EditShare Unveiled AirFlow Private Cloud

EditShare LLC is unveiling its latest AirFlow ‘private cloud’ remote workflow solutions.

Now included with every company’s storage system as part of the integrated Flow MAM toolset, and available for integration with qualified third-party storage products such as Avid Technology, Inc.‘s ISIS 5500, AirFlow empowers organizations to provide secure remote access to outside collaborators right from their own production centers.

With AirFlow ‘private cloud,’ collaborators anywhere in the world can use a standard web browser to play, log, search and organize media content, and upload and download content directly to and from central storage systems. Executive producers on the go can keep an eye on projects and view rough cuts and fine cuts on a tablet or smart phone. Producers can hire and collaborate with the best editor for a job, even if that person is located half a world away. 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.

“When customers say they want cloud capabilities, what most of them mean is they want to open up their production workflows and assets to people outside their facility,” comments Jeff Herzog, manager, Flow product, EditShare. “With AirFlow, there’s no need to pay for extra cloud services and no need to waste valuable time uploading content to an outside location such as Amazon or Google. Just enable AirFlow on your server, open up a port on your firewall, and instantly the outside world can connect to you. No complicated IT intervention required.“

From the perspective of David Merzenic, sales manager, MoovIT GmbH, premiere system integrator in Germany, AirFlow integration with EditShare storage is having a huge impact on the efficiency and flexibility of customer projects. “

We have a production company that is shooting a big reality TV series today on an island off the coast of Central America, and the editors working on the project are actually sitting in their edit suites 4,000 miles away in Germany,” he explains.

High-resolution material is captured directly into a 196TB company’s storage system located on the island, and Flow makes lightweight proxy files that are stored there as well. Every day the editors use AirFlow to browse the latest content. For any material they want to edit, they download low-resolution proxies across the Internet. The proxies are small, and even with an average Internet connection and dozens of hours of clips, the transfer is quite rapid.

“The editors import the proxies into Avid Media Composer and assemble scenes and complete programs,” adds Merzenich. “When the shooting is over, the high-resolution storage will be flown back to Germany and the Avid sequences will be relinked to the high-resolution material, saving up to 50% on the usual post-production time. It’s a workflow we have tested extensively, and the amazing thing is that AirFlow supports this same kind of workflow, not only with Avid but also with other editing applications such as Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro.“