Clear Cut Pictures Continues Investment in EditShare Storage

EditShare, LLC is maintaining a strong relationship with post group Clear Cut Pictures Ltd.

The post house relies on EditShare’s EFS-450 storage across its central London facilities.

Clear Cut Pictures specializes in end-to-end post for factual television. It is the choice for major production companies and broadcasters, because of its skilled workforce and its ability to manage a huge variety of projects. At any time, the company will be supporting a range of programs, from those being shot over a period of years to those that are turned around within a few hours of transmission.

“When we went out to replace our shared storage, we were looking for something that would service all of our needs – to consolidate in one solution where in the past we had different systems for different areas of the business,” said Jess Nottage, group operations and technical director, Clear Cut Group. “We looked at all the likely players, but EditShare gave us more than simple storage, it allowed us to make the business more unified.“

“We started with 1.2PB of storage, which was a vast uplift on what we used to have,” he added. “We continue to expand, and we have identical installations in separate Clear Cut Pictures facilities in London linked to all London sites via our dark fiber network. Customized synchronization routines back projects up from one site to the other. If one site failed completely, the other would be instantly available with an up to date synced copy of project and media.“

Group MD Rowan Bray said: “Streamlining the operation has training advantages, workflow advantages, and direct and indirect financial benefits. It also gives us a consistency of approach, whatever the project.“

“Today we see huge amounts of data coming in: shooting on multiple cameras and fixed rigs, in mixed formats, mixed frame rates and mixed resolutions,” she continued. “Clients have 10 or 15 edit suites hanging off the same media, accessing the same footage – this is clever stuff!“

Clear Cut also emphasized the importance of support and communication with EditShare.

“In our initial discussions it was clear that EditShare was not just selling hardware and software: they were offering a relationship,” Nottage said. “That was key to our decision. We continue to work collaboratively with them to feed back on the product and functionality we would like to see. EditShare is very responsive to us: it is a real two-way relationship and we can see our input feeding into the product roadmap.“

Said Bacho, chief revenue officer, EditShare, said: “Clear Cut’s requirements put a whole range of demands on the storage network, from incredibly fast turnarounds to very long-term security and access. We designed EFS to meet the expectations of the industry, and we are proud to continue our proven relationship with Clear Cut through the functionality and services we have developed.“

When Clear Cut Pictures expanded the storage capabilities of their twin HA EFS-450 installations – these included dual metadata controllers for resilience allowing the system to survive the loss of a metadata controller or a storage node without any operational impact.

The new system was designed and installed by EditShare channel partner Jigsaw 24 Media Ltd.