Design of multi-user editing servers for continuous media

Based on a fifteen month investigation of post production facilities for both the entertainment and broadcast industries, we identified a number of challenges that arise when designing a server in support of multiple editing stations. These include how to: share the same content among multiple editors; support continuous display of the edited content for each editor; support complex editing operations; compute the set of changes (deltas) proposed by an editor; and to compare the deltas proposed by multiple editors. It is beyond the focus of this paper to report on each challenge and its related solutions. Instead, we focus on one challenge and the physical design of the system that addresses this issue