“While security, cost and bandwidth concerns often make hosted cloud solutions prohibitive for many productions, EditShare AirFlow’s ‘private cloud’ allows you to utilize your existing on-premise shared storage already used for high bandwidth workflows to provide secure remote access to media and metadata via your facility’s internet connection,” explains Jeff Herzog, Flow product manager, EditShare. “Add in the extensive new codec support and new Flow Story application, and productions of almost any format or workflow requirement can easily enable remote collaboration and editing.”

AirFlow, the web-based module that ships as part of the Flow MAM platform, lets staff search, log, edit, and play proxies in a web browser from any location. AirFlow also offers users the ability to securely download and upload proxy or high-resolution media from on-premise EditShare storage systems to anywhere in the world using a laptop, tablet or smartphone. It has been used on remote productions like Endemol's Wild Island reality TV show.

Flow Story is an addition to EditShare's collaborative and remote workflow tools. “Unlike traditional NLEs, Flow Story provides remote and secure access to on-premise stored media directly through any internet connection,” says the firm. “Having full integration with EditShare storage, MAM and video server solutions, Flow Story is aimed at fast turnaround environments such as editorial, reality TV, news and sports, providing users the ability to package content for finishing, delivery or playout.

“AirFlow’s ability to securely access content across boundaries or borders is key to optimizing production efficiencies and has already been proven to dramatically cut production time and cost.”

Flow Story was shown at NAB as a technology preview with availability expected in Q3 2016.

Building on EditShare Storage and Flow’s Apple Final Cut Pro X support, Flow now includes full encoding and decoding capabilities for the Apple ProRes codec family. This allows users to not only scan existing Apple ProRes media for proxy creation but also to transcode to ProRes from many other file-based camera formats. Flow supports ProRes MOV in Proxy, LT, 422, and HQ rates in any HD, SD, or even 4K resolution, making ProRes an ideal offline or mezzanine format for today’s high resolution workflows.

In addition to ProRes support, Flow has added ingest to Avid format OP-Atom MXF H.264 proxies to its arsenal of supported codecs, providing an easy path for remote Avid based workflows. At the time of ingest, users can create both a full-resolution file (e.g. DNxHD) and a low resolution Avid proxy, or transcode existing hi-res Avid media to the Avid OP-Atom MXF H.264 format later. These lightweight Avid proxies can then be downloaded remotely via AirFlow or locally, edited offline, and then seamlessly relinked to the high resolution Avid MXF media for finishing, using the built-in Avid media management tools.

Flow also includes support for scanning new 4K-centric codecs such as Sony XAVC and OpenEXR for critical DI and visual FX work.