This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
18 TVBEurope Interview


www.tvbeurope.com June 2014


With production key to ITV’s core business, the broadcaster needed to reexamine current practices and, where necessary, evolve its workfl ow and technologies


ITV goes Nativ


After careful evaluation, ITV Studios selected Nativ’s Mio for its production transformation project. Adrian Pennington reports on the results


ITV STUDIOS is the largest and most successful commercial production company in the UK, creating over 3500 hours of original programming each year. With production key to ITV’s core business, it was only logical to examine current practices and, where necessary, evolve the workfl ow and technologies to make the division even more creatively dynamic and responsive to market and audience demands.


After careful evaluation of various vendor solutions, ITV Studio’s Production Innovation team selected Nativ Mio as the basis for a pilot of its production transformation project. “We didn’t want to build a bespoke system in house,” explains Martyn Suker, head of production innovation, ITV Studios, and participant in last month’s TVBEurope workfl ow roundtable. “Instead we wanted a system that would work off-the- shelf but is also fl exible so that we can confi gure it to handle our production data and workfl ows. There was a willingness on the part of Nativ to work with us to expand the core functionality of their product, providing mutual benefi t.”


Partners for change Working alongside ITV’s production staff over a six month period beginning in autumn 2013, the Nativ team gained a deep understanding of the organisation’s existing processes and how Mio could improve them.


“Only by putting new systems into a real, live environment


Nativ partnered with Adobe to integrate customisable Mio panels into Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Prelude


can you quickly fl ush out any issues and learn whether your approach is right and what needs changing,” says Suker. From day one the process embraced everyone involved, from editing and logging staff, to production managers and producers, ensuring that Nativ understood fully how they worked and that the production team understood the benefi ts of the new system. The approach was sensitive to managing change throughout, including workshops and feedback. The focus was on capturing data at its point of generation and streamlining labour-intensive tasks without interfering in the creative process.


“What we wanted was a comprehensive approach to tracking data and orchestrating the movement and tracking of media from one system to another in order to simplify production processes and to cut out time-consuming activities,” says Suker.


End-to-end data management The importance of effi cient data management is well understood at ITV.


“An awful lot of metadata throughout the production chain either gets lost or isn’t captured at all,” explains Suker. “One of the main criteria we wanted to achieve was to fi ll in the missing links in data, truly and for the fi rst time from end-to-end – from greenlighting of a commission, right through to delivery and even on to the consumer.” Like many organisations, ITV’s production information is spread between disparate systems, making tracking data and video assets very diffi cult. The promise of fi le-based


workfl ows is effi ciency on many fronts, yet the transition from tape throws up a number of complexities. One benefi t is the ability to acquire signifi cantly more footage, yet this also can lead to a loss of control over large amounts of media.


As material is input into the production system via Mio, producers are able to see at a glance how many hours it represents. That simple indicator is one practical example of how Mio at ITV is giving control back to producers so that they can better allocate and budget for storage, and plan what to keep and what to delete. ITV also realised that valuable logging information was being lost or input erroneously, with expensive and wasteful consequences from incomplete data fi elds and time spent trying to reconcile media in one system with information in another. “We need to know where content is, who generated it and when,” Suker continues. “In order to do that we had to have a technology platform that would not only enable us to structure and manage the data properly, consistently and visibly, but also that allows us to gain value from that data in other parts of the organisation.” Reconciling media with metadata is core to Mio’s functionality and begins well before any media has even been created. Within the platform, producers are able to capture the editorial specifi cation of a new commission (e.g. production name, channel, number of episodes, duration), in a process that allows media to be associated with that information as the production progresses. Mio understands the hierarchy of a production, series, episode and versions of an episode. The ability to create these


placeholders — or Business Objects — in Mio without having to fi rst attach data to media is central to its operation at ITV. Once a production template is established, Mio automatically assigns


appropriate data to the media.


Integration with Adobe For ITV, Nativ partnered with Adobe to integrate user- customisable Mio panels into Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Prelude. Adobe Prelude is a fi le-based ingest application that works in conjunction with Adobe’s editing application Premiere Pro. The integration allows producers and directors to add metadata to their video fi les directly from within the Adobe product set, but controlled by Mio. As a production’s camera cards are recycled, media is ingested and logged into Prelude with all technical metadata (bitrate, frame rate, aspect ratio) automatically extracted and catalogued into Mio seamlessly. At the same time user


defi nable ‘tags’ can be added to individual or multiple shots. In the edit, users can open up a similar panel in Premiere Pro, select the exact project according to production, episode or version, edit the project, and export the completed programme when the session is fi nished, matching it back to the production structure within Mio in the background.


Next steps


With the pilot programme complete, ITV is evaluating the results with the aim of scaling up the platform and rolling it out across ITV Studios productions. “We’ve seen that our approach is right, that the metadata framework works in practice and more importantly that production really likes it,” concludes Suker. “Everybody we’ve shown it to can see the benefi ts and how it can make life simpler.”


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52