Australian University of Sydney Chooses EditShare

EditShare, LLC announced that the learning media team at The University of Sydney (Sydney Uni), an Australian public research and teaching university, selected its XStream EFS 300 to help them meet the demand to produce high quality video content in 4K.

Digistor Pty Limited, an EditShare dealer in Australia, was on site to facilitate the installation.

Founded in 1850, The University of Sydney was Australia’s first university and is regarded as one of the world’s leading universities. It comprises nine faculties and university schools, through which it offers bachelor, master and doctoral degrees.

Tom Cavdarovski, team lead research and learning media production, University of Sydney, explains: “Our team of five produce educational videos for both international and on-campus students, and the Learning Media Team has grown rapidly over the last three years in order to meet the growing demand for quality video content in 4K. Our legacy  DAS system was not designed to work in a multi-project environment, so we turned to Digistor to help us find a central media solution which would streamline our production workflow and integrate with existing university systems.“

He continues: “Based on Digistor’s recommendation we chose the EditShare XStream EFS 300 Node 96TB system. This included 82TB of usable storage, a 10GbE RJ45 switch and 10 licenses of Flow media asset management. The XStream was an ideal solution as we were after a relatively small and simple set up with minimum administrative overhead. It also easily integrated with our existing IT systems ensuring the new server was secure and robust. We have both a Mac and Windows environment and connect our seven client machines via a Thunderbolt converter and cat 6A cables, so the new XStream system had to be able to work seamlessly within this environment, which it did.“

The Learning Media team’s projects can have anywhere from 1 to 60 videos being produced at any one time, and all must be able to be edited by any one of the team at any time.

Cavdarovski explains: “The team now works primarily in Creative Cloud and use common templates and branding assets for all projects. This was not possible to do with our previous set-up. By using Flow media asset management, we now streamline our processes on a daily basis. When we first did a needs analysis to ramp up our production output, it was obvious we were losing valuable time trying to manage files across incompatible systems and protocols. The new EFS solution saves us time by being efficient and effective.“

When working on videos the team’s main input consists of 4K video and podcast audio files. They shoot with Blackmagic URSA and Studio cameras, Sony FS7, Panasonic GH4 and 5 DSLR, OSMO and Mavic drone cameras. Their delivery output is 1080p and includes web-based channels including YouTube, Coursera and Arc video platforms.

He adds: “EditShare represented a robust system that didn’t need a full-time onsite technician to run the server – this was important to us as we needed a solution that was relatively low cost. The XStream model also had the speed and throughput to ensure the editors could scrub through 4K files without any significant lag or compromise in quality. As a result, we can now easily adjust to proxies if we need to, but generally we can use it at 4K preview quality for the early phases of editing.“

According to Cavdarovski the EditShare satisfied current requirements and has much added value as he concludes: “Our EditShare media server now does everything we ask of it and it has also increased our output. We are delivering our large video projects on time and we no longer have production bottlenecks. This gives us a cost saving that enables the team to invest more time in creating higher quality videos that better meet our customer needs.“