EditShare recently provided a large-scale storage network for Directors Cut Films, a leading London post house specializing in long-form content, with a particularly strong reputation in documentaries and entertainment. The new installation, which replaced a proprietary storage system, provides seamless transfer of projects between all the operational rooms.

Directors Cut, based in central London, currently houses 34 offline Avid suites, five online editing rooms which support Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve as well as full-featured Avid, three audio suites and a large grading theater with Baselight 2. With the increased demands of Dolby Vison and Dolby Atmos, when looking for a new storage network, it was vital that it should not only provide the capacity and bandwidth to support all these rooms, it had to provide the ability to move projects from stage to stage, and from software package to software package, seamlessly and transparently.

The storage system itself provides more than a petabyte of usable storage. It consists of five nodes each of 256 terabytes, configured to provide the highest levels of resilience and eliminating any single point of failure. The resilience built in also includes duplicated metadata controllers and high speed, fiber ethernet switches. A sixth EditShare node is also included, in a high security environment, to provide external access for receipt of content from locations, for remote log-ins, and for delivery.

FLOW, the EditShare production asset management platform, is a vital part of the workflow structure. This is visible to clients, who use it to prepare material, monitor progress and review and approve cuts. FLOW provides open interconnectivity, allowing clients to tag and prepare content using standard tools like Excel, with FLOW managing those inputs and translating it into assembling the right content in the right format for each editor.