The time has come to unveil our vision for the future of EVO and ShareBrowser.
Last year, we released tons of features like sync, backup, and replication for Slingshot, new panels and extensions for Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Premiere Pro, and After Effects, and scale-out clustering for EVO Nearline. 2020 will bring even more innovation to your EVO shared storage server and its arsenal of easy-to-use software.
We’re building an even stronger foundation for the next generation of shared storage, media management, and automation, with an increased emphasis in remote workflow technology. Completely redesigned with usability at the forefront, new features coming to EVO include a fully reimagined UI for EVO OS v.7, an all-new experience for ShareBrowser v.6, improved archive and restore, simplified multi-EVO and hybrid cloud workflows, extended API functionality, remote and multi-site workflows with Nomad, and secure, remote access to your EVO with SNS VPN.
Intrigued yet? We’re just getting started.
EVO OS v.7
First and foremost, we’re unveiling a completely rebuilt and modernized EVO GUI.
When we first released EVO, we built our GUI with the commissioner—or installer—in mind. A couple years ago, we introduced a feature called Secondary Admin, which was built for a better post-deployment administrative experience for supervisors, editors, and other workgroup administrators interacting with the system. The Secondary Admin approach became a guiding principle for our new GUI to better serve all users—not just installers, but post-deployment admins, too.
We know that many creative organizations don’t have the luxury of keeping a full-time system administrator on staff. We’ve streamlined the entire EVO UI to make management more user-friendly for all users.
System status, alerts, and access to support are moving front and center in EVO OS v.7. We’re improving navigation so you can quickly find what you need, and adding the ability to pin shortcuts to your favorite features in the navigation panel.
For added ease-of-use, the new GUI provides important performance data like disk and CPU usage, throughput, and uptime metrics in a collapsible header at the top of every page.
EVO’s high-performance shared storage solutions and built-in software products enable users to create content faster. As our clients grow, EVO is right there with them, fueling their ability to take on more, bigger, and better projects.
Whether it’s a 2nd (or 3rd) EVO on-site, an EVO Nearline, or an EVO in a different location, many users have a multi-EVO approach to powering their post-production, broadcast, and VFX workflows. If you’re working with more than one EVO, the new GUI is designed to let you manage multiple EVOs in your facility or various locations from a single, unified interface. After all, keeping your media accessible by the entire team is as important as ever.
Concerned about security? We’ve got that covered, too. We’re rolling out security enhancements like user auditing, HTTPS support, improvements to EVO’s firewall, and overall system hardening. These additions give admins the ability to create user logs for their storage and gain insight into what files are being accessed on EVO and who is accessing them.
Also, new folder-level permissions allow production managers to restrict access at very granular levels, simplifying workflows and keeping important footage secure.
EVO is in use in over 80 countries around the world. Last year we opened new offices in Asia and Europe. As we continue to expand globally, we’re dedicated to delivering the same high-quality experience to all of our users regardless of location. As part of this effort, EVO v.7 includes a new framework for language localization, laying a clear path forward toward internationalization and a more inclusive experience for non-English speakers.
With these features and more, managing your network storage will be easier than ever with EVO OS v.7.
ShareBrowser v.6
Not to be outdone by the sleek new interface of EVO OS v.7, ShareBrowser v.6 features an all new desktop client experience, fully rewritten and reimagined.
The new look combines a redesigned aesthetic with unified controls, making the transition between the ShareBrowser web app and desktop client easier than ever. Even more, ShareBrowser v.6 supports high resolution displays, so your media asset management will look amazing!
We’ve updated a lot more than just visuals, though. ShareBrowser has been rebuilt to provide a richer media management experience overall. The desktop version now supports custom metadata fields, allowing users to organize, search, and filter through footage like never before. It also features full screen asset previews, time-based comments, tag exploration, and gallery view browsing to help make your workflow and media management experience as easy and enjoyable as possible.
We’re also improving archive and restore functionality. Tying ShareBrowser v.6 directly to storageDNA’s Fabric API, you can archive footage directly from ShareBrowser with a simple right-click. The metadata and proxies for these files are retained in ShareBrowser, so you can browse, search, and restore from within the ShareBrowser interface.
We’ve expanded archive capabilities via the public API as well, allowing more of this functionality to third-party developers.
Welcome to the next generation of powerful, easy-to-use media asset management!
Hybrid Cloud Workflows
Storage environments are becoming increasingly complex. Organizations are constantly adding to their on-premise storage while looking to the cloud for a scalable solution for their ever-growing backup and archive needs. Hybrid cloud workflows are fully available with EVO.
