EditShare Achieves AWS Media & Entertainment Competency Status
EditShare adds to AWS expertise after recently joining the AWS ISV Accelerate program
Boston, MA – August 24, 2023– EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, continues to demonstrate the strength of its offering in cloud and hybrid solutions, with large numbers of successful client systems in use. This continuing success has led EditShare to achieve Amazon Web Service (AWS) Media & Entertainment Competency status.
EditShare joined the AWS Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Accelerate Program a year ago, which affirmed its success in delivering practical cloud storage solutions. Achieving AWS Media & Entertainment Competency status further solidifies that the company follows architectural and operational best practices, is being actively used by customers in product environments, and customers advocate for the solution.
“This is another great accolade for our technical and applications teams,” said Stephen Tallamy, CTO of EditShare. “What it tells potential users is that we will deliver a solution that meets their operational requirements, makes optimal use of the cloud environment, and will be secure and resilient. With EditShare FLEX, our award-winning cloud technology, has reached a new level of maturity and adoption of media workflows that unlock the benefits of AWS services and applications tailored for media professionals,” Tallamy continued. “Post houses, production companies, broadcasters and creative agencies have realized that, by combining on premises and cloud technology, they can deliver real value to their clients and into their programs, while achieving operational savings through remote working and distributed workflows.
“This additional recognition from AWS means we are at the cutting edge of cloud and hybrid systems architecture. We look forward to continued growth in delivered systems around the world, and an ever-strengthening bond with our colleagues and peers at AWS,” said Tallamy.
The AWS Media & Entertainment Competency designation is the way to differentiate AWS Partners that have engineered their solutions and demonstrated the ability to deploy and operationalize these solutions repeatedly, at scale. Finally, and most importantly, they have a list of customers that have successfully deployed the solution on AWS.
AWS is enabling scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions from startups to global enterprises. To support the seamless integration and deployment of these solutions, AWS established the AWS Competency Program to help customers identify AWS Partners with deep industry experience and expertise.
EditShare will be showcasing it’s FLEX Cloud Solutions at the upcoming IBC Exhibition in Amsterdam, Hall 7, Booth A35 and also on the AWS booth Hall 5, Booth C90.
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.
Boston, MA – April 28, 2021 –EditShare®, a technology leader that specializes in collaboration, security, and intelligent storage solutions announced support for theAWS for Media & Entertainment initiative from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to transform content production, editing and archive workflows.
AWS for Media & Entertainment is an initiative featuring new and existing services and solutions from AWS and AWS Partners, built specifically for content creators, rights holders, producers, broadcasters, and distributors. AWS adds the newly announced Amazon Nimble Studio, a service that enables customers to set up creative studios in hours instead of weeks, to a portfolio of more purpose-built media and entertainment industry services than any other cloud, including AWS Elemental MediaPackage, AWS Elemental MediaConnect, AWS Elemental MediaLive, AWS Elemental MediaConvert, and Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS). AWS for Media & Entertainment also simplifies the process of building, deploying, and reinventing mission-critical industry workloads by aligning AWS and AWS Partner capabilities against five solution areas: Content Production; Media Supply Chain & Archive; Broadcast; Direct-to-Consumer & Streaming; and Data Science & Analytics.
Today’s content producers and owners want friction-free collaboration from anywhere in the world using the creative tools they know and love. Running on AWS, EditShare’s EFSv media optimized platform is designed to allow teams the opportunity to migrate their production environments to AWS using all their familiar production tools, such as Adobe® Premiere® Pro and DaVinci Resolve. Underpinned by EditShare’s FLOW media management technology, EFSv facilitates collaborative end-to-end editorial and archive workflows in the cloud. Robust APIs enable users to create advanced automated storage workflows or integrate additional systems to create entirely new workflows.
EditShare EFSv on AWS provides customers with choice. Whether that’s deploying full high-resolution video production workflows, or cost-effective proxy-based editing, EditShare allows customers to choose the environment that suits them and their budget.
