University of the West England Selects EditShare

EditShare, LLC announced that The University of the of West England (UWE Bristol) has upgraded the existing infrastructure of its new arts, creative industries and education media programs facility to a file-based workflow powered by EditShare Flow media asset management (MAM); a 256TB scale-out, HA no single point of failure XStream EFS 450 shared storage solution for the Film/Animation department, and a 128TB single node XStream EFS 300 shared storage solution and Geevs ingest and playout server for the university’s Broadcast Journalism program.

The infrastructure features automation and provides integration with the university’s third-party non-linear editing and graphics systems as well as multi-platform distribution of student-created programs.

Dick Allen, UWE Bristol Faculty of Arts, creative industries and education technical resource manager, digital media and broadcast, selected EditShare to create an immersive infrastructure that connected systems, content, students, and staff.

Allen states the importance of having a MAM workflow: “Managing several programs and hundreds of broadcast and film students requires a detailed level of asset tracking as well as automation capabilities to have an efficient operation. Implementing a media asset management layer is key to optimizing the infrastructure, enhancing collaboration between students and staff, and giving our students a real-world media experience using modern tools.“

At the heart of the UWE Bristol facility is the XStream EFS 450 and 300 scale-out storage platforms and Flow media asset management facilitating content access and sharing across the university’s production studio, two large photography studios, animation stop-motion and CGI studios, sound recording and Foley studios, colour grading studios and editing suites which are all connected to the XStream EFS. The university’s news broadcast studio, which also leverages the XStream EFS and Flow solutions, is equipped with Geevs for multi-channel playout to TV and Internet channels. The EditShare powered infrastructure offers an integrated workflow that is student-optimized, providing hands-on experience that mimics real-world workflows that are integrated with the program’s expansive course content.

“EditShare creates an immersive learning environment by connecting systems, content, students and staff,” explains Tara Montford, MD, EditShare. “Flow, XStream EFS and Geevs form the core solution that assists students, staff and research teams to find, reuse and store media assets. It enables collaboration of teams with seamless integration of media systems and embedded tools to retrieve and archive media from a central location. With metadata tracking and asset indexing, staff and students can easily locate and re-use content, increasing the value of asset use.”

UWE Bristol leverages real-world content creation applications including Adobe Premiere Pro CC, Avid Media Composer, ProTools and Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve to give students an experience-based curriculum with an intelligent media management layer that brings efficiency to the university’s expansive program.

Flow organizes the massive amount of content created and exchanged, acting as a control layer across the XStream EFS scale-out, HA shared storage platforms, which are designed to support 4K, 8K, UHD and beyond with near infinite scalability on a no single point of failure architecture. Flow automates media ingest, transcoding, content searches, online to offline movement of media to ensure students are using the correct format and that their content is copied to the right media space.

In addition to providing the core infrastructure housing all UWE Bristol media program assets, the XStream EFS 450 and EFS 300 shared storage solutions provide project sharing capabilities including Avid-style bin-locking, project-sharing and multi-user write access to media spaces for its Adobe Premiere Pro and Avid Media Composer editing systems.

At UWE, student project collaboration is a must, making the XStream EFS project sharing feature a critical component. Student media and projects can be stored in the same media space, or in separate spaces with files are owned by the members of the media space – including media files, media database files, project settings and bins – and any user with permission can modify or delete the files.

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