South Africa’s Magnatude Facilities Opts for EditShare

EditShare, LLC announced that Cape Town, South Africa-based Magnatude Facilities, a division of Okuhle Media Group, has selected an XStream EFS 300 scale out storage platform, EFS 40NL nearline storage nodes and Flow media asset management to overhaul their media workflow.

Prior to implementing EditShare workflow solutions, the team worked off an aging RAID setup that wasn’t equipped to support media intensive workflows, often slowing down with as few as three editors working on a project. In addition, there was no way to search for or retrieve existing assets. As a result the team would lose valuable time and money as a consequence of having to re-shoot material they already knew they had they just couldn’t find it.

“Implementing Flow has completely changed the way we interact with and search for existing footage,” says Ryan Sheraton, live director and post production supervisor, Okuhle. “For example, we’ve shot Table Mountain for nearly every single show that we’ve delivered and broadcast because we didn’t know where our existing iconic shots were. (Table Mountain is a prominent landmark overlooking the city of Cape Town in South Africa). Now with Flow, we can basically just type in ‘Table Mountain’ and the raw footage appears. It’s been an incredible time saver and we don’t waste time and money going out there to get that shot again.“

Faced with a major project, Showville, a reality television talent show in the vein of America’s Got Talent! but focused on the smaller areas of South Africa, the facility’s existing storage infrastructure needed a major upgrade. With a production crew of 20 deployed to each location, the team knew that they needed a way to optimize their workflow in order to collaborate on this project and manage the huge amounts of incoming media.

“It’s one of the bigger shows that we have brought on as a client. There’s no way we could have taken it on with our old setup- it would have been a collaboration nightmare,” Sheraton continues, “With the EditShare systems in place we’re able to have four editors working on the show simultaneously. It’s a great achievement in terms of managing data and managing at least five cameras and four editors working in tandem.“

The production team shoots on location then the footage is couriered over to Magnatude Facilities on HDDs where it is ingested to the 40NL. The editors work with the raw footage off of the 40NL directly, accessing project files at the same time and collaborating to yield a final cut which is migrated to the production centric EFS 300.

“When we were working off our legacy RAID system, there was no way for us to share and work collaboratively on projects. As a result we literally had editors running up and down the halls asking people to close files, it was completely inefficient,” Sheraton adds, “Working on ‘Showville’ in this way would be impossible, the bottlenecks it would have created would have been a major blow and would introduce risk to on-time delivery. With the EFS 300 production platform coupled with the nearline storage 40NL system, everyone can open any project when they need it without compromising system performance, it’s awesome.“

He concludes: “EditShare solutions have given us the confidence to approach larger and more complex projects, we know these systems can take the heat. Going from what we called ‘Frankenstein’ to a reliable and robust storage and media management ecosystem has completely revolutionized how we approach our work. In addition, EditShare’s technical support team is incredible, they’ve always been available to us as an invaluable resource for troubleshooting and workarounds.“

“Successful post facilities like Okuhle need platforms that they can grow their business on,” comments Tara Montford, GM, EditShare. “EditShare EFS allows facilities to step into an enterprise workflow with a ‘right sized’ infrastructure that maps back to their production needs, with the flexibility to expand on the fly. It’s the best of both worlds. They invest in only what they need today with the freedom to grow the platform alongside the business.“

About the EditShare Workflow at Magnatude Facilities
EditShare XStream EFS is a distributed scale-out video storage platform developed for the most intensive media workflows. It’s designed to support resilient large-scale workgroups and high-bandwidth, high-volume media ingest, transcoding, online collaborative editing and multi-platform distribution of HD, 4K, 8K and beyond. Administrators can add one or more XStream EFS 40NL nodes of cost-optimized storage to an existing XStream EFS storage cluster to create a nearline storage workflow like Magnatude Facilities or configure the EFS 40NL as an independent storage cluster for DR or media backup purpose, with each 4U storage node providing 240TB of raw capacity. EditShare Flow integrates with EFS, providing a control layer that manages assets and metadata from ingest to playout with tools to search, retrieve and storyboard media, facilitating a collaborative post-production workflow for Okuhle.