Work
smarter not harder
With an ever-increasing volume of high bandwidth streamer 4K HDR content to post, Operational Managing Director, Alex Meade and Head of Technical Operations, Michael Sienczak have invested in pixitmedia’s pixstor and ngenea through trusted supplier Jigsaw24 Media
ALEX MEADE (AM) OPERATIONAL MANAGING DIRECTOR FIFTY FIFTY POST We run two Flames, two Baselights, two Avid Symphonys, two Atmos suites, and MTI Cortex for QC. We’re a medium-sized Soho post house, but we’re working on ever more upstream projects over the past two years, like Snowflake Mountain, Capturing the Killer Nurse doc for Netflix and Dreamland for Sky all in 4K HDR.
MICHAEL SIENCZAK (MS) HEAD OF TECHNICAL OPERATIONS FIFTY FIFTY POST
Fifty Fifty had 500TB of nearline storage which was functional but when it came to pulling in the material, conform and playback it didn’t have the speed or flexibility we needed. We had a lot of local copies, data duplication and slow copy times, especially for EXR sequences. From a workflow and personnel perspective, we were wasting time. We wanted very fast storage as a central mount point to find efficiencies, and we’ve gone with NVMe. We now have 30GB of read, if we’re not writing, but we will always have at least 10GB which allows us to run four finishing suites with 16bit TIFF uncompressed. We are unlikely to be running four suites like this synchronously and so this gives us future headroom. With pixstor and ngenea being futureproof and cloud enabled, this allows us to leverage any storage anywhere in the world. That workflow will develop and more camera to cloud offerings are around the corner.
media.jigsaw24.com
Working with pixitmedia allows us to integrate with what look like predictable changes. Should SVoDs or Indies come with their own cloud storage, we can easily connect to it and its environmentally preferable to shipping the media. You can see it reliably integrate into everything that’s coming. Wanting a single source of truth was a key ambition. To make multiple copies of high bandwidth data is expensive. We can make savings further down the line by streamlining our front-end kit.
AM Michael came back with a list of options post-IBC. pixitmedia was clearly offering the best solution. That pixitmedia has had the market-leading solutions within the high-end for so long and a reputation for reliability was
AM We have a long history with Jigsaw24 Media and they helped with our expansion and infrastructure work in 2019. Jigsaw24 Media has the expertise to help drive change. Alongside pixitmedia, they worked with us on some of our network structure to optimise the speed available with pixstor. They provided the pre-sales engineering and mapped out a substantial amount of change to minimise business interruption. The core of the infrastructure and network optimisation work was completed over a weekend. Our clients didn’t notice.
Longer term, the cloud is going to be increasingly significant; using pixstor and ngenea is the backbone of how we’ll integrate those resources into the company.
reassuring. Investing in infrastructure to post the very highest quality work makes you risk averse. You need something that – literally – keeps you up to speed, not something unproved and untested.
MS I had worked with pixstor at my previous employer and when I saw ngenea for the first time I was an instant convert. The workflow possibilities are endless. It’s a mature product now and about to go on to version2. Other vendors seem to be on catch up.
MS We migrated 45TB of data on to it which took about eight hours, which is remarkable. I now know that overnight I can pull an entire project off and put an entire new one up and we’re ready for the next day. Now all our high-end HDR
SVoD, Flame workflow runs through pixstor.
AM Michael was overseeing that part of the project. I left on Friday evening and didn’t hear a peep and came back on Monday morning and everything was up and running as if nothing had taken place. It was a seamless and efficient transition with little if any client interruption.
MS Everything was pre-planned with lots of futureproofing and behind the scenes
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