POST
IN-HOUSE FACILITIES
post is all down to the success of production, so you need to be smart about overheads, and be able to expand and shrink with demand. We have a core of employees and a loyal freelance base that helps with this. “Finding personnel has been
key,” he continues. “Our freelancers are fantastic, as are our core team. We have tried to make our suites feel like a professional space – not just rooms with a desk and an Avid. They feel like studio spaces with good kit, a good infrastructure, and they sound great too.”
Partners in post A close integration with internal
production teams is one of the obvious benefits of going in-house. “We are so ingrained with the
“We have tried to make our suites feel like a
professional space - not just rooms with a desk and an Avid”
KYRAN SPEIRS ARROW MEDIA
“We have offline suites as well as
a machine room with racks of blades and shared storage on our NEXIS. We also have fully specified screening rooms for grades, online and mixes and a library with LTO tapes and drives,” says Speirs. “Naturally, we run the edits remotely through the cloud and are starting to deep archive all our LTO and rushes through Azure. We use Limecraft in the cloud to store proxies for easy access and production to manage for their needs.”
Though on-prem hardware is the
norm, in-house facilities are keeping an eye on cloud utilisation. “All our ingest and backup is managed locally with spinning disk and LTO but we have invested in technologies that take advantage of cloud such as
frame.io for our playouts and viewing systems, Trint for our speech to text transcriptions and LucidLink for collaborative sharing of media for re-mote operators,” says Strous. “Eventually we would like to shift our backup solutions to being cloud- based when it becomes financially viable.”
56
televisual.com Autumn 2021
Challenges “Having worked for many years at
commercial post houses and now in my sixth year of working in-house at Manor Post, I honestly feel the challenges are the same,” says Cuttica. In common with our other
interviewees, he cited these as finding and keeping good staff, keeping up with technology and getting to the root of complex technical issues that may arise. “I do feel lucky to have the
support of our operating companies that choose to bring their produc- tions to Manor, but also have the support from All3Media assisting us
to keep up to date with technology and give training opportunities to the team,” Cuttica adds. “Our challenges are very much
the same as an external facility,” agrees Strous. “We make sure we maintain an appropriate level of occupancy, remain adaptable to changing schedules and always have a plan B. “Staffing is always the biggest
challenge, making sure you have great people who understand the tech, who love making programmes and feel like they have a career path,” he adds. “We’ve relished the opportunity to nurture upcoming talent. Whilst a large facility might have someone specifically dedicated to networking, on a leaner in-house model that person might also look after the edit technologies, ingest workflows and audio requirements too. It all depends on the scale of the suites and how big you want to go!” “We design our facility according
to our specific requirements,” says Speirs. “We never cut corners, but we don’t buy [the latest tech] unless it is justified and can be covered with future work. The success of
production teams that we also find ourselves heavily involved with acquisition from shooting configurations to on-set DIT management,” says Strous. “Manor Post Services are present
and part of the discussions as early as the budget stage,” says Cuttica. “Pre- production meetings are valuable to all those involved, enabling Manor to prepare for the correct workflow with the camera and codec choice for that production.” “Being with production
sometimes from the development stage right through to delivery can be incredibly advantageous,” says Spiers. “We consult on cameras and shoot in pre-production just as much as when it comes to us for ingestion, edit and delivery. We only have to worry about Arrow’s productions so this makes it easier for moving schedules and being able to react quickly and efficiently.” Arrow also has a great
relationship with external post houses, which looks likely to continue. “We like to work with talent that suits our creative needs or for certain show specifications like HDR or Dolby Atmos, or venturing into the 8K world,” says Spiers. “Strong collaboration and healthy relationships will always be there.”
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