Sprint Vision Taps EditShare for In-Track Big-Screen NASCAR Productions

EditShare announced the deployment of an end-to-end EditShare system at Sprint Vision, the company that produces the octane-fueled videos shown on big-screen displays at NASCAR Sprint Cup Series events. The system includes EditShare Flow for ingest, logging, and MAM; a high-performance 32 TB Energy Series storage server; and EditShare Ark Tape, which acts as both archive and backup. The EditShare system is the core media management platform for Sprint Vision’s video production center in North Carolina. EditShare is also used by Sprint Vision’s parent company, Motor Racing Network (MRN), the national radio network (“The Voice of NASCAR”) that provides coverage of NASCAR and other racing series.

“We were shifting from tape to file-based production and needed a better way to organize and optimize our assets. Even though we started with EditShare in mid-season, we’ve already benefited from a lot of efficiencies,” says Brook Horn, program manager for Sprint Vision. “Now, we ingest our footage only once — no more passing around tapes — and content is available for everyone who may want to use it. With Flow, our content can be logged, tagged, and indexed very easily. Everyone can search the EditShare database — from an edit suite or even from a laptop — to find what they need. Before it was very hard to locate specific content, as we had to refer to limited information scattered on different spreadsheets or text documents, or even resort to scanning tapes. More often than not, a producer had to rely on memory to locate a specific incident. It was clumsy and time-consuming.”

The Sprint Vision team covers 35 races each season as it travels the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. The video presentations at the track span hours of coverage each weekend, with practice sessions, qualifying sessions, and races, as well as live coverage of pre-race ceremonies, pre-produced team and driver profiles, highlights from earlier races, fan tributes, evergreen packages, commercials, and even music videos.

“EditShare delivers an extremely cost-effective solution that saves time and drives productivity for companies like Sprint Vision. The seamless integration between our products provides a fluid, end-to-end, collaborative workflow on a single storage platform. It’s a winning combination from Flow capture to Ark Tape, which allows users to browse, delete, and restore — including partially restore — archived materials from any desktop on the EditShare network,” says Andy Liebman, CEO and founder of EditShare. “The media management provides a practical framework for fast and easy access to an ever-growing catalogue of content that can be easily optimized well into the future.”

After every Sprint Cup race, the latest Sprint Vision footage, including pre-race coverage from AJA Ki Pro digital recorders, EVS replays and melts, file-based video from Panasonic P2 Pro cameras, and other contributions, is ingested into EditShare shared storage or moved off to the Ark Tape for archiving. Simple editing tools and metadata templates let users add details to clips, make rough cuts, and drag and drop clips and sequences into their Avid NLEs — all without requiring access to full-resolution media. EditShare’s interoperability with Pro Tools audio suites also allows the producers for Motor Racing Network to work on the same EditShare system for more efficient, streamlined production for their national radio coverage of all NASCAR series.