NEWS
Share and Share Alike
A Storage Solution for Multiple Systems
by Michael Kunkes
 EditShare president and founder Andy Liebman, second from left, demonstrates his system at the EditShare booth at NAB 2007 in Las Vegas. |
In June, the Editors Guild Training Center in Hollywood hosted a seminar by Andy Liebman, founder and President of EditShare, Inc. (www.editshare.com). In just its fourth year of business, the Boston-based company has over 450 installations worldwide and is becoming known as a premiere creator of low-cost, shared storage solutions that combine centralized storage with a series of collaborative workflow applications and features. At the seminar, Liebman went through what he called the obligatory “Death by PowerPoint” presentation, then launched into an absorbing demonstration of EditShare’s features and new products.
EditShare is a product that came literally out of nowhere. In 2003, Boston native Liebman, a multiple-Emmy Award-winning producer with 27 years experience producing documentaries for Frontline, Nova, Scientific American and the Discovery Channel, was in the Canadian Arctic, 1,000 miles from the North Pole, shooting a documentary about a simulated mission to Mars. Working in tents in below-freezing temperatures, Liebman and three editors were digitizing DV footage onto FireWire drives on a ‘round-the-clock basis. “We discovered that whenever anyone would sit down to edit, material that one person needed was always on a drive attached to someone else’s computer. It was irritating, and when I got back to Boston, I knew there had to be a better way to share storage and do collaborative Avid editing.”
 EditShare's easy-to-use Media Spaces submenu, which allows users to create and distribute new storage volumes anywhere across the system. Photos courtesy of EditShare |
There was—but the major media file sharing solutions in existence were prohibitively expensive. Liebman turned inventor and cobbled together his own system around a Windows 2000 server. It worked, but very slowly. Taking the next step, he taught himself Linux, built another system and hired a programmer to automate various functions. “Suddenly,” he says, “I had this nifty program that made it possible for multiple Avids to work together.” On the advice of his wife, Liebman put together a company, took out a patent, and took the Linux unit to NAB 2004. He shipped his first system in eight weeks.
While there are other shared storage products, such as Avid’s X-San and Unity, EditShare is a cross-platform toolset, with seamless media sharing that will work with Avid, Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, ProTools, Media 100, Autodesk, Canopus and a host of other products. EditShare can also work with any type of file format, from offline to uncompressed HD. Also, unlike other SAN devices, EditShare supports file level sharing, allowing multiple editors to write to the same volumes simultaneously. Regardless of the application or platform, source material, works-in-progress and finished projects are shared and instantly available to all users on EditShare’s network.
For audio, EditShare also offers users an option that allows them to set aside a certain portion of their storage and export it as iSCSI, which allows workstations to function with ProTools. “It’s just another protocol that really puts the storage under the direct control of the workstation,” says Liebman.
The other major unique factor about EditShare is that it operates over existing one-gigabit or optional ten-gigabit Ethernet, a far more inexpensive solution than the fiber channel cable networks now being employed at most facilities. “Most people will just use standard gigabit Ethernet to work with multiple streams of standard uncompressed video or other formats such as DV-25, DV-50, DVC HD ProRes, or Avid’s new GNX HD,” he says. “You can work with four streams of this material at the highest resolution of standard definition video or compressed HD with standard gigabit Ethernet. You don’t need to make these huge investments in fiber channel technology. People need a little time to accept that they can work in uncompressed SD over the net.”
This summer, EditShare introduced version 5.0, which features a completely reconfigured network that enables the server itself to be configured to act as a plug-and-play switch for easier deployment. “It’s so simple,” says Liebman. “You just take the server, put it into the network and get an IP address; and you can plug anything into anything—DHCP server, office network, other file servers, anything––it just works!”
 The front panel of EditShare Field, showing the product's old-time radio styling. Photo courtesy of EditShare |
Unlike other shared edit systems with large numbers of users, EditShare does not need to re-scan to make new media available; it just comes up on the interface. In addition, duplicate media files can move across two or more servers, no matter where in the building or the world they may be located. “We completely changed the way we store media files on our central server to make workflow smoother than ever,” he adds. “We also retained all our great security features that make sure files aren’t deleted by accident, maliciousness or acts of God.”
