University of Portland Athletics Department Opts for EditShare XStream EFS

EditShare, LLC announced that the University of Portland (UP) Athletics Department upgraded to the its XStream EFS single node shared storage platforms for all content capture for UP athletics including men and women’s soccer, volleyball, basketball, tennis, cross country, track & field, baseball and rowing.

The UP Athletics Department is known for grooming its soccer players for professional and national teams; UP is ranked 7th in the US for division 1 men’s soccer.

Faced with a surge in content creation and a migration to higher quality recording formats, the UP Athletics Department, also known as The Portland Pilots, needed an agile, intuitive video engineered storage environment to manage the amounts of content being generated from the University’s 100+ games a year. In addition, the department also creates a monthly TV show profiling its student athletes along with notable game highlights and results.

With up to five editors working on projects at a given time, the department needed a solution that was powerful enough to support a collaborative workflow.

Prior to implementing EditShare, the department relied on a RAID setup connecting three editing stations. With three editors working simultaneously, the system would slow to the point of becoming inoperable, creating massive inefficiencies among the team. In addition, the decentralized storage structure meant that there were multiple drives around the department harboring footage that had been offloaded to create more room for incoming projects. This made locating specific project files that had been offloaded a daunting, time-consuming process.

“For the last four years we relied on our clunky RAID system, which required annual offloading at the end of the year to make room for new content coming in. Every bit of content was stored on a travel HDD without any system in place for backing it up,” says José Nevarez, assistant athletic director, broadcast operations, University of Portland. “It got to a point where the amount of footage we were working with was increasing every year. A potential drive failure meant losing content that had cost thousands of dollars to produce; it would have been a devastating financial hit. With this increase in content, it finally became a priority for us to implement a centralized storage solution.“

Initially, investing in a shared storage solution seemed financially insurmountable. However, the budget-friendly XStream EFS single node platforms proved to be the cost-effective solution that the department needed.

Nevarez continues: “We started looking at how many terabytes a year we produce and how many terabytes the EFS single nodes were capable of supporting. Then when we broke down the dollar amount that we were spending annually on new HDDs along with the amount of time and money we were losing to offloading content, it started making sense financially.“

In addition to the financial sensibility associated with the EditShare solution,  XStream EFS afforded the department the ability to implement an additional fourth editing station as part of their post-production workflow. Previously, editors were required to share three stations. Now the team is able to output more content with greater efficiency.

Since the University of Portland does not offer video production or journalism classes, the Athletics Department enlists students to help with sports production and content creation as an opportunity to get hands on experience. In addition to exposing students to a career field that they may not have otherwise experienced, the students also help the Athletics Department increase content output and turn projects around quickly. However, with only two full time post production staff on board, Nevarez needed a way to give students access to the network without giving them access to sensitive materials.

“We have a lot of students working with us to help get our content out the door, so having some control over what they can see and interact with as well as being able to track what they’re doing is incredibly beneficial for us,” continues Nevarez. “Since the students and full time staff often have differing schedules, and we can’t have them in the office while we’re gone, we needed to figure out how they could continue working on projects even while they weren’t physically there. With the EditShare system, they can access projects anywhere on campus as long as they have access to our hardwired network. Many of them edit in their dorm rooms or in the library. They’re able to work as if they were sitting right in the office editing.“

The EditShare platform also allows Nevarez and team to package and push out content to local news stations. “After big games or wins, we send two minute highlight reels out as quickly as possible to local news stations to try and make the evening news. The EditShare system allows us to do this on an incredibly fast turn; the games usually wrap around 9PM and we’re able to submit in time to try to make the ten o’clock news.“

Looking ahead, Nevarez plans to integrate Flow media asset management for ingest and automatic metadata tagging for the UP Athletics Department. “We ingest so much footage every weekend; being able to task logging and metadata tagging is going to make our workflow so much easier. We waste an incredible amount of time searching for footage on the computer. We’re really excited to abandon this process and actually use a tool that was designed to do this efficiently.“

Nevarez concludes: “The EditShare platform has completely revolutionized our approach and workflow. The fault-tolerant design and scalable capability means that we’re future-proof and able to grow as needed. Since there are several other video departments across campus, we’re anticipating that our success with EditShare will demonstrate the value for them and lead to a university-wide implementation of the platform.“