EditShare and Blackbird Partnership Expands Cloud Video Editing Workflows
Boston, U.S. and London, UK – November 10, 2020 –EditShare and Blackbird have joined forces to give media professionals more options when it comes to collaborating and editing video in the cloud. The integrated solution combines EditShare’s EFS scalable storage, FLOW media management, and open APIs with Blackbird’s cloud video editing and publishing platform. Optimized for both speed and mobility, Blackbird and EditShare connect users into the wider media ecosystem, making content of all types located across storage pools accessible in the proper formats for rapid editing and delivery to multiple platforms and channels.
EditShare CEO Conrad Clemson comments: “Cloud-based remote collaboration is no longer merely a “nice to have” but a necessity. Video production teams have rapidly pivoted their workflows to take advantage of the cloud’s scalability, flexibility and mobility. The combination of Blackbird and EditShare delivers added value to customers wanting to incorporate quick turnaround editing into a greater production workflow.”
Blackbird CEO Ian McDonough said: “Our exciting new partnership with EditShare is a great example of industry specialists building interoperable end to end solutions. Media assets stored and managed by EditShare solutions can now be accessed directly through Blackbird’s browser interface where they can be professionally edited and passed back or published.”
The companies will demonstrate their joint solution on Wednesday, 18th November at 9AM and 3PM ET. To register for the webinar please visit:
FLOW is EditShare’s media orchestration layer, with enterprise strength media management and automation. Built on a vertically integrated technology stack, it allows editors access to their media, wherever it is, and in any format. Fully proven in high pressure production environments, FLOW’s open APIs and media-engineered core make it ideal for fast and close integration with other great products.
EFS scalable storage enables media organizations to build extensive collaborative workflows on premise, in the cloud, or in hybrid installations, shielding creative personnel from the underlying technical complexity while equipping administrators and technicians with a comprehensive set of storage management tools. For Blackbird editors, EFS is a fast and flexible collaborative shared video storage solution with best-in-class project sharing.
About Blackbird
Blackbird is a professional grade video editor that functions in a browser even with a low bandwidth connection. It delivers unbeatable speed, scalability and richness of editing features. The Cloud-native platform allows users to rapidly go to market with their content, bringing massive efficiencies across all organizations.
About Blackbird plc
Blackbird operates in the fast-growing SaaS and cloud video market and has created the world’s most advanced suite of cloud-native computing applications for video, all underpinned by its lightning-fast codec. Blackbird’s patented technology allows for frame accurate navigation, playback, viewing and editing in the cloud. Blackbird underpins multiple applications, which are used by rights holders, broadcasters, sports and news video specialists, esports, live events and content owners, post-production houses, other mass market digital video channels and corporations.
Since it is cloud-native, Blackbird removes the need for costly, high end workstations and can be used from almost anywhere on almost any device. It also allows full visibility on multi-location digital content, improves time to market for live content such as video clips and highlights for social media distribution, and ultimately results in much more effective monetisation.
Blackbird® is a registered trademark of Blackbird plc. www.blackbird.video
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
Integrated FLOW Panel provides DaVinci Resolve Studio users access to storage pools and archives with tools to search, browse, and retrieve assets; facilitates exceptional remote proxy editing as well as review and approval workflows
Boston, MA – November 9, 2020 – EditShare®, a technology leader that specializes in collaboration, security, and intelligent storage solutions for media creation and management, today announced its FLOW Panel for DaVinci Resolve Studio, connecting thousands of users into the wider media ecosystem. Designed to simplify storytelling, FLOW manages media assets and workflows across on-premise and cloud-based tiered storage environments. The integrated FLOW panel, which was developed with FLOW’s open API, provides DaVinci Resolve users a media gateway to assets and associated metadata. Easy-to-use production tools facilitate advanced remote workflows including seamless proxy editing and review and approvals.
“Our collective customers need freedom and flexibility when it comes to the tools they work with and the same applies to the workflows they need to run their production and business. EditShare and Blackmagic Design have a common goal of aligning customer needs at the forefront of our development and delivering innovative technology to enable the very best storytelling experience,” comments Sunil Mudholkar, vice president of Product Management, EditShare. “Many of our customers rely on DaVinci Resolve’s incredible creative toolset day in day out. With the new FLOW panel, our collective customers now have a seamless and secure interface to all the production assets from ingest to delivery, with smart tools that enable them to find content easily and work collaboratively with other team members, regardless of location.”
New FLOW Panel located within the DaVinci Resolve 17 UI
The FLOW Panel for DaVinci Resolve Studio lets editors, colorists, VFX artists and sound mixers move beyond their locally connected storage and search, browse, and access proxy and high resolutions versions of video and audio assets across multiple storage pools and archives. FLOW’s fast production tools can be used to quickly organize assets into folders and cuts-only sequences. With one click, users can import assets into DaVinci Resolve Studio, including clips, sub clips, and sequence markers. FLOW delivers the rich metadata and content directly into the DaVinci Resolve Studio bin and onto the timeline. Users can also upload assets from DaVinci Resolve Studio back into FLOW with one click, facilitating review and approval across the operation.
“EditShare’s focus on developing open platforms and remote collaboration workflows is helping production and post-production businesses adapt to new remote business models in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond,” said Jacob Groshek, PhD, research manager, Digital Experience Management for IDC. “They are continuing to evaluate the content supply chain and seek out innovative ways to enhance the user experience that help optimize the return on investment for customers.”
Support for Remote Proxy Editing Ideal for working in any remote scenario, the FLOW Panel for DaVinci Resolve Studio lets users edit with proxies – whether downloaded, streamed over a VPN, or played from central shared storage. This nimble proxy workflow benefits from the lightweight characteristics of highly efficient codecs like H.264/MP4. FLOW generates the proxies and tracks the relationship between high and low-resolution files. A menu toggle in DaVinci Resolve Studio lets users switch seamlessly between original and proxy versions, allowing them to check the original shots any time during editing. With both sets of files always available and accessible to DaVinci Resolve Studio, color grading, effect creation and conforming are greatly streamlined.
The FLOW Panel for DaVinci Resolve Studio will be generally available with FLOW 2021.
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
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.