“Content producers across a range of industries are increasingly engaged with us about remote workflows and production flexibility. These conversations are driven by the demands for agile work environments that allow editors to work from anywhere. The pandemic has only accelerated these discussions,” states Tom Rosenstein, VP of Business Development, EditShare. “Working with AWS extends the benefits of our EFS media optimized file system from its on-premises origins to now run in the cloud, bringing the same high performance with added operational efficiency. Customers only pay for what they need without having to pre-plan purchases or have systems sit idle.”
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.
Press Contact Cat Soroush Zazil Media Group (e) catherine@zazilmediagroup.com (p) +1 (631) 880-9534
Boston, MA – March 23, 2021 EditShare, a technology leader that specializes in collaboration, security, and intelligent storage solutions for media creation and management, announces support for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Media Intelligence (AWS MI) solutions, providing customers with the ability to maximize the value of their content through enhanced metadata and scalable production capabilities. EditShare FLOW, a media management platform, includes API integration with AWS Machine Learning (ML) services that allow the simple addition of robust media capabilities such as transcription, translation and video analysis right into the production pipeline.
AWS MI solutions are a combination of AWS AI-powered services that empowers customers to easily integrate AI into their media content workflows.
The EditShare EFSv and FLOW platforms provide a cloud-based video production environment that supports industry-standard third-party creative tools for video editing and workflow management. These capabilities are now expanded to allow customers to quickly and easily leverage machine learning with the FLOW production asset manager. AWS services like Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Transcribe, and Amazon Translate allow EditShare users to increase the value of their content by unlocking what’s inside of it and making it discoverable. API integration with FLOW provides that environment to make content searchable, reusable and more valuable.
“Increasingly, our customers are pivoting from simple editorial and publishing workflows,” says Stephen Tallamy, CTO of EditShare. “They have significant investments in their video assets and they want to make their media discoverable, structured, and ready for telling their next story. The AWS Media Intelligence solution allows FLOW users to easily enrich their content and make it accessible during the production process and out through the archiving process.”
EditShare continues to build upon its innovation in cloud video production and its focus on building out an extensible, API rich, production environment. Our customers demand openness and flexibility, and EditShare is committed to continually meeting those expectations.
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.
Press Contact Cat Soroush Zazil Media Group (e) catherine@zazilmediagroup.com (p) +1 (631) 880-9534
October 28, 2020
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With fewer opportunities for in-person teamwork, collaborative, geographically-distributed media production workflows have quickly become a must have for traditional and nontraditional producers of video. In this webinar, AWS and EditShare will demonstrate how quickly and easily a cloud-based production studio can be spun up to connect teams all over the world. We will discuss the best practices in enabling cloud-based production with a focus on:
Scalable and cost-effective content production storage and media management on AWS
Balancing performance and capacity vs. cost
The ability to provide collaborative workflow environments with any mix of leading content tools
Open APIs for quick integration into media services and applications
See how easily an edit in the cloud environment can be provisioned and made operational in under an hour while hearing from AWS and EditShare technology leaders on best practices for production in the cloud.
** This webinar has passed. Please fill out the form to access the recording.
With fewer opportunities for in-person teamwork, collaborative, geographically-distributed media production workflows have quickly become a must have for traditional and nontraditional producers of video. In this webinar, AWS and EditShare will demonstrate how quickly and easily a cloud-based production studio can be spun up to connect teams all over the world. We will discuss the best practices in enabling cloud-based production with a focus on:
Scalable and cost-effective content production storage and media management on AWS
Balancing performance and capacity vs. cost
The ability to provide collaborative workflow environments with any mix of leading content tools
Open APIs for quick integration into media services and applications
See how easily an edit in the cloud environment can be provisioned and made operational in under an hour while hearing from AWS and EditShare technology leaders on best practices for production in the cloud.
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.
Matt Scott with his students at USC School of Cinematic Arts.
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.
Customers have long been asking for the ultimate in remote workflow flexibility. Whether that means hiring video editors from distant geographies or simply letting employees and contractors work from home, production houses no longer want to be tethered to their machines. COVID-19 has only accelerated this request. As a part of EFSv, we recently announced the capability to achieve true seamless proxy editing. This patent-pending feature enables the first cost-effective cloud editing infrastructure, overcoming one of the primary objections of migrating media workflows to the cloud.
