Waterfront Studios Deployed EditShare 18TB Storage System

Based in South Africa, EditShare LLC, in cross platform collaborative editing and shared media storage, announced that Cape Town-based Waterfront Studios has deployed an EditShare 18TB storage system to facilitate production workflows across its various operational units. Waterfront Studios provides front-end services and high-end post production as well as studio support to local and international customers. With project demands on the rise, Waterfront wanted to streamline operations while fostering the creative process. Reseller Shoal Creek Investments provided the solution with EditShare’s Complete Collaborative workflow.

“The Waterfront Studios installation is a terrific example of EditShare’s cross-platform,high performance capabilities,” says Tara Montford, General Manager, Editshare EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). ”Multiple Avid systems on both Macs and PCs are online along with several Apple Final Cut systems. EditShare provides a truly open and safe media sharing environment for creative teams, regardless of application or platform.EditShare is very simple to use. Editors just go about their normal business; and for administrators the system is quite easy to manage.”

The Waterfront editing facilities are principally used for feature film off-line work and on-line editing of drama-series that are being produced in the studio complex. Typically, 8 to 10 editors are working concurrently on the EditShare system. There are 8 Avid MC V3 and 3 Apple Final Cut Pro units connected via 1 Gigabit connections to the distribution switch which has a 10 Gigabit connection to the EditShare server. There’s also an iSCSI connection from the EditShare to 3 Digidesign Pro Tools HD systems which streamlines audio production workflows.

“EditShare really improved our workflows; with our old system, we had network connectivity but file sharing was very limited and not true media sharing. And there was no way to do any project sharing, and that’s really a key factor in all our work,” says Mike Smit, Managing Director of Waterfront Studios. “EditShare’s project sharing capabilities within either an Avid or Final Cut environment really made a difference for us. The fact that we could operate EditShare with high reliability on our existing Gigabit infrastructure was another plus. We also appreciate that with the scalable architecture, we can grow the system over time to adjust to the demand.”

Complete Collaboration
with the Industry’s Best Media Sharing Workflow
Combined with EditShare’s 5th generation administration, monitoring, and workflow tools, EditShare provides industry-leading performance and an open environment for creative teams to share media regardless of application and platform. Users of Apple, Adobe, Assimilate, Autodesk, Avid, Digidesign, Sony, Thomson and more can connect via Gigabit or 10-gigabit Ethernet and freely share media regardless of size or format. EditShare provides true project and media sharing for Apple and Avid users with user management tools that are designed specifically for real-time collaboration in post and broadcast workflows.

EditShare’s Complete Collaboration products are fully integrated and support shared workflows from ingest through production and archiving. Flow Ingest captures up to four channels of media and associated metadata, storing each channel in up to three formats simultaneously and outputting a proxy for fast retrieval. No background transcoding is required. Flow Browse completes the media organization process by simplifying media cataloguing and accelerating the search and retrieval of material within the EditShare shared storage environments. From any PC, users can quickly locate media among hundreds of thousands of clips on the EditShare media spaces. Flow Browse provides advanced functionality for assembling and annotating media outside the non-linear editing application. From Flow Browse, users can update metadata, log clips, can drag and drop media to Avid and FCP bins before the user begins editing. Complementing the EditShare Storage Series is the EditShare XStream Series which is specifically designed to support high demand and high volume situations, including huge numbers of SD and compressed HD video streams, or multiple streams of uncompressed HD or 2K video. EditShare ARK provides a range of options for back-up, mirroring and archiving.