in any kind of way that we want to deliver it now. And I am very grateful.”

EditShare Solutions

FLOW media management provides a control layer for managing millions of assets as well as tools for ingest/log, browse, automate, and distribute
AirFLOW facilitates remote production including review and approval workflows
FLOW Story editor supports remote storyboarding and remote editing 
EFS provides media engineered shared storage 

Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston saw shared storage and collaborative working as the future of post-production ten years ago. Today, they’re convinced that their future is in the cloud.

Massachusetts College of Art and Design – usually known simply as MassArt – is a forward-looking visual and applied arts college in Boston. Founded in 1873, it’s the nation’s oldest art school, and the only publicly funded arts college in the United States. The college first installed EditShare over ten years ago. More recently the disruption caused by COVID-19 has accelerated the school’s journey into the cloud.

MassArt combined their film and video departments in 2000 and with continued growth, the department has seventy to eighty students plus a number of graduate students in any given year.

Joe Briganti, is the Associate Director of Video in the Film/Video department at MassArt. He describes himself as an artist, video editor, and video producer: “essentially, I’m a video person”. A familiar face at the school since the early eighties, when he was a student himself, he joined the staff in 1989. Joe is tasked with developing a strategy that mimics real world production and post-production for his students. “It’s pretty intense, because we always want to be on the cutting edge.”

And, they have always been on the cutting edge. Their first digital editing system arrived in 1995 which was right at the start of the steep ascent of NLE editing.

Boston-based EditShare has a proud history of being involved in local arts and the editing community. Briganti was an advocate for shared storage and oversaw the arrival of the school’s first collaborative system in 2010, donated by EditShare. Until then, “sneaker net” was the default mode for data transfer. Students brought their own hard drives and often they didn’t work or wouldn’t mount.

The EditShare system also solved the significant problem that students often simply didn’t have enough storage. The new workflows made possible with the shared and collaborative storage confirmed Briganti’s own conclusion that storage itself is the key to post-production, and the fact that it was working so well over a network showed that this was not only a viable technology but a desirable one.

The new set-up, compared to the old way of doing things (essentially walking while holding a drive, which made it very hard for students to collaborate), was amazing.

Students were blown away when they saw you could start a project on one system and pick it up on another. It really changed the dynamics. It quickly became an essential part of our day to day operations.

Across the estate

The Film and Video faculty at MassArt is comparable to the scale of a large post-production house, with grading, editing, and audio suites all needing powerful computers. EditShare sits in the middle of these, connecting each of the systems.

Students can use Avid Media Composer, Premiere Pro, or their DAW (audio software) and fluidly share their project files. It’s an ideal set-up for teaching, with all the materials exactly where they’re needed so that staff can focus on teaching. And, students can concentrate on technique and craft, rather than resources.

For Briganti, the addition of shared storage with EditShare changed the whole dynamic.

“With EditShare you can put some material on the system and everybody can access it. Nobody has to wait for a presentation to load or have it hang. It’s just there. EditShare is an essential part of our operations. I couldn’t work without it now. It’s exciting for me because we’re a teaching school and a post-production house. It’s been very good with EditShare.”

EditShare FLOW arrives in 2020

The pandemic and the subsequent shutdown in March 2020 meant that many students continued their studies either in a hybrid or remote setting. At first the school turned to WeTransfer but Briganti said “it was an awful way to work with video – we needed to find a way for students to remotely access their video in our local EditShare drives.”

Students shooting in the college’s studios on campus are able to upload to EditShare locally. Utilizing the FLOW media management solution makes that same material available from the cloud so that when they’re at home, they can edit without returning to the college.

“Some of our students are shooting at very high resolutions like 4K and 6K. They definitely don’t have the storage at home for that size of file, so they upload it into our EditShare server here and as soon as they do that, it’s available to them from any location. FLOW and AirFLOW solves the two problems of storage and working remotely”, said Briganti. “And this way of working isn’t just for the pandemic: it’s going to be our standard way of working into the future”.

Moving to the cloud

Briganti liked EditShare’s approach to cloud migration. With a vast range of options, from EFSv, which is the whole system, virtualized in the cloud, to traditional local shared storage, he saw, as an educator, a huge opportunity. EditShare’s cloud technology could extend his courses to students – potentially anywhere in the world – who can’t make it into the classroom. “We’d love to connect to artists around the world: not everyone can afford to live in Boston!”.

