Irish Post-Production Ka-Boom Selects EditShare

EditShare, LLC announced that post-production and creative facility Ka-Boom has invested in an end-to-end EditShare workflow solution that encompasses EditShare Flow and AirFlow media asset management (MAM), XStream EFS scale-out storage, EFS 40NL parking storage and EditShare Ark archiving solutions to support its growing media business.

Located in the heart of Belfast, Northern Ireland, Ka-Boom’s facility is currently working on a range of documentary and entertainment programs including Channel 5 Celebs on Solitary by Stellify Media, the BBC NI Drama Counsel for Lacada Entertainment, and the BBC Network daytime series Holding Back the Years for BBC Studios. 

“We’ve just opened up a new facility with more offline suites and have greater expansion plans over the next six to 12 months, which is where EditShare comes in,” comments Zach Willis, Ka-Boom’s co-founder and producer. “With the facility and projects expanding, we had to scale our technology to meet the client needs as well as give our team a way to better collaborate.“

He explains: “While our current building and new building are in the same location, there is a bit of a gap between them and we needed a technology solution that could span across multiple sites with ease. With EditShare, we can house the entire EditShare infrastructure platform in our main building and then easily connect to the content hub and to each other from the new building and anywhere else in the world via Flow and AirFlow so that it is all very seamless.“

Ka-boom have six offline suites with another five coming online shortly, all of which are connected to the EditShare tiered storage infrastructure, which includes XStream EFS scale-out storage, 40NL parking storage, and Ark tape archiving. Integrated, Flow and AirFlow provide the control layer for managing assets and automating migration policies across the EditShare tiered storage pools with simple-to-use production tools for producers and directors to review content, annotate notes, storyboard ideas and collaborate with teams across departments and beyond facility walls.

Willis elaborates: “With the capabilities of the Flow and AirFlow, producers and clients can be located anywhere in the world and review media, storyboards and collaborate with editors, colorists and other staff back at the facility. This setup far better suits with our expanding filmmaking workflow.“

Within Flow, all assets and relative metadata are tracked, making searching and retrieving media fast and efficient, even for those assets stored on tapes. AirFlow provides team secured remote access to content with tools to facilitate editorial review and approval from anywhere.

Willis adds: “We have quite a few projects that can be very quick turnarounds. There is typically lots of material where the edit producers and the execs along with their actors want to sit down to review the rushes or do rough assemblies and things like that. It’s not like a drama or a feature or scripted material, where you know what the story is and you have only two or three takes and that’s it. A lot of what we are doing is you have a story but you have no scripts. You’re working on the material that you have and many times the team is dispersed in different locations, so the Flow and AirFlow product lends itself absolutely perfectly to what we do anywhere, and that type of flexibility is really our bread and butter of TV.“

With content indexed across the tiered EditShare storage environment, staff can use Flow to search and retrieve content, even with material shot years earlier.

Willis explains the impact of this new capability: “Even when a project is finished, staff still have access to the proxies. They can search for that shot that they always wanted to use but didn’t because it would have taken them half a day to find it in all those drives we used to store content on. With Flow, they can find it in seconds and that’s been big. Our clients are going to love this.“