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| EditShare Evolves: Furthering the Collaborative Workflow |
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By Oliver Peters, January 16, 2008
Andy Liebman spent the first part of his career as an Emmy Award-winning independent documentary filmmaker working with WGBH's Nova and Frontline series. Along the way, Liebman's production company developed an in-house shared storage solution using a unique Avid project sharing scheme to provide his editors with the efficiency of a collaborative editing workflow. Colleagues and clients liked Liebman's solution so much that they encouraged him to bring it to market. That led to the birth of EditShare and my first encounter with them a few years back in the far end of the South Hall at NAB.
In the intervening few years, Liebman's start-up has grown to 500 installations worldwide covering a spectrum of clients from small, independent post houses to broadcast news operations to university film and sports programs and even major enterprise customers like the BBC. This past year EditShare introduced version 5 software, which added Apple Final Cut Pro project sharing to the portfolio. This places EditShare in the position of being the only non-Avid project sharing solution for Avid editors, as well as the only company to offer any sort of sharing for FCP projects.
Expanding the Product Line
EditShare storage solutions operate under the Linux operating system with media passing over Gigabit Ethernet (GigE). Since editing workstations are direct-connected to the server (or via an Ethernet switch), GigE offers enough bandwidth for multiple streams of DV25, as well as uncompressed SD and even compressed HD. Editors using DVCPRO HD, Apple ProRes or Avid DNxHD are able to work with three to four streams of compressed HD when connected to EditShare storage. For customers needing greater bandwidth, EditShare units can be configured with 10-Gigabit cards. EditShare systems employ ESA (Extreme Scalable Architecture), so more than 100 users can be connected in the largest system. Individual EditShare products come configured in three variations: the rack unit systems (3RU, 5RU and 8RU units), Metro (a standalone tower, first introduced in the Asia-Pacific region) and EditShare Field (a ruggedized location production model).
Storage capacity ranges from 1.2TB to 3TB in Field to as much as 30TB in an 8RU system. Field is the only shared storage device that I know of specifically geared for film or TV location production. Three editors can be plugged directly into it over GigE, and its cube shape ideally fits into airline overhead compartments. All configurations include the server and Ethernet switch. All EditShare systems are RAID 5 protected, which consumes only a small portion of your total storage for the metadata needed to restore media in the event of a drive failure. According to EditShare's specs, a 16-drive EditShare system is capable of writing data at over 450MB/s and can read data at over 750MB/s.
These units currently use SATA (Serial ATA) drives, but Liebman mentions that they are also developing SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) storage for larger enterprise installations. According to Liebman, a 32-drive SAS configuration should be able to support 80 to 100 streams of DV25, and a 64-drive configuration is currently in testing.
Another innovation added in version 5 is the option to create iSCSI partitions. Technically, EditShare's flavor of storage is Network Attached Storage (NAS). This permits file-level locking, which means that more than one user can write to a volume or partition at the same time. Some editing products, like Avid DS Nitris and Digidesign Pro Tools don't entirely work in this environment. They can read from NAS storage but not write to it. For these applications, the iSCSI option lets the system administrator create a small pool of iSCSI storage within the EditShare media space, effectively creating a virtual volume-level SAN (Storage Area Network) within the NAS system. Volume-level locking means that only one user has permission to write to that space at any time.
Workflow Is the Key
Liebman is certainly a technology buff, which drives him to investigate open source code programs and improve the products EditShare offers, but if that were the whole story, little would set EditShare apart from the competition. Liebman comes from a "hands on" production background, and that experience drives the company's engineers to provide solutions that address workflow issues. It's more than creating a central pool of storage. Over 90 percent of EditShare's customers use either Avid or Final Cut Pro, so offering them unique collaborative tools provides the edge.
Project sharing was initially available only for Avid Xpress Pro and Media Composer systems. EditShare achieved this by managing the Avid projects on the Linux server. In Avid's own Unity MediaNet system, several editors are able to open and work within the same project. Whoever opens a bin first gets permission to write to that bin (save changes), while all other users get just read-only access. EditShare's Avid project sharing essentially achieves the same functionality by displaying who is the owner of each bin and enforcing write permissions accordingly. As long as a bin is "owned" by User X, Users Y and Z can look at the contents but cannot modify them. Under EditShare's Project Sharing, editors always have the option of yielding write control to another editor.
