Editshare

Hi,

I'm planing to buy an shared storage solution for video, Editshare is one of the possible solutions however I don't have any knowledge of their hardware, except for we can read on the Editshare website.
Does anyone works with Editshare. Is it good, better than Xsan and Promise, or not at all?

Any others solutions that I should check?

Thank you

Rui Barros
Editor Colorist Trainer
Lisbon, Portugal
RTP Post-Production
Apple Certified Trainer FCP 7
Apple Certified Pro FCP 7

Rui

I just saw your message, sorry to take so long to reply.

One of my clients has an Editshare system, and overall are pleased with the system and the company.

There are a few differences between the Editshare system and the others you mention.

1- The Editshare solutions are complete systems. Not only do you buy the hardware, but also the SAN software and administration are part of the package. You can also add optional Digital Asset Management and Archiving modules.

2- The "normal" configuration is to use Gig-E to connect the client workstations. If you work primarily with compressed media that is more than adequate. If, on the other hand, you plan to work uncompressed or with mulitcam projects with many angles you need to ask them about linking your workstations with a higher bandwidth connection.

3- They have great customer service. There is however a price to be paid. After your initial contract expires they have an annual customer service contract you may, or may not want to purchase.

The system has been pretty reliable for my client for about a year. It did have some initial problems due to a batch of bad drives. Editshare worked with them to resolve the issue, replacing not only the failed units under warrantee, but all the drives in the system.

Hi VPiccin,

"The "normal" configuration is to use Gig-E to connect the client workstations. If you work primarily with compressed media that is more than adequate."

Do you mean 1 GB-E for compressed media and for the other workflows 10 GB-E?

Thank you.

Rui Barros
Editor Colorist Trainer
Lisbon, Portugal
RTP Post-Production
Apple Certified Trainer FCP 7
Apple Certified Pro FCP 7

You should check with them on configurations that require more bandwidth. In my discussions with them prior to purchase I was left with the impression that they could deliver up to 10Gb/s to workstations if required. The system uses 10 Gig connections from the RAID(s) to the Ethernet switch. They may have a way to interface workstations at that speed as well.

In the case at the facility I helped install an Editshare we had no need to go beyond the 70MB/s or so that you can get from GigE.

There are a couple of solutions out there worth looking at. If you require a turnkey solution editshare might be the way to go but there are other options as well. You probably want to have alook at FlavourSys . We offer a solution called Strawberry which is a san/nas agnostic Avid, FCP, Adobe media sharing application on the project level. The ssftware offers an instant search for projects, metadata, media files and even avid bin content. We have a build in user and team management and some very intersting technologies in order to keep any media on your storage perfecly structured. Editors can share projects in realtime and access the same media at the same time. And since we offer a software product our pricing is way better than most of the hardware/software turnkeys. You might wanna have a look at http://www.flavoursys.com/strawberry-is-collaborative-editing.html

What kind of formats, and how many streams and how many machines?



www.strypesinpost.com

Hi Sorry for answering so late,

We are working with editshare since 6 months now and we are very pleased.
We had 5-6 Mac Pro and 3 iMac AVID 5.5/FCP7 edit suites working parallel plus one Resolve/Adobe and two ProTools9. We decided to work local on Resolve and ProTools. The biggest project was a 600hrs footage reality show. On top of that we had several EPK, Promo, Casting and whatever edits. We had a maximum of 10 clients attached working parallel in ProRes422HQ, DNxHD 120, DVCpro50/100, XDcam 422 50 and DV. We had up to 94MB/s bandwith per client tested with 9 clients. The only issues we had were minor AJA hickups with MC 5.5.2 wich were fixed with MC 5.5.3. My editors never complained about lack of performance. All in all the gigabit infrastructure made it easy to up and downscale quickly. These transfer speeds, mentioned above made it easy to take a local roundtrip on Resolve/ProTools and go back to editshare and AVID/FCP7.
The User management structure in editshare is brilliant, project sharing is good to handle but needs a little bit of education for your editors if they are used to work with Unity Systems.
Administration takes more Know how then for an AVID Medianet but less then XSAN. Deleting material is a little tricky, but hey, it´s not a bug, it´s a feature! I wished I had that on XSAN!
Let me know if you need any more Info!
cheers
hamaca