London, UK-Based Picture Production Company First to Order EditShare XStream EFS 300

EditShare, LLC announced that elite film-marketing agency Picture Production Company (PPC) is the first facility to place an order for the brand new EditShare XStream EFS 300 single-node, scale-out storage platform.

Renowned for its creative work, PPC has locations in Soho, London and Los Angeles, CA, and produces trailers, television spots and online video for some of the world’s largest film studios. The full schedule keeps the two offices running 24 hours a day, working on multiple feature film campaigns at any given time.

“We have a range of systems in our London office, complementing our many workflows. To expand our portfolio, and specifically our Avid environment initially, we immediately thought of EditShare for our shared storage infrastructure, because EditShare supports the lot,” comments Nick Tipping, PPC technical director. “EditShare will work with Avid. It will work with Premiere Pro. It will even work with Final Cut Pro 7, and most other edit platforms you can think of. The new EFS 300 model is a very robust, cost-effective solution. We have had an EditShare system in our Los Angeles office for a couple of years now and have had nothing but good results, so it was a perfect choice.“

The XStream EFS 300 single-node, scale-out storage installation replaces the PPC Soho office’s aging Avid Unity system with a platform-agnostic EFS 300 solution that will futureproof the PPC infrastructure. The move to EditShare also provides a level of granularity in terms of managing media space access that well serves the PPC workflow.

Tipping explains: “Given the nature of our business, security and media access are extremely important and with EditShare you can control who gets access to which media spaces very easily, with full Active Directory integration. We handle sensitive material for many of our clients, and are regularly inspected and audited to ensure we are security-compliant. Having the content on EditShare, completely locked down on its own media space, allowing access only to those editors who need it – that is an absolute necessity for us.” 

The reliability of EFS combined with its fault-tolerant design also played a part in PPC’s decision to go with the new EFS 300 model.

Tipping adds: “Content protection is certainly important to us. The distributed architecture means that EditShare is some of the most secure storage we have in the building. If we had a hardware failure, the fault-tolerant design means we are always protected, and would not experience any downtime or data loss.“

Paul Saint, who oversees the EditShare Soho office, comments on capabilities the new EFS single-node systems offer creative houses like PPC: “Facilities like PPC get the performance and protection they require without having to invest in a multi-node cluster out of the gate. They can scale as needed, without compromising on performance or security thanks to incredibly versatile data protection features. Plus, they can leverage the EditShare portfolio of products to expand workflows to include production asset management, parking content, QC and archiving within one fully connected media ecosystem.“

The EditShare Soho office opened in July 2017 and provides consultation and support for the central London creative community.

The XStream EFS storage platform is a powerful distributed scale-out file system combined with a highly resilient architecture, developed for media intensive workflows. It’s designed to support large-scale workgroups requiring high-bandwidth, high-volume media ingest, transcoding, online collaborative editing and multiplatform distribution of HD, 2K, 4K and beyond.

Whether a one-node or multi-node system, every XStream EFS model can be expanded to increase capacity and bandwidth. For ease of use and administration, all systems present a single namespace, regardless of the system size. And unlike many SAN storage solutions, the performance of XStream EFS does not decrease as storage use increases. Its continual performance and reliability are backed by RAID-6 technology.