Apple's Final Cut Pro doesn't inherently work in the same way, and one of the things Avid editors miss is the Unity style of collaborative editing. Multiple editors working on an Apple Xsan system must send copies of the FCP project file to other editors if they are working concurrently. The "lightbulb moment" for Liebman was realizing that FCP project files can be used really just like Avid bin files. Both types of files are where the application stores all of the metadata for the edits. Just as Avid allows you to edit with multiple bins at the same time, FCP permits you to edit with multiple project files open, and you can edit between project files. This ability enabled EditShare to create an Avid-style sharing approach for Final Cut Pro.
Shared FCP project files are stored on the Linux server, and control over these files works in much the same way as EditShare's Avid project sharing. When you first launch the EditShare Project Browser, it automatically launches FCP. Inside the Browser window--which sits just outside the editing application (unlike EditShare's Avid implementation)--you can see who controls each Final Cut project file. An editor can modify project files under his/her own user name, while files under other user names are read-only. Both approaches are functionally the same, giving editors working on FCP the same benefits of collaboration that Avid editors have enjoyed for years.
Full Administrative Control
One important difference between EditShare and many competitors is that the administrative software is not charged according to a per-seat license fee. You can install the administrative software on as many systems as you like. System administration is handled via a remote desktop application, so management of media spaces and user profiles can be performed from any Ethernet-connected computer, including edit workstations or someone's office system. Naturally, the administrator must have the proper authority and clearance to do this.
All EditShare media spaces are virtual volumes or partitions that can be created, protected, unprotected or dynamically changed at any time. This last feature is important because if you have a 300GB partition that fills up with media, the administrator can simply increase the size (if the storage is available) and give those editors more scratch disk space in mid-project. Administrators can also assign the partitions that a user is able to access and view. So if you have competing clients in the building, the administrator can set up the user profiles in such a way that each client (or editor) can access only their own space and won't be able to see any of the other partitions.
Synchronization and Archiving
EditShare's expansion into multiple connected servers and the introduction of EditShare Field has led them to add a Synchronization Tool. This software application can be used to sync the media between two different servers, such as copying files from Field to an in-house system. It can also be used for automatic backups. Since EditShare is based on Ethernet and IP addresses, backup locations could be across town or even in another country. In this way, the EditShare Synchronization Tool can be used for scheduled archiving, so if RAID 5 protection isn't enough, simply schedule a mirrored backup overnight to a second archive server.
With that in mind, EditShare plans to introduce two dedicated archiving solutions. Version 1 would be a less expensive, commodity server with storage that would be designed strictly for nearline archiving. It wouldn't offer the level of editing performance of a standard EditShare system. Version 2 would cost a bit more but offer the full performance of an EditShare server. At any time in the future, the customer could turn this archiving unit into a full-fledged EditShare system by purchasing a dongle upgrade.
I was struck by the little things that EditShare has incorporated. For example, some of EditShare's install sites are at university film programs, so configuring user profiles for each semester for 100 students can take quite a while. To aid in this task, EditShare's software accepts input from Excel-style spreadsheets, making the configuration faster. At the end of a term, the administrator can use the app's "clean slate" tool to reset all the parameters. Typically, partitions are created according to a project, so all the media for a given project will be in one location. Deleting the media for a single project is as easy as deleting the associated partition. As in other systems, the administration software can automatically e-mail the administrator with a regular report of system health.
EditShare is certainly marketing in a crowded and competitive space, but they offer the advantage of understanding the customer's production needs. These are robust systems offering comparable performance to any other unit out there, but the project sharing capabilities are unique. No other company offers Final Cut Pro project sharing as well as an Avid sharing solution. Furthermore, both Avid and FCP systems can co-exist in one ecosystem--a big boon for post houses that have to supply both solutions. EditShare is the collaborative workflow solution many editors will want when they decide to expand their facility.
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