In this media day and age, it’s apparently not enough to offer just blazing-fast shared storage based on SATA drives and Gigabit Ethernet or 10-Gigabit Ethernet networking. EditShare, which over the past few years has made network-attached storage systems that act like SANs, is now focused on workflow.

EditShare claims that its server software is what allows its shared-storage systems to use a much bigger portion of those gigabits per second of bandwidth than its competitors. So it’s not a huge surprise that the storage company’s now touting its new software—workflow software—here at NAB.

I sat down with senior workflow specialist Grant Carroll at EditShare’s booth, and he explained that partnerships are what allows the company to focus on workflow and help its customers to work smarter and faster. For instance, most editors are familiar with Automatic Duck’s conversion software. Within an EditShare system, Automatic Duck still does its Avid-to-Final Cut Pro project file conversion to allow timelines to travel from one NLE to the other.

New for the show: EditShare now follows suit, bringing the actual assets (the stuff that takes up all that storage) over from Apple Final Cut Pro to Avid or vice versa. A special version of Automatic Duck is able to understand EditShare’s Universal Media Files and retrieve files from EditShare’s database. So editors can switch back and forth from Avid and Final Cut Pro and use the same pool of media files, keeping entire timelines intact.

Also new at the show for EditShare is a partnership with Assimilate that enables realtime DPX and Red 4K workflows across digital intermediate equipment and non-DI equipment. That helps connects a facility from ingest to finishing.

EditShare was also demonstrating its (relatively) standalone software programs Flow Ingest and Flow Browse. Flow Ingest captures over SD/HD-SDI up to four channels of video and audio with its associated metadata, storing each channel in up to three formats (one of which must be a proxy format) simultaneously. Flow Ingest might be used by an intern at a facility on a generic computer with no professional editing software installed, says Carroll. Once material is ingested, any editor or assistant on the EditShare workgroup can browse material, control decks via RS-422, and schedule actions.

Flow Browse allows anyone on an EditShare workgroup to view Avid and Apple Final Cut Pro clips and create a selects folder, all without opening an NLE (or having editing software installed on that computer). There’s full asset management functionality, with metadata entry, clip logging, and dragging and dropping clips to Avid and Final Cut Pro bins.