South Pacific Pictures in New Zealand Implements EditShare

EditShare LLC has announced that South Pacific Pictures (SPP) has implemented EditShare’s end-to-end production infrastructure for New Zealand’s most popular soap opera, Shortland Street.

With EditShare, SPP now has a file-based, tapeless workflow with centralized storage and content readily available to any department at any point in the production chain, enabling the company to handle production faster, better and more cost-effectively.

SPP, a full-service production facility, has a team of more than 150 actors, directors, camera operators, sound mixers, video editors, assistants, loggers and other professionals churning out 250 episodes of Shortland Street each year. Chris Bailey, managing director of SPP, sees the EditShare workflow as a major boon to this operation. "Of course, HD has improved our production values, but so has our EditShare," he said. "Flow Browse is a great tool with all departments being able to reference shots instantly, which leads to better decisions being made. Footage and information are available to the edit suites faster. We can now finish in-house and grade more extensively, which all helps our look on-screen."

With the new workflow, the Shortland Street soap is shot, in the studio, with three Sony HDC 1500 cameras that are ingested through an EditShare Geevs broadcast server. During recording, video and audio are stored directly on an EditShare XStream server in full resolution and simultaneously on an EditShare Flow server in proxy resolution. Both sets of media are available to anyone who needs to view or edit it. In the show’s previous workflow, it would take up to a week for footage from a scene to be available for editing. Location footage, recorded on P2 with the DVCProHD 100 codec, is transferred to the XStream and scanned into Flow, where proxy files and database entries are generated. Bailey sees the EditShare tapeless end-to-end workflow as a major boon to the soap opera, which just made the transition from SD to HD this season.

Paul Hayes of the EditShare Australia Pacific team emphasized the importance of integrated archives, said: "It was extremely important for SPP to protect the footage and edit decisions for Shortland Street from acquisition through archive and retrieval. In addition to EditShare’s RAID 5 architecture, SPP has the added security of EditShare Ark Disk and two Ark Tape LTO-5 backups, allowing both on- and off-site protection, which has resulted in a reduction in the company’s insurance premium. The combined power of Flow and Ark allows SPP to browse proxy clips of everything in the archive and bring back high-resolution versions with minimal effort."

Feature Highlights of EditShare Workflow at SPP:

• Geevs