EditShare Speeds Production For Best Job In The World

A technology leader in cross platform collaborative editing and shared media storage, EditShare, has announced that Inner Sanctum Media (ISM) based in Brisbane, Australia deployed an EditShare 8TB storage system to facilitate production workflows during the hugely successful Best Job in the World competition.
Sponsored by Tourism Queensland, the clever campaign to hire a "caretaker" for the islands of the Great Barrier Reef quickly went viral, attracting international interest and press attention.
More than 40,000 candidates from around the world applied for the salaried job, which included luxurious free housing in a paradise setting. Ben Soutwell of Great Britain won the competition and begins his new job in July. But Tourism Queensland, with media support from ISM, proved an even bigger winner, attracting huge tourist interest and publicity valued at over $180 million dollars AU.
ISM was responsible for setting up the Media Centre on Hamilton Island and providing production and distribution support during the 3-day final selection process.
Regional and international video crews, including the US, UK, France, Japan and more, swarmed to the island. ISM produced continuous video news releases (VNRs) and web updates on the 16 finalists and daily events. Regional reseller Digistor provided the EditShare Storage Series server, which was at the heart of the ISM workflow.
Lindsay McNeill, ISM's Project Manager for the Best Job event, said: "EditShare helped us meet our goal of generating maximum media exposure for the ad campaign, the Great Barrier Reef and surrounding islands. We were covering all the activities and needed a system where you could ingest the content just once so all our edit suites could see it and use it at the same time.
"This was especially important because we had very short turnarounds and no time to waste. It's hard to imagine how we could have worked the project without this kind of system."
Paul Hayes, General Manager of EditShare, APAC, said: "The Best Job in the World project really demonstrated the value and efficiency of EditShare products. The straight-forward installation with Gigabit ethernet connectivity and RAID5 protection allowed ISM to be up and running quickly and securely.
"Media sharing provided a streamlined workflow, allowing the Final Cut Pro editors to concentrate on creating packages which kept the worldwide audience up to date on the competition."
ISM had a 21-person staff covering the event, including two video crews, an underwater specialty team, three video editors and producers. The EditShare was the hub for sharing media connected to other devices with standard 1-Gigabit ethernet. One workstation was dedicated to ingesting video from the HD XDCAM professional discs as they arrived from different venues. Media was immediately available to the 3 Final Cut Pro suites used to create the VNRs and web packages. Finished packages were up-linked via satellite to Reuters in London for global distribution on the news agency's media distribution platform.
Two additional viewing workstations in the Media Centre were connected to the EditShare, allowing other video crews access to the media. Crews using non-linear media could quickly download particular segments onto thumb drives.
The streamlined workflow helped ISM meet their deadlines and even exceed expectations. ISM generated more than 86 transmissions over the 3-day event and the Best Job competition made the top ten list of Reuter's biggest stories in the past year.
(KMcA/BMcC)