January 2014
www.tvbeurope.com
TVBEurope 45 The Workflow
Project Parking: a supermanager for post assets
By Andrew Ioannou, Marquis Media Partners
WITH ANY post production facility there are numerous projects in progress at any one time. However, the material associated with a project is rarely stored in a single location or post produced where it was recorded, and this makes archiving completed projects or moving temporarily delayed projects a challenge. In addition, the move from
tape to file-based capture has contributed to a significant increase in shooting ratios — in many cases in excess of 500:1 and sometimes much higher. While this is unlikely to change, it does present a problem when it comes to consumption of
Project Parking analyses all projects and media across all workspaces and allows them to be viewed in a user-friendly way
expensive online storage. This is particularly so if the edit is not going to happen for some
time. Therefore, a simple and effective solution to enable transfer of material to a less
expensive offline storage is required, without losing content into the ‘ether’. Inevitably media does get missed or lost, particularly if it was mistakenly put in the wrong location initially, and this is difficult to manage later on if a project does need to be retrieved. Collecting media that has ended up in several different places and putting it back in one archive, knowing editors can come back to it at a later date, is a time-consuming task. Simon Brett, director of
operations, Fox International Channels UK, explains: “Like most facilities, up until now our short-form promo content has tended to be stored in various formats and locations including back-ups on tape. This becomes
an issue if one of our territories would like to re-use a promo for example, as the source material and everything needed to re-visit the content to edit it for a different geographical audience, is not stored in the same place. It is therefore, a time-consuming task to locate and supply the content.” Even if facilities don’t need to supply completed projects to third parties or clients, the need to free up valuable edit storage is always pressing. Crews can return from less than a week of shooting with 500GB of media, this in addition to edit storage becoming jammed-up with stalled projects, finished projects, left over render files, duplicate files and media files no longer used by any online project. “Fox were looking for a complete storage and project analysis tool which would help us delete the clutter and archive projects and all their media elsewhere. In addition, we needed to be able to retrieve them at the drop of a hat, when
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