74 TVBEurope The Workflow Northern Union
David Fox reports on the rapid expansion of True North Productions and its increased storage requirement across multiple sites — with some help from Flix
WHEN WEST Yorkshire’s True North Productions decided it needed to expand and that a trans-Pennine move into Manchester made the most sense, it wanted to share the risk via a joint venture and teamed up with Manchester’s Flix Facilities to open multiple post production suites in the MediaCity Pie Factory, Salford. This cautious, yet pioneering approach has been mirrored in its adoption of new cost- effective technology that it believes gives it the power, reliability and versatility it needs for this expansion and further diversification.
The decision to open facilities near the BBC’s new northern headquarters should allow it to take advantage of the surge of TV activity in the North West. The company can now quickly arrange local screenings, access new talent and reduce travel times to and from Yorkshire. The newly-opened facility has 10 edit suites, with Flix providing an in-house edit service for True North. At the production company’s Leeds HQ, it already had 16 edit suites. “It has got to the point now where we were spending too much time trying to cram everything in and were heading towards a compromised workflow,” says True North managing director Marc Allen. “We could have stayed in Leeds and kept our head down or gone further afield, so we
“In terms of overall
True potential: Marc Allen and Andrew Lurcuck are planning for the arrival of 4K
decided to reach out towards the talent and commissioning base at MediaCity. We’re not losing any capacity in Leeds at all. If things go to plan we will hopefully expand in Leeds as well.” Flix said the Pie Factory facility is part of its wider expansion plans, which include other premises on the MediaCityUK campus alongside its existing site in Manchester city centre.
Avid sharing To facilitate linking True North’s two sites and to securely mirror data in both Leeds and Manchester, a new storage infrastructure had to be implemented. “Even without this new Manchester venture, we needed to upgrade our tier one storage as capacity was becoming an issue on our Avid ISIS 5000 and it’s not designed to be dynamically expanded,”
it (Allen describes his engineers as “tech geeks who test systems to the point of destruction”). “Most of our editors are
dyed-in-the-wool Avid guys who are used to working fast,” adds Lurcuck. “We needed them to make the transition quickly to Space without having to re-invent our ISIS workflow. GB Labs has gone about things slightly differently from Avid, but the team adapted quickly. “In terms of overall
performance, Space is a step up from the ISIS. And its Avid sharing tools are actually better in some ways. Because it forces users to make copies of bins, there’s no chance of mistakenly deleting someone else’s work. It’s a really good discipline to get into.”
performance, Space is a step up from the ISIS. And its Avid sharing tools are actually better in some ways” Andrew Lurcuck, True North Productions
explains True North’s head of Post Production Andrew Lurcuck. As True North is an
established Avid house, Lurcuck needed a system that could support collaborative projects and bin sharing. The storage also needed to be able to grow and adapt to their needs. As data transfer between the two sites would be essential, a fast, open workflow was crucial. “We were fortunate to be
Truly madly: True North created a hard-hitting series about animal welfare for the BBC
approached by the media storage specialist GB Labs to beta test the Avid sharing technology they were building into their new OS,” he adds. They had been aware of GB Labs’ Space storage for a while and were confident about core storage functionality, but were particularly interested in seeing how the Avid sharing implementation would be handled and were happy to test
Data deluge The post production process at True North is now centred around 256TB of Space central storage, which is fully future-proofed and already delivering broadcast-ready
results quickly. This is despite the changes in tapeless production that
Lurcuck says is increasingly making editing
more labour-intensive. “Recording to tape imposed a discipline on location to shoot efficiently. Now, with file-based capture, post production supervisors are getting swamped. Our shooting ratios have increased and from discussions we have had with other production and post houses this is an industry- wide phenomenon. “As a result, we’re exploring asset management tools to efficiently process the higher volumes of media. What’s great about our new storage infrastructure is that GB Labs seems to integrate with every system out there.” Workflow and expandability
are vitally important. “We have to archive to LTO and transfer files in and out of the system constantly to protect assets and deliver media. The great thing now is that any
www.tvbeurope.com September 2013
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