The pandemic has altered the curriculum. Some students will not return to full-time in class learning they may do more of their work online. Some students find it easier to access the curriculum and the project-based work from home. More importantly, this applies whether you’re halfway around the world, or are a short distance away. “Thanks to FLOW, we now have the ability to bring a world class film and video education to everyone”.

An ideal workflow

Senior Ian Dumas working on his thesis project relied on EditShare’s hybrid workflow to achieve his vision. A big believer in community filmmaking, Ian collaborated with friends using a wide range of equipment to create the film. A hybrid between narrative and experiential, Ian’s film is a character study of a close friendship shot over several days and evenings. The narrative was shot in 6k and other visuals in 4k, resulting in 3 TB of content. Without access to EditShare, Ian would have had to significantly alter his project. “When you have technology at your disposal you should explore new ways to use it. So I wanted to shoot this film in 6k on a Blackmagic Cinema Pocket Camera I had access to. However, COVID threatened to significantly derail my project,” said Ian. “Without access to the shared storage, I couldn’t even open the files on my laptop. EditShare allowed me to approach the project exactly the way I wanted too. I was able to use AirFLOW to offload my high resolution media to the EFS storage at school and FLOW to create mp4 proxies for my laptop. This was huge as I was able to start storyboarding and editing at home with the high resolutions safe at school.”

Briganti loves this way of working, and so do the students. “Ian’s really diving into it. He’s going to see where it takes him. When he’s done with the edit, he’ll take it into a craft editor like Avid Media Composer or Premiere Pro using XML and then come into the college when it is safe to grade and conform. I think this is going to be the norm from now. It really is pretty cool!”

FLOW and EFS provide campus-wide cloud-based media management and open storage for renowned educational institution

Boston, MA – December 3, 2020 – EditShare®, a technology leader that specializes in collaboration, security, and intelligent storage solutions, today announced that the UK’s National Film and Television School (NFTS) is standardizing its post-production, content delivery, and storage operations on EditShare’s EFS open shared storage solution and FLOW media management platform. By replacing its aging shared-storage platform with a mix of on-premise and cloud-based technologies, the prestigious NFTS, one of the world’s leading film, television and games schools, will increase productivity and more efficiently manage and share the content being created by staff and students.

Founded in 1971, and based at Beaconsfield Studios in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England, the School offers more than 30 post-graduate level courses across the film, television and gaming disciplines, including camera operations, directing, cinematography, sound, script supervision, and production accounting. The school realized it needed to update its current system, while implementing open, logical, and automated methods of file and project management.

NFTS has always taken pride in its earlier reputation as a “slightly anarchical” community of filmmakers, but just as that culture over time settled into a more organized and formalized environment, its technology and production infrastructures needed to follow suit, according to Doug Shannon, head of IT for NFTS.

“When I began here, there was no network,” said Shannon, who brought a professional background in post-production when he joined the School 20 years ago. “Everyone simply passed hard drives around by hand. We needed greater consistency and a more open production environment. Initially we moved to simple, departmental servers. Then, five years ago, we first moved to dedicated shared editing storage, but that system had come to the end of its usable life, with the support contract becoming unsustainably costly. It was time to move on.”

In addition to continually enhancing productivity and efficiency, NFTS is focused on giving its students a diverse educational experience with hands-on access to the latest generation of production tools used by professionals today.

“We aim to emulate real life as much as possible,” Shannon said. “Our students come here already knowing what they want to do, so they work with teams of specialists, much like any professional environment. It’s less about technology and more about helping people work to achieve their best within each role.”

NFTS was looking for an open media management and storage foundation to easily allow the use of multiple creative editorial and finishing tools. The School will use EFS and FLOW to support a range of connected solutions for editing, grading, animation and more.

“Companies have realized they have to be open,” Shannon said. “The proprietary world is gone. For us, openness was both an assumption and a requirement.”

He added that the EFS and FLOW systems help production teams adapt quickly to the different camera systems NFTS uses from Arri, Sony, RED and Blackmagic. “For example, FLOW supports formats in a clever way and doesn’t have to break up RED files into blocks.”

Security and remote collaboration were also key factors, especially with the school and the rest of the world still in some phase of COVID-related lockdown. “We needed something to help us work beyond our physical boundaries and give us the ability to look at rushes when working remotely,” Shannon said, adding the virtualized version of FLOW and AirFLOW are the perfect match for the school’s fast-turnaround production and review cycles. EFS underpins the on-premise and remote production workflow with best practice security file tracking to answer who did what and when.

