Editshare's high-end collaborative editing now available for small production company budgets

Editshare XStream ST

Editshare's top-end features are now avaialble to smaller production companies that want to work together on the same material

Imagine for a minute that you're a small production company working on a project with video coming in from all directions. Maybe it's corporate, sports or even part of a live TV production. Perhaps you have three, four or five people working on the edit.

These days you're likely to get video material arriving in all shapes and sizes: from professional HD and 4K camcorders to smartphone footage. Editors have their own choices for NLE and post production software.

How do you make all this work together?

Ideally, you buy a collaborative workflow system. These can be expensive, but Editshare's XStream ST package seems to offer a lot for the money.

What is it?

At its core is 24 or 48 TB of enterprise-quality storage. This means high quality drives, hot swappable, and protected using RAID 6. (Both of these systems are completely scalable if you need to expand later). But, as we’ll see in a minute, this is only part of the story.

The storage connects to the users' PCs and workstations with (a maximum of) 10-Gigabit Ethernet. Essentially, when you log on to the system, it's like having your own private local drive, except that the other people you’re working with can work on the same media. Editshare's software makes sure that only those with permission can see your material, and that there's no danger of overwriting or otherwise corrupting your work.

A nice point about Editshare XStream is that it works with most commonly used software, including Avid Media Composer, Final Cut Pro, Lightworks, Adobe Premiere Pro, Edius, Smoke, Resolve, Pro Tools and more. Most of the time, you can share your work down to sequence level - you don't just share raw material or projects. Bins and sequences appear as if they were made in your own NLE.

When you're working with a group of editors, it's essential to manage all the media. This is all part of the Edtishare system. In addition to the essential software that looks after storage allocation, there's Air Flow, a "Private Cloud" tool that allows users to share their work remotely for editing, review and approval. It's like having your production company's own private cloud system, with all the control but without the cost.

There are some useful finance options so it's a good time to look at XStream ST if you're in the market for an editing workflow system.

Here's the full run-down on Editshare's own website.