PROGRESS was founded in East Berlin in 1950 and, until the fall of the Wall, was the only film distributor in East Germany. Today it holds the complete film heritage of East Germany, along with exclusive collections from East and West Europe, Vietnam, Ukraine, the US and more. The archive runs to more than 26,000 films.

Part of PROGRESS is a production company, LOOKS.film, specializing in historical documentaries. Original footage shot by LOOKS is also added to the archive, becoming a resource for film-makers of the future. LOOKS selected EditShare as the best platform to support its production activities, and parent company PROGRESS recognized that the flexibility, security and power of the EditShare solution was ideal as the foundation of its archive projects.

The goal was to create workflows which would enable the team to bring online vast amounts of film at multiple locations across Europe, and link it with excellent metadata in part generated by AI software. By integrating the EditShare storage network with a highly automated commerce platform from Veritone using APIs to build a seamless solution, PROGRESS provides archive access to film-makers everywhere, with a cost-effective license and delivery workflow.

At the heart of this system is the three-tier storage network from EditShare. At the top layer is an EFS server with a total of 120TB of storage, providing fast and agile access for online users including eight editing suites. Supporting that is another EditShare disk structure providing 320TB of nearline storage, making all content in current use readily accessible, and providing a buffer layer to move content in and out of archive.

The third tier is an EditShare ARK LTO8 tape library. Currently this has around a petabyte of storage but can continue to grow, and provides secure backup as well as highly resilient long-term archiving. EditShare FLOW asset management manages all levels of storage and generates proxies as required, and runs on its own servers.