With the EFS system in place, total shared editing storage at NFTS has increased from 490TB to 2.2PB, more than enough to meet the School’s current and even future requirements.

“Our enrollment is quite small at 500 students per year and we don’t see those numbers growing exponentially, so it’s an easy equation,” he said. “Most of our workspaces are around 10TB and an average film is 5 to 10 TB, with around 120 films in production and post-production at any one time. Also, using the Ark storage software is the easiest way to back-up an entire project. EditShare gives us a complete media production workflow. Everything you need for a film is there.”

“EditShare has worked alongside universities since its inception and understands the unique and highly diverse needs of faculty and students and have purpose built, yet open, solutions that sustain the academic setting while mimicking a real-world situation,” states Robin Adams, vice president EMEA sales, EditShare. “This insight and crafted solution, paired with EditShare’s cloud innovation, will help teachers and students hurdle the unprecedented challenges this year has brought and continue to connect, teach, learn, and create amazing together.”

For more information on EditShare solutions, please visit the website at www.editshare.com

About the National Film and Television School (NFTS)

Variety’s Top UK Film School 2020 and recipient of the 2018 Outstanding Contribution to British Cinema BAFTA, the NFTS is one of the world’s leading film, games and television schools. NFTS alumni have gone on to win 13Oscars and 145 BAFTAs with graduates including: double Oscar winning cinematographer Roger Deakins (1917) creator of global Netflix hit Sex Education Laurie Nunn and BAFTA winning director, Lynne Ramsay (You Were Never Really Here). The NFTS is a registered charity (313429). For more information see nfts.co.uk

About EditShare

EditShare is a technology leader in networked shared storage and smart workflow solutions for the production, post-production, new media, sports, and education markets. Whether you need on-prem, cloud, or hybrid solutions, our products improve efficiency and workflow collaboration every step of the way. They include media optimized high-performance shared storage, archiving and backup software, a suite of media management tools and a robust set of open APIs that enable integration throughout the workflow. Customer and partner success are at the heart of EditShare’s core values ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none.

©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

What I love about working with film production crews and teaching a film class are the highly collaborative relationships formed while working towards a common goal. The interactions between students and their professor when working on a major project are just as “passionate” as the discussions between the director and cinematographer when discussing the art of the shot.

I have been fortunate to experience this collaboration from multiple perspectives, having spent more than a decade working in post-production on documentary and non-fiction projects for television and theatrical release. And I continue to work in this field designing collaborative workflows for filmmakers and facilities as a senior sales engineer with EditShare in Los Angeles, CA. I also teach giant screen (IMAX) film production to the next generation of filmmakers at the USC School of Cinematic Arts – my alma mater.

Teaching Students Across the Street and Halfway Around the World

The collaborative relationship between teacher and film student is a core element of film school. From my perspective as a professor, the pandemic has created unique problems – students and teachers are struggling to collaborate across time zones and geographies. They are also experiencing difficulties accessing materials and resources. This impacts the ability to teach, access to real-world experiences and more importantly, the students’ ability to learn.

As we start the Fall 2020 school year, my students live as near as across the street to as far as across an ocean from our classroom. My colleagues and I are finding that many US-based students are staying local to their hometowns, and the overwhelming majority of international students are unable to return back to campus at all. With students spread around the world, some in countries with online access restrictions, we have extreme time zone differences that add another hurdle to collaborating in real time.

While sometimes the course work is independent, filmmaking, especially for juniors, seniors and grad students is a highly collaborative course of study with teams of students working day and night to create their projects. Compounding the challenges of connecting and collaborating is the lack of access to real-world experiences. 

Opportunities for students to gain hands on experience have taken a major hit. In April through June of this year, production nearly evaporated. Dropping 98%, only 194 shoot days were recorded in Los Angeles vs. the 8,632 shoot days recorded during the same period in 2019. It was the lowest filming level on record. Of the few internships still available, most are remote, denying students both real-world experience and industry relationships they will need to succeed.

Then there is access to the material that we teach in class. Some of the media we rely on to convey the concepts of our lessons is not readily available via Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime, yet it’s an important component to the core curriculum.

So, as educators, how do we enable creative collaboration that exposes our students to real-world production, including access to the materials they need – when they are attending class from across the street to half-way around the world?

Options for Collaboration, Access, and Continuity

This is where I’m proud to be part of a company that has a solution for educators who are facing this problem.

