6 Signs Your Video Editing Team’s Workflow Isn’t Working

Ever get that feeling no one can really relate to the problem you’re having?

Well, you might be happy to know that we hear from editors all day long — some from huge companies, others from newly formed teams — and there’s definitely a pattern: Without the right media storage solution in place there are several common challenges that come up time and again from our potential new customers.

We created this short explainer video to identify the six most common problems media workgroups face, and to give an introduction to the workflow issues that can be solved with the EVO video editing shared storage system.

Shared storage for video editing is continually evolving, and we’re frequently talking with people who’ve only recently started looking into what these systems can do. If you’re familiar with EVO you already know what’s coming up in this video and article, but if you’re new around here then we hope this post helps give you a better understanding about what the purpose-built EVO video editing server can do for your team, whether they’re all in-house or working remotely.

Signs your team’s workflow isn’t flowing like it should.

These are the most common issues media workgroups encounter as they expand. Eventually, the daily hassle leads to someone on the team searching to find the best server for video editing in an effort to eliminate the troubles. If you recognize some of these in your organization then your team will benefit from a more comprehensive storage solution to improve its workflow.

1. Your organization has a lot of video projects, you’re constantly getting more media, and you’re running out of space — Everyone knows that video files consume loads of storage capacity, but the effect can be profoundly expensive for a media team if it can’t manage its file proliferation. An ad hoc approach to storage quickly becomes a big problem.
2. You have most of your assets on external drives — Direct-attach storage (e.g. USB and Thunderbolt) is great for exactly one user: It’s fast, it’s simple, and it’s generally pretty inexpensive. As soon as you have more than one person relying on decentralized storage you put your organization at greater risk of loss in terms of time or data, and the problem compounds with more users to the point that the decentralized approach ultimately becomes too expensive and unsustainable.
3. You have several editors and other users who want to collaborate on the same projects, but can’t do it easily — If “sharing” for you means physically moving drives from one computer to another computer, you’ll be amazed how a real shared storage system will improve your team’s daily flow!
4. You bought or built a generic server, it’s struggling to keep up, and you’re tired of trying to make it work — Video forums are loaded with frustrated users burdened with troubleshooting odd performance and compatibility issues with generic storage systems. It’s surprising to discover that expensive, highly spec’ed servers fall down on this job, but the reality is that hardware isn’t everything: If the storage system’s collection of hardware, software, tuning, and features wasn’t purpose-built to the task of handling professional NLE applications for many concurrent users, then performance and compatibility issues are all but guaranteed.
5. You’re frequently duplicating files — You can’t edit from your storage reliably (or at all), so you copy files to your workstation, make changes, then copy things back to your storage system. But you’ve found that pushing and pulling files wastes too much time. You’ve unnecessarily created many duplicate versions, leaving your team to determine which is the right one, and in the process you may have even inadvertently overwritten someone else’s work.
6. You have a bit of a digital mess on your hands — You have media and projects scattered wherever you can fit them; it’s taking an archaeologist to find things, and you fear this problem will never get better. You need a system to help you organize and find your media and projects, giving you easy ways to tag and comment your assets.

If you recognize these signs, what you probably want is to put all of your projects and media on some kind of storage system so that all of your users can edit in-place directly on the network, without pulling things down from a server, then pushing them back up after changes have been made. You want a secure system that lets you choose who can see what. You want to get organized. You want a system that makes the daily process more efficient and enables you to confidently take on bigger jobs.

This is exactly what the EVO shared storage server can do for your video editing team. We call our EVO systems “workflow defined shared storage,” because they are flexible enough to transform the way your team works together.

EVO is built from the ground-up to be a high performance, easy-to-use shared storage system for professional media workgroups, and EVO comes in three sizes to fit your needs.

Customers all over the world use EVO every day to create things like full-length movies, documentaries, TV shows and internet videos, marketing and instructional videos, worship videos, music, and books on tape.

How does it work?

Here’s the basic outline explaining how EVO integrates within your organization:

• You migrate your projects and camera media from your old disks and storage systems to your new EVO.
• You connect all of your editing computers to EVO, using Ethernet.
• Users login to EVO at their computer and work on their projects directly on EVO.
• EVO prevents other users from accidentally overwriting open projects.
• Any new media is migrated to EVO as necessary.
• Users can tag and find assets using the included ShareBrowser management software.

EVO works with many industry-leading applications, but most companies use their EVO with software such as Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer, and Pro Tools.

Want to know more? Contact us today — we’d love to hear from you!