Cloud editing economics –block storage vs object storage
Until today, the questionable economics of editing in the cloud has been one of the biggest objections to adoption. With EFSv seamless proxy editing, we have dramatically reduced the costs, making cloud editing economically viable for anyone. When we say dramatically better, we mean reductions in the region of 50-75% compared to current cloud editing infrastructure implementations.
When it comes to editing video in the cloud, assuming you plan to use standard applications such as Adobe® Premiere® Pro, Davinci Resolve, Media Composer®, ProTools® or Adobe® After Effects®, you need your shared cloud storage to appear as though it is just another drive attached to your workstation. That is to say, the storage needs to have a filesystem that supports all normal operations such as read, write, seek, modify, The filesystem also needs to use standard mechanisms to tell an application if your username or group has permission to read, write, and lock a file for exclusive use. To protect your media you also need file system auditing to see who is accessing files within your storage. And, of course, you need storage that’s fast enough to play back your media in real time. These are all features that can be realized easily in the cloud using block storage.
Unfortunately, block storage in the cloud is expensive. However, there is a lot of value that cloud providers are bringing on top of standard disk storage. Behind the scenes you are getting file protection and robust security for your data with high performance guarantees.
Being able to utilize object storage in the cloud (like AWS S3) would be much less expensive. However, out of the box, it doesn’t meet the requirements of media creation applications because it lacks the features needed to create a real filesystem and instead focuses on simplicity, scalability, and reliability. By limiting the features of object storage, cloud providers can offer significant cost savings. You only pay for the exact number of bytes you store, rather than reserving a whole block of storage that ends up only being partially used.
But what if you could make object storage appear as a standard filesystem so that you could enjoy the cost benefits and also get it to work with editing, mixing and visual effects applications? In fact, that’s part of what we have done with EFSv — making object storage look exactly like a normal file system, regardless of whether it’s connected to Windows, MacOS or Linux. But there’s still one more challenge to overcome that is specifically problematic for video and audio editing – latency.
Object storage is fine for throughput, and when you play a video from a streaming platform such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, or Disney+, you are almost certainly streaming the video from an object storage solution. These streaming platforms deal with latency (the time it takes to read the first byte of video) by having you wait a small amount of time to watch the first segment of video (you know, that little bit of buffering you see before the video plays) and then, because the videos are generally played linearly, it is always possible to keep ahead of the user, disguising the latency.
While this works for streaming services, such a solution is not acceptable for video and audio editing – by its very nature these are non-linear activities. When you edit video even a small amount of latency will impact your workflow as you attempt to read multiple video files simultaneously and jump quickly back and forth between different files on your timeline.
Current object storage trades latency for resilience and throughput. Indeed most object storage solutions not only have higher latency than is acceptable for video editing, they also have inconsistent latency. So the challenge is to find a way to blend object and block storage into a single filesystem in a manner that lets you have your cake and eat it too — in other words, get the cost savings of object storage but the low latency of block storage that’s needed for editing.
Fixing the headaches of proxy editing
EditShare isn’t the first company to come up with the idea of blending object and block storage. Since people first started editing in the cloud, a common approach to mixing the two types of storage and saving money has been to put high resolution original media into object storage, and then transcode everything to smaller, just good enough low-resolution proxy files for rough editing and store just those proxy files on the more expensive block storage. Because proxies are small, they don’t use up a lot of block storage — and so you save money. Then, at the end of a project, you restore from object storage back to block storage just the files that made it into the final cut and you “conform” your sequence back to high-quality originals.
Adobe UI accessing content via FLOW panel and toggling proxy with high res content
Unfortunately, this kind of proxy workflow is fraught with problems.
Just ask anyone who has ever had to proxy edit a project. First, there are inevitably shots that don’t look great in the proxy version, and it’s really frustrating to have to wait for the conform to find out a shot isn’t any good. Second, it’s impossible to create accurate effects that match colors when you are dealing with proxy files. Third, it’s no fun to have rough cut and fine cut screenings based on your proxies because these screenings will never give the best impression. Fourth, at the end of an edit, it takes time to copy high-resolution files back to block storage and if your project is coming down to the wire, every minute counts. And finally, there’s nothing worse than conforming an edit and getting a “media offline” or “nothing relinked” message when you attempt to relink back to the original.
