34 TVBEurope The Workflow
Moving mountains in Manchester
ITV Manchester’s relocation from the city centre to nearby Salford Quays provided an ideal opportunity to reinvent the broadcaster’s post production workflow. Will Strauss reports
of discussion, in which every conceivable use of space was investigated — from edit suites around the edge of the building to a facilities island in the middle of each floor — they agreed on a design and a plan of action. During this process, however, it also became clear that the move would be a great opportunity to adopt, as McNab puts it, a more “elegant and flexible” way of working. “We had a rather limited
budget to do all this so we couldn’t just buy a load of new stuff to put in our new building,” he says. “Where possible, we had to re-use what we had at Quay Street.” At the same time, because
Quay Street had to be kept running throughout the migration, the current infrastructure couldn’t be re-used. Although this created something of an impasse, the potential negative was quickly turned into a positive, a challenge becoming an opportunity. “The fact that we had to build
ITV’s relocation became an opportunity to adopt a more “elegant and flexible” way of working
Noun: workflow; plural noun: workflows. 1. The sequence of industrial, administrative, or other processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion. Sounds simple doesn’t it?
Yet television producers the world over seem to spend half their days discussing how to improve, refine, update, change or overthrow their current working practices. The move from tape-based to digital production necessitated this and, despite complications, also provided greater freedom and the chance to reinvent the way television is made on both a creative and technical level.
One of the best opportunities to do this, of course, is when you have a blank canvas to work with: when a company, department, division or team moves office, for example. ITV in Manchester (the artist
formerly known as Granada) is a great case in point. In 2013, when the commercial
broadcaster’s northern operation moved from Quay Street in Manchester city centre to MediaCityUK in Salford, the first task was to work out how to move the North of England’s largest production facility 2.5 miles down the road without dropping a frame. The second was to devise a way of making
a new one gave us the opportunity to address some of the challenges that had built up at Quay Street,” says McNab. “Due to it being an old building that had evolved over the years, there were a number of pools of
“Why do you have to edit in an edit suite? Why can’t you edit in a meeting room if you want to? That drove quite a lot of the infrastructure decisions”
Taig McNab, ITV
it work more efficiently once it got there. Both were significant challenges, not least when you consider that ITV Manchester is responsible for 800 hours of broadcast television every year. That’s about 2.5 screen hours per day.
The facility itself is involved in just about every facet of
television post production from ingest, backup, editing, graphics and visual effects to dubbing, grading, archive, QC and transmission. To move this broadcast mountain lock, stock and barrel required serious planning from ITV technical manager Taig McNab and his chosen systems integrator root6. After months
infrastructure and it was difficult to create elegant workflows and it was tough to support.”
Work wherever, whenever The resultant new set-up is based around the mantra of ‘work wherever, whenever.’ The key to this, says McNab, was “unlocking the space from the task”, in much the same way
www.tvbeurope.com March 2014
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