EditShare 5.0 has several key new features, including a Sync Tool that comes in handy when linking more than one EditShare. The Sync Tool allows users to select media spaces that they want to duplicate in other places, whether on local servers or an entirely separate location. Other new features include a daily e-mail “health report” that details server status and performance, improved shared Avid projects that provide warnings when other users’ bins are locked, tighter control through limited admin rights, and a new “maintenance mode” for deleting and modifying files.
The company has built-in multiple levels of file protection because, according to Liebman, people don’t think enough about security issues when working with any kind of centralized storage. “At some point, if you’ve protected things so that they can’t be accidentally deleted, you have to be able to unprotect them and enable a maintenance mode so they can be deleted at a later time,” he explains. “We’ve all experienced deletion from our hard drives––and obviously that can be a catastrophe in a production environment––so it’s good to have these protections, which permeate all the different aspects of our servers. Whether it’s a project or media file, systems are in place to protect the file and back it up or restore it from the trash if it is deleted.”
Later this year, EditShare will be extending its project-sharing technology to Apple’s Final Cut Pro, eliminating the time-consuming process of exporting and importing .xml files and duplication of FCP project files. Says Liebman, “Our project sharing for Final Cut is extremely simple. It functions in a more passive mode, so that users can see what others are doing, without being able to change it. It’s a permission-based, easy mechanism that allows users to pass their work along and keep workflow moving. That’s how project sharing works. It’s much different from the FCP server, but at the end of the day, it accomplishes the same thing in a much simpler way. We’ve done for Final Cut editors what Avid editors have been able to do for the last seven or eight years.”
Liebman also displayed EditShare’s compact new EditShare Field, introduced earlier this year. Sort of an “EditShare Lite,” the one-cubic-ft. chassis is attractively styled to recall an art deco-styled 1930s radio, and each individually built chassis can be configured to hold anywhere from three to 30 terabytes of storage. Like all EditShare products using more than one chassis, all units are administered from the same interface, so the administrator does not have to log into each individual server, and the users don’t even have to be aware that there is a second or third server. “Our Connection Client feature automatically connects you to the correct server. It’s actually pretty basic,” says Liebman.
“When it comes down to it, we are not a storage company, we are a workflow company,” says Liebman. “Storage is just part of what we do. One of the ways we are really different from other storage companies is the way we’ve thought through what happens in an audio-video production environment. EditShare has made it easy to separate media for different projects into different virtual volumes, and made it easy to control who can access those and how much can be put in those volumes. The company also does not charge additional license fees for each workstation.
Also this year, Liebman plans to introduce what he calls a “Hobbled EditShare,” employing the same software and chassis, mainly to be used as a destination for back-ups. A simple dongle upgrade will turn it into a full-fledged EditShare system. The company is also working on a new asset management program that will allow users to access a web browser to find all the resources on their server, create EDLs, and make sub-clips for an Avid or Final Cut bin. “We’re moving as fast as we can to get our customers what they are asking for,” Liebman says.
Each EditShare system is built from the ground up, and comes in configurations that start at several to hundreds of terabytes. Each system can be delivered within a week anywhere in the world, and the company provides support 24 hours a day, Monday through Friday, through its offices in Boston, Beijing, Brisbane, London and Paris. In addition to its use around the world in features, reality shows and TV––mainly in Europe and Australia––EditShare has proven itself extremely adaptable for sporting events and educational institutions. It is also being used by a half-dozen news organizations, corporate media departments, military and training, as well as for records documentation.
One last barrier remains for EditShare to conquer––the Hollywood feature film industry. When will that happen? “When they realize they don’t always have so much money to burn,” Liebman laughs.
Michael Kunkes is a freelance editor and writer specializing in animation, production and post-production. He can be reached at writermk@sbcglobal.net.
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