Shared equals true


“Empire Design started in 1996 as a posters business and then in 2002 set up a trailers department to run alongside it. I joined in 2003. Over the years, we’ve worked on campaigns for pretty much every major Hollywood Studio as well as SVoDs, Film4 and many others. For example, for Working Title Films we’ve worked on Love Actually, Pride and Prejudice, Darkest Hour, Shaun of the Dead and Yesterday. What started in the basement of the building, with four Avid Media Composers, one Avid Pro Tools audio suite and an Avid DS, is now 24 Media Composers, five Pro Tools, six Flames and a full motion graphics department. We also have an office in New York that we opened in 2006, with five Media Composers, a Flame, a Pro Tools and motion graphics operator. The deliverables required have developed in recent years from TV spots and theatrical trailers to include the moving poster and delivering for digital platforms and outdoor.”


“We’re like an à la carte restaurant. When someone comes in we don’t know what they’re going to want to eat, what ingredients they require and how they want them prepared, or what shape and even what colour plate they want to eat from… all we know is that they’re going to want to eat.”


Empire Design’s Timon Mahony shares his thoughts on how the ELEMENTS ONE enables high performance and concurrent high bandwidth workflows to run smoothly when time is always at a premium and with often fast-changing expectations


TIMON MAHONY Technical Director, Senior Flame Artist and Senior Colourist at Empire Design “We’re using the ELEMENTS ONE


as our core finishing storage, hard mounted to the Flames. When we’re finishing Theatrical Trailers we’d ideally go all the way back to the camera files, often working in scene linear, up to 8K, from ARRI RAW or R3D, or working in C Log from DPXs. We have ELEMENTS ONE with 360TB RAW feeding our six Flames, all running concurrently; five at 25gig and mine with a 50gig connection, all through a Mellanox Switch. The ELEMENTS ONE allowed us to create a workflow to make everything faster, when our time to do things is seemingly ever shrinking. When finishing a Trailer, I’ll pull all of the


original high res sources on to the ELEMENTS and soft link that into the Flame and begin to create new collated sequences, and from these, new combined master offline sources as .MXFs. These files are sent to the Avids to cut from, so


that when we lock picture, they can make a final AAF from a source that we control on the ELEMENTS, removing any ambiguity about the shot’s provenance, which is especially helpful on VFX heavy shows, making the conform quicker. We can be finishing multiple TV spots, across numerous films on any given day, so having a linked workflow without bottlenecks, is imperative for our delivery. The graphics department are also connected via Ethernet to the ELEMENTS with a dedicated


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