EVO shared storage servers now have integrated support for Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and Dropbox. Additional integrations with Wasabi, Backblaze, and other cloud storage platforms are currently in development.
Slingshot—EVO’s automation engine—bridges the gap between your on-premise and cloud storage. With Slingshot, EVO can orchestrate a variety of automated file workflows ranging from scheduled file copies to sync and replication jobs that span across multiple EVOs, cloud storage, and even third-party NAS devices.
Some applications for this include:
- Automatically moving completed projects and assets to EVO Nearline
- Replicating data between multiple EVO systems in different locations, (e.g., LA, New York, and London)
- Orchestrating backups and file transfers between EVO, EVO Nearline, and cloud storage like Amazon S3, Azure, and Dropbox
That’s the beauty of our cloud integration—the ability to sync and backup your assets from any EVO system to the cloud manually, or automatically via Slingshot. By making automation and backup a central part of EVO’s functionality, we’ve simplified the process of managing data in complex hybrid storage environments.
Support for the Latest Post-Production Workflows
Our customers love to push the envelope. To ensure you get the most out of all your tech, we extensively test new builds of the latest NLEs, operating systems, and workstation hardware. We’re also integrating with more systems through our API to help improve your workflow so you can create more, manage less.
APIs
Developers and integrators working with our APIs can access new ShareBrowser and Slingshot functions to fully customize their integrations and workflows. For example, you can use our APIs to retrieve and update ShareBrowser bins, write metadata to custom metadata templates, integrate with Streamline, trigger NDI recording, and much more. The possibilities are endless.
This functionality is already being used by Ross Video to efficiently integrate Streamline newsroom systems with the EVO Signature Series. With this integration, users can communicate jobs and status seamlessly between EVO and Streamline, significantly improving your broadcast newsroom workflow.
In IP-based production workflows, applications can also access the EVO API to enable direct NDI recording. For example, using our API, NewTek’s TriCaster macros can trigger NDI recording to NewTek Remote Storage – Powered by SNS directly from TriCaster, without having to interact with the storage UI.
Adobe Productions
Before Productions for Premiere Pro was released in April 2020, we worked extensively with Adobe’s engineering team for several months to test the new feature set with EVO shared storage. Through this testing, we qualified EVO for use with large-scale Adobe Productions projects. We also learned just how powerful your workflow capabilities are with Productions. It’s a total game-changer. For more of our thoughts on the new feature set, watch our video review on Productions in Adobe Premiere Pro. You may also be interested in our Adobe Premiere Pro Storage Configuration Guide updated in April 2020 to include Productions.
Multi-site Workflows with Nomad
Released in March 2020 when everyone in the industry sought a need-it-now, work-from-home solution, we developed Nomad to make sure our customers could stay connected with their media from anywhere in the world. Nomad is a free utility that allows users to quickly retrieve proxy or source media remotely from their facility’s EVO shared storage server.
If you are running EVO v.6 or higher and aren’t set up with Nomad yet, contact our support team to get started working from home, or anywhere.
With Nomad, users can retrieve their on-site media, edit offline, and collaborate with the rest of their team on important projects all without going into their facility. This process can provide opportunities for employees to work from home long-term or as needed, allow better collaboration with freelancers, and keep projects moving forward while traveling without a suitcase full of bulky hard drives.
Nomad has helped many EVO users transition to a multi-site workflow for their remote editing needs. Hear the real-world experiences of users actively working from home, on the road, and around the world using Nomad in our blog post, A Tale of Four Nomads.
For companies with VPN already set up, you’re good to go. If you don’t have VPN access to your facility’s private network, we’re proud to announce that EVO is getting its own secure, cloud-hosted VPN service just for you. Introducing, SNS VPN.
SNS VPN
SNS VPN allows you to connect to your EVO server remotely as if you were in your facility. With SNS VPN, users can create their own virtual private network just for EVO, add and revoke users, and monitor their VPN status from any remote location.
Together, EVO, Nomad, and SNS VPN provide a complete multi-site and remote editing workflow to keep your team creating—anywhere in the world.
We are currently offering SNS VPN to pilot sites in the US and expanding to multiple geographic locations in the coming months. Nomad has been available to EVO users (v.6 or higher) since March 2020. ShareBrowser v.6 partner release will be available starting in July 2020 with additional point releases to follow. EVO OS v.7 is currently scheduled to begin rollout on new systems in Q4 2020 or later. Contact us for availability.
For more information on EVO, ShareBrowser, Slingshot, Nomad, or SNS VPN, schedule a personalized demo with our team today. We’d love to hear about your workflow and see what problems we can solve for you.