It’s probably safe to say, no one loves the offline and conform workflow. While it is not a ‘broken’ system, it’s far from ideal. And it doesn’t even save as much money as it could, because at the end of the day you still have to copy at least some content back to expensive block storage.
A seamless proxy workflow designed for everyone
The EFSv seamless proxy editing feature solves all these problems. It is open — we have yet to find a NLE that it doesn’t work with — and fundamentally, it changes the economics of editing in the cloud.
EFSv lets you put your 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 can be generated by our FLOW media management system, or by your own tools. Both high-resolution and proxy versions are accessible at all times to your media creation application. And when you import clips into NLEs such as Premiere Pro using our new FLOW panel, the panel “teaches” the application about the existence and location of both high-resolution and proxy versions, so you can toggle back and forth between versions any time you want. While you won’t be able to play back your whole timeline from the object storage — mostly because of the latency — you can nonetheless view the original high-resolution clips at any time (including for color correction), and when it comes time to rendering your timeline for a screening or for the final deliverables, you just toggle to (or link back to) the originals and hit the render or export button. There’s never anything to copy or restore from object storage. Instead, you render directly from object storage — a process that is not slow, by the way. The momentary latency you get when first accessing a file and that can frustrate timeline playback won’t make any noticeable difference for rendering.
Our new system not only works with cloud workstations you connect to by advanced remote desktop software such as Teradici, but it also works spectacularly over a VPN — so if you want to keep working from home with the editing application running on your own workstation or laptop, this is also an option. You can get the same proxy/high-resolution toggling — and this even works with macOS-based workstations (something you cannot run in any cloud today). And if you need to download proxies instead of working with them “in place” from central storage, that’s supported too.
There’s a reason we refer to this as “true” seamless proxy editing — because it is truly seamless.
For creatives, the new system eliminates any compromises on quality or workflow, and for the people who look after the finances, the news is equally good. Better. Faster. Cheaper.
Cost savings – it’s BIG.
The savings you get with EFSv seamless proxy editing are tremendous. For example, you may have a media library of about 100 terabytes for a project — consisting of a little over 2,000 hours of original media assuming you’re using a 100 Mb/s codec. With traditional block storage , storing this content for editing would cost about $4,500/month. On top of this, you’ll require fairly powerful storage and workstation instances to handle the bandwidth of this high-resolution content. Suddenly, cloud-based editing may stretch outside of your budget. In fact, in many cases, your high-resolution codec will be of a higher bit-rate; for example many ProRes codecs exceed 500 Mb/s.
Seamless proxy editing resolves these issues. By taking down the content to a lower bit rate for editing we can reduce your block storage needs down to the 2-4 terabyte range, a factor of 25x or more. In this scenario, your total storage costs (object and block) will come down to something closer to $1400/month. And since we will be editing proxy files, less expensive compute instances can be used for storage management and NLE workstations. Your high-resolution files will continue to be stored in cheaper storage tiers, where they can be accessed instantly by the NLE with no additional workflow effort required. An added bonus – with your high-resolution files residing in object storage, you can easily take advantage of cloud-based AI tools such as automatic object recognition and audio transcription, and also share your files with partners who may be doing other work on the project.
EFSv with seamless proxy editing not only makes cloud editing affordable for the first time, it also creates the opportunity for new cloud-centric workflows to make your media projects more efficient. Learn more.
Part 5 of a 5 Part Series introducing EditShare’s FLOW Asset Management and Remote Video Collaboration.
Open platform with broad compatibility across creative tools for editing, audio mixing, and grading. Enables high-performance cloud video storage and collaborative editing. Virtualized in AWS, Tencent Cloud, and other public and private cloud environments. Simplified migration to the cloud with pre-configured and pre-tested EFSv solutions.
These turn-key configurations allow you to immediately adapt your workflows from traditional, on-premise environments to cloud-enabled remote workflows.
