EditShare Supplies Large Storage Platform To BKW

EditShare® has supplied a very large storage platform to market-leading Chinese television production company BKW.

The EditShare environment, developed and implemented by local dealer and system integrator ThinkTone, supports multiple concurrent editors working on a popular reality television project.

Love Actually is the most popular reality show on the Tencent Video streaming platform in China, and is available globally on Tencent’s WeTV service. 12 young people live in the same large house for a month, and the show tracks their relationships as they develop. As well as activity in and around the house, the show tracks its participants as they go out and about daily activities such as food shopping.

The nature of the production means there are more than 100 cameras shooting simultaneously, generating enormous amounts of content and demanding powerful post production facilities. BKW looked at the state of the art in reality television production workflows worldwide. EditShare was able to bring considerable experience to these discussions, and the system design was tailored to the specific needs of Love Actually.

The system, developed by ThinkTone and EditShare, is built on the EFS450 storage solution, with 13 nodes and around 2 petabytes of storage, all available online. To enable the fast turnaround show to follow multiple simultaneous stories, there are 56 edit workstations across three production rooms. The show’s producers opted for a stylish, glossy look to the show, with the addition of highly stylized graphics.

"Reality television is growing exponentially in China, so to really win and keep an audience, you have to keep delivering the best insights, action and storylines," said Xu Bing, CEO of BKW. "EditShare and their Chinese partner ThinkTone were willing to work with us to optimize not just their technology but our workflows to ensure we can deliver exciting and engaging programmes, quickly and efficiently. The result is that Love Actually is extremely successful."

Said Bacho, Chief Revenue Officer of EditShare commented: "The challenge for reality television programmes the world over is that they generate massive amounts of content, which has to be turned into compelling television virtually instantly. To do that cost-effectively while supporting the creative look and feel of the show demands a very special production environment: not just secure and stable storage and effective asset management to track the content, but the huge bandwidth required to deliver it to large numbers of editors working together. Built on EditShare's storage and workflows, BKW's Love Actually is the model for reality television the world over."

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