When it comes to stepping up the speed of media across the production chain, the Pittsburgh Penguins turned to EditShare shared storage solutions. Prior to the installation of the advanced workflow-engineered shared storage solution, an EditShare Storage Series 8U 30TB system, the Pittsburgh Penguins digitized specific game clips to each workstation using an off-the-shelf drive. The game source material became isolated to either a specific editing workstation equipped with Apple Final Cut Pro or a compositing workstation equipped with Adobe After Effects.  Because certain media was housed on specific workstations and not in a central location, media had to be constantly re-digitized in order to be available in multiple locations. Further, there was a constant battle to balance the media space per editing and compositing workstation, limiting the amount of material to work with for any given highlight or replay project.

To resolve the “silos of media” issue, the Pittsburgh Penguins installed EditShare. The Penguins needed the EditShare system to help mobilize media and turn around robust packages more quickly for commercials, scoreboard highlights and promotions - as well as the Penguins web site. Another catalyst for shared storage was the increasing demand from the NHL for more online content. Not only was the EditShare going to mobilize their media, it was also going to be used for multi-platform and multi-channel distribution.

The EditShare system provides high-performance and an open environment for creative teams to share media regardless of application and platform. Users of Apple, Adobe, Assimilate, Autodesk, Avid, Digidesign, Sony, Thomson and more can connect via Gigabit or 10-gigabit Ethernet and freely share media regardless of size or format. The EditShare system also provides true project and media sharing for Apple and Avid users with user management tools that are designed specifically for real-time collaboration in post and broadcast workflows.

The Pittsburgh Penguins post team - working on 8 Apple Final Cut Pro workstations and 2 Adobe After Effects workstations - use the EditShare system for simultaneous project and media sharing while producing highlights and replays of the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey games. Being a “think on your feet” group of users, the Pittsburgh Penguins post editors use the EditShare to work in ways they did not anticipate.  They record shows for the web and scoreboard pre-game, they are able to pull up logged highlights of various talk shows on the fly using laptops, even as commentators are speaking, and they use the media in real-time as b-roll.

For the Pittsburgh Penguins editors, sharing media is job number one for the various end products that they need to deliver.  Project sharing is also emerging as a way to cut larger form material and could become more useful as they look toward adding live ingest solutions such as EditShare’s new Flow solution for creating in-game highlights packages.