BOSTON — EditShare, provider of shared media storage and end-to-end tapeless workflow solutions, announced today that Seminole Productions, an auxiliary organization of Florida State University (FSU), has expanded its existing EditShare platform to include an additional 96TB of shared storage with integrated Flow media asset management and Ark backup and archiving.
Located in the FSU athletics department, Seminole oversees a 6000-plus square foot complex with two control rooms, a large studio with both greenscreen and conventional studio setup, and 19 Avid Media Composer 7 suites for use by both students and staff. It also operates a centralized control room that is connected via fibre to the university's nearby football, baseball and basketball facilities as well as other athletic fields and stadiums. The Seminole production team, which is staffed with a mix of full-time video professionals/instructors and university students, is tasked with covering FSU live events, as well as producing the university's pre- and post-game shows. The team covers an impressive 120-plus live events and is responsible for producing more than 130 athletic television programs yearly.
"EditShare shared storage meant that our editors could access all the material they needed for their particular programs much faster. Ingesting just once, and then making content available to all authorized users on the EditShare network, was a game changer - as was EditShare's project sharing capabilities. We couldn't work to our schedules today without having the EditShare system," states Jim Garbarino, associate director of Seminole Productions.
With increasing production and programming demands, Seminole Productions recently expanded the infrastructure to support the growth. Garbarino adds, "The idea of adding more storage with integrated archives was great. However, when we saw EditShare's Flow media asset management solution at NAB, we realized the enormous potential in respect to managing ingest and asset tagging and searching, and hence added it to our must-have list."
"Seminole Productions manages a massive amount of content, so an efficient workflow is key to productivity," states Grant Carroll, EditShare's director of workflow design, post-production. "EditShare shared storage allows students and staff to safely work in the same Avid projects at the same time. In addition, EditShare's integrated Flow Media Asset Management tools make logging and finding content a breeze - including content that has been archived to LTO tape with EditShare Ark."
Seminole takes advantage of Flow's centralized file ingest and metadata capabilities, freeing Avid editing suites for editing. "We create our own melts from cameras through our EVS system, and then store them on EditShare through Flow," explains Garbarino. "If there is a multi-segment show being taped, the first segment is pushed to EditShare as soon as it is completed, and editors begin to work on it immediately, even while the studio ops are still taping the next segment." Garbarino remarks about the new media asset management capabilities, "Thanks to Flow, we were able to completely de-clutter our content by building a methodical metadata schema. We took advantage of the customizable metadata tags in Flow Logger and standardized the way we tag assets for just about every searchable play. For example, we have tags for completed passes between 10 and 19 yards or 20 and 39 yards. Now staff can quickly locate material for shows and trailers that need to show a series of successful passes from 10 to 19, 20 to 39, 40 to 59 yards, and so on."