Design of Multi-user Editing Servers for Continuous Media

Based on a fifteen month investigation of a post production facilities for both the entertainment industry and broadcasters, we identified a number of challenges with the design and implementation of 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, compare the deltas proposed by multiple editors, etc. It is beyond the focus of this paper to report on each challenge and its related solutions. Instead, we focus on one challenge, namely how to support continuous display of the edited content for each editors, and techniques for physical organization of data to address this challenge