For more than a decade, EditShare has been actively used in higher educational settings all over the world. It has given thousands of students real-world experiences in filmmaking, journalism, sports, and production. Its project sharing features let teachers collaborate on a deeper level with students, while useful admin tools and SSO integration manage hundreds of student profiles from a single dashboard with ease. And with the release of EFSv, our cloud-based solution, EditShare can virtualize an entire education focused post-production environment, allowing students to upload and share their raw or proxy media and collaboratively edit directly from the cloud, collapsing the distance that may be separating students from their peers and teachers.

EditShare’s cloud-based EFSv solution, which is runs in cloud infrastructures such as AWS, Google Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and other public cloud environments, enables instructors to securely store and share raw or proxy media in the cloud, providing students seamless access to footage from their team’s project, regardless of where in the world each student may be.

Where EditShare cloud-based solutions really help education is through its remote editing capabilities. It supports all industry NLEs, so no matter the toolset a student has access to, they can participate in any project. Everything, including project sharing, editing, and bin locking, is virtualized. As a teacher, I can easily spin up an entire virtual classroom in moments, with all the computing power needed to complete real-world projects in the cloud.

EFSv solutions also optimize the cost of editing in the cloud. EFSv puts high-resolution files into cost-effective object storage but makes those files appear as if they are on a normal mounted block storage file system. At the same time, EFSv provides the scalable high-performance block storage needed for low-latency access to proxy files and renders.  Proxies are generated by our FLOW media management system. Both high-resolution and proxy versions are accessible at all times, streamlining the editing workflow while minimizing costs.

For institutions that do not want to put everything into the cloud – EditShare’s FLOW and AirFLOW media management applications enable students and instructors to securely access the university’s private on-premise storage. Students can log-in, access course materials, including films they need to review as well as share their own projects. Teachers can use FLOW to review student work and provide feedback on the next steps.

Many hybrid cloud + on premise workflows are also available. Most popular is storing raw footage locally on campus and sharing proxy media through the cloud.

Making Lectures Accessible…Globally

Another new challenge with distance learning has been teaching via video conference, and institutional mandates to record our classes for asynchronous learning or other requirements. This is a great idea, but as anyone who has actually watched a recording of their class will know, there’s plenty of class time taken up with minor admin – like attendance, 1:1 conversations with students and even some technical issues that don’t need to be or shouldn’t be replayed publicly.  This is where FLOW’s integration with Zoom has become extremely useful. FLOW is now able to automatically download all angles of a class recording, including the shared desktop, plus it downloads the AI speech to text transcription as markers on your video. Now instructors can quickly edit out any material that’s not germain to the lesson either with FLOW Story or with the NLE of their choice. We can even cut our recordings down into pod size modules making it easy for our students to find specific sections or topics they wish to review. 

It’s All About Being Flexible

There is light at the end of the tunnel. Productions will return, many already have, and we’ll get to collaborate in person once again. But many of the new habits we’ve adopted during this pandemic might be to be so efficient that in many ways, there is no going back to how it once was.

Either way, EditShare has the flexibility to offer the classroom of the future—whatever that will look like–the capabilities it will need.

Part 2 of a 5 Part Series introducing EditShare’s FLOW Asset Management and Remote Video Collaboration.

AirFLOW brings all the media sharing capabilities of the FLOW production MAM to secure multi-team multi-location productions. Its simple and intuitive web-based interface lets collaborators located anywhere in the world search, log, organize and play media content; and also upload and download content directly to and from EditShare central storage systems. Producers on the go can keep an eye on projects and view rough cuts and fine cuts on a device of their choice whether it’s a laptop, tablet or smartphone, making it easier than ever to work with talent located anywhere in the world. Reviewer comments, which are written to the FLOW database in real-time, can be timecode-tagged, giving editors back at home base concrete creative direction. Organizations with multiple facilities can search for and exchange material from any of their sites. And thanks to easily customizable metadata templates, AirFLOW can be deployed to support diverse workflows such as review and approval, outsourced transcriptions, marketing archival material for sale to third parties, and proxy editing with relinking to high-resolution files.

Key features:

Platform independent, no client software installation required, simple and intuitive user interface
Browse, search and organize content in media spaces, projects, folders and sequences
Load custom metadata templates and view and enter clip metadata
Download proxies and/or high-resolution files individually or in batch through web browser
Edit remotely using downloaded AirFLOW proxies locally in NLE, then relinking to high-resolution media onsite