TV Cultura in Brazil adopted an EditShare storage environment that organises and secures its media assets and allows the full production team to work on the same project simultaneously
FLOW asset management
Public television network TV Cultura, based in São Paulo, Brazil, is part of the Fundação Padre Anchieta (Father Anchieta Foundation) and funded by the regional government. It focuses on educational and cultural subjects, but also produces and broadcasts sport and entertainment.
TV Cultura was recently faced with the need to set up comprehensive, secure production asset management, along with direct editing support on the facility’s storage device. The production requirements of a new programme called for collaborative workflows, in which multiple users could access the same project for editing with Adobe Premiere Pro and other post production software. It amounted to a large integration project between storage, asset management and third-party tools.
An EditShare EFS 300 storage system was chosen for the environment. EFS 300 is a compact, all-in-one storage appliance built for high capacity storage – 128 TB in this installation – with transparent access for Windows, MacOS and Linux clients, and EdiShare’s integrated production asset management software FLOW. The system was negotiated, supported and installed by EditShare’s Brazilian partner, CIS Group.
Single Network
“We needed to create a new environment, where we could organise and categorise the media as well as maintain secure storage,” said Nelson Faria, Director of Engineering at TV Cultura. “The key challenge was for all types of members from a large production team to be able to work on the same project simultaneously – editors, colourists, graphic artists and producers.
“EditShare’s approach allows us to connect workstations and storage on a single network. Users are still working in the software they are familiar with, but now have access to the organised material and can find the files they need to finish the programmes quickly and accurately.”
In a 2U cabinet the appliance holds 16 enterprise-grade disk drives, protected through RAID-6 and hot-swappable from the front so that users can remove or replace a hard drive without disrupting access or powering off the device. Storage capacity can be increased at any point, either by fitting larger-capacity drives or by adding further nodes. The EFS 300 does not requires maintenance windows for tasks like defragmentation, storage expansion or software updates.
EditShare supports numerous software integrations.
The system employs the multi-threaded EFS Native Client, a driver with low overhead and latency that helps raise the performance of Windows, OS X and LINUX workstations. The EFS 300 has a number of other features, and comes bundled with applications, that support management and administration. For instance, EFS always presents a single namespace for management, which avoids having to balance user workloads between volumes or workspaces, or build multiple sets of user accounts.
Asset Management
FLOW Production Asset Management software that comes with EFS 300 has tools for file-based ingest, logging, cataloguing, searching and basic edits. Users can drag and drop media to Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut X, Avid Media Composer and other NLEs. Ark Media Archive is also bundled with the EFS 300, and used to automate backup tasks and park unused assets in nearline disk and offline tape storage. System administrators can use EditShare Manager tools to manage users, permissions, quotas, workspaces, projects, reporting and so on.
EditShare Connect is the client software that allows collaboration between project members. It gives users access to assets and workstations, while enforcing read and write permissions and quotas, and implements project sharing and bin locking. An EFS 300 master node can also support a small number of direct connected client workstations.
Felipe Andrade, VP of Sales from CIS Group, said, “The application at TV Cultura makes a good match for the EditShare design philosophy. We were able to demonstrate clearly how simple it is to integrate EFS storage, FLOW asset management and third-party tools like Premiere Pro. Because of our support team based in São Paulo we were able to quickly configure and install the storage device, and supply training and guidance on workflows.”
The new storage and asset management system at TV Cultura went online in August 2023. editshare.com
