How EditShare’s management toolkit can help you find extra efficiencies this winter 

 As the post-production industry moves into its busiest time of year, we know every second counts. Every efficiency you find in project setup, data flow, burst expansion and even disaster recovery means more time to focus on delivering effective creative. It also gives you the opportunity to take on more projects at a time when an already-busy industry is seeing a major surge of investment. We asked storage specialist Phill Boettcher for his advice on fine-tuning your post workflow. 

Proper preparation prevents failure 

Having processes in place for how work is ingested, organised, stored and shared will make it far easier for busy teams to manage projects effectively, especially if you’ve brought on board freelance talent that is still trying to acclimatise to your systems. 

“In the same way that we talked about getting your disaster recovery plan in order ahead of peak times, having your content management strategy in place before big projects hit is vital,” says Phill. 

“If you have a template for how a workspace is set up and how folders within a project are organised, it becomes much easier for people to work across multiple projects without wasting time finding, organising and relinking assets, and reduces the chance of people making mistakes. It means that, even before you add a layer of asset management to proceedings, staff have the ability to go into any media space and know where the rushes will be, where graphics will be and how they should store their own work.” 

That’s not to say asset management isn’t important 

“While people always discuss asset management in terms of remonetisation and reusing content, tools like EditShare FLOW can be extremely helpful in the early stages of a project as they allow you to index all of your various storage silos within a single system so that users at every location can carry out important work,” Phill explains. 

“If you’re in the process of consolidating multiple NAS appliances scattered across your sites, FLOW can index all of those alongside your newer, more powerful production storage so that they can still be used for nearline storage and their content remains searchable.” 

And it’s not just editors who can take a look – the sophisticated tools found in modern asset management solutions mean that producers, directors and other staff can be given role-based access to review and mark up footage before editing even begins. FLOW even offers the chance to add custom metadata to footage so that it will be flagged, shared or transferred as needed without manual intervention.

Automation has the potential to be a huge timesaver 

If you have a skilled workforce, you want them to be working on complex tasks that require human input, not carrying out repetitive tasks. 

FLOW Automation gives you a toolset that allows you to create bespoke but repeatable workflows,” says Phill. “So you might have a designated ingest workflow that saves media in the correct location, backs it up and alerts certain members of the post team that it’s available. You might integrate FLOW with a QC tool so that you can actually tie altogether your review and delivery processes. Not only is automating these tasks a lot faster than manually paying someone to move media from one place to another and send alerts about it, you’re reducing the risk of human error and delays caused by competing demands on people’s time.” 

These benefits are all compacted by FLOW’s unique read/write/playback architecture, which is optimised for multi-stream video and will maintain playback even if hundreds of streams are being requested at once. 

Plan for failure… 

Knock on wood, you’ll have a smooth successful run up to the final delivery of your project, untroubled by the government’s three-hour rolling blackouts, flood, fire or the rise of a new plague. But just in case, we recommend reviewing your backup practices now, and making sure you have a robust reporting system in place. EditShare offer their own in the form of EditShare Guardian, which allows you to generate custom, realtime reports on your data’s integrity and your overall system performance but the Jigsaw24 Media team can help you find the reporting tools you need to suit whichever workflow you currently favour. 

But also remember to plan for success 

“No matter how many efficiencies you put in place, it’s entirely possible that you’ll find yourself at capacity but not wanting to turn away work,” says Phill. “While there used to be hard limits on how many projects you could work on, such as how many edit suites you had in the building, but now you can add burst expansion quickly through the cloud.” 

That might mean taking on virtualised infrastructure through something like our own IaaS solution, which can spin up new seats in under 48 hours. You can also take advantage of cloud licensing options in the Avid ecosystem to extend licences to remote editors. And EditShare offer FLEX, a newly-expanded cloud offering built in partnership with AWS, which allows you to store, edit and sync footage completely in the cloud, complete with data cost/performance balancing and N+1 protection options. 

“The cloud ecosystem has matured over the past few years and even if you dismissed solutions previously, it’s worth revisiting them in light of the current media industry boom and the capacity you may wish to create,” says Phill. “Whatever you previous impression was, you’re likely to find a more complex feature set that more closely mirrors the in-house experience you deliver, without being subject to the same limitations of space, location and access.” 

To find out more about preparing your facility for your busiest winter yet, get in touch with the team using the form below, email media@Jigsaw24.com or call 03332 409 210.