Wildsound Studios was founded in 2003 and quickly established itself as the leader in sound engineering in the Philippines. With an eye on the regional and global markets, company owners Mike Idioma and Tony Tuviera built a company whose foundations lie in the practice of international standards, a focus on the skills and talent of its staff and in keeping pace with technological advancements in the industry.
Today, it is the country’s only Dolby Atmos certified mixing studio for theatrical and home entertainment systems and has expanded into a complete, one-stop post production house for both audio and video, consisting of:
7 audio studios, consisting of: 3 ADR suites, 1 Dolby Atmos cinema mixing stage and Dolby HE suite (undergoing certification), 1 foley suite.
3 color grading suites with one equipped with a cinema projector to complete the cinematic experience on 7.1 system
1 for digital cinema (DCP) mastering and replication suite
4 offline video editing suites
Growing Pains
Anyone involved in post production understands the challenges that come from having to manage the large amounts of data associated with every project. Wildsound Studios is no exception. In fact, most of their projects are long form feature films or multi-episode TV or streaming content, many shot in 4k or higher, so data management challenges are ever-present!
Introducing a generic IT NAS (Network Attached Storage) helped alleviate some of these challenges, forming a centralised storage repository from which producers, editors, audio engineers and colorists could copy media to and from. It helped but it was far from an ideal solution.
Wildsound Studios began searching for a solution that could provide better security for the clients data. They were also looking at ways to improve their workflow, both in terms of speed and efficiency.
And when Covid-19 restrictions began to take effect and staff had minimal access to the facility, the need to access media and work remotely from home became of utmost importance.
Finding the right solution
Mike Idioma and his team set about to look for a solution that could overcome the challenges they were facing. They were looking for a storage and media management system that was affordable to start with but could scale up with the business demands as they grow.
Their research led them to EditShare and to us, The Media Village, EditShare’s reseller for Singapore and the Philippines. After much discussion and a thorough assessment of the requirements, the EFS 200 48TB was deemed to be the right solution and at the right budget.
EditShare EFS200, slotting into the existing infrastructure
EFS200 is the entry-level scale-out shared storage that delivers the benefits of EditShare File System in a size that meets the capacity and budget requirements of boutique collaboration teams and smaller media facilities. With its simple building-block approach, scaling capacity and bandwidth as the needs of the organisation grow is as easy as plugging in additional storage nodes.
All EFS storage systems include FLOW, a media management platform that supports and manages all types of media content, whether located on premise, in the cloud or as a hybrid implementation.
At Wildsound Studios, FLOW manages media residing on the EditShare EFS200 storage as well as the NAS; and it is ready to manage cloud based storage such as AWS should that be added in the future.
FLOW handles all media by indexing every file, centralizing them and enabling easy access through a simple, efficient UI. Access to media may be on premise or remotely, opening up the possibilities to develop remote workflows.
Sharing the experience
“The ability for our editors, colorists and audio engineers to work directly off a common pool of shared storage has simplified our workflow and made us more efficient and flexible,” remarked Mike Idioma. “We’re not moving hard drives around and spending time making duplicate copies of media anymore.”
“The ability to assign specific users to a MediaSpace and to determine the level of access that each user has to that MediaSpace helps to ensure the privacy of each client’s session. Together with EditShare’s Auditing feature, I have a greater peace of mind!”
Mike Idioma
Auditing is a crucial part of the EFS technology stack. Real-time analytics reveal every nuance of each valuable content’s journey, in real time. There is complete accountability over who did what, when, to which files and directories which is compliant with industry standards and security guidelines.
Looking ahead
“Every production presents its own set of unique challenges,” says Mike Idioma. “With EFS and FLOW, we have a set of tools that we can use to help address some of them.”
For more information about Wildsound Studios, visit https://www.wildsoundph.com/ I’d like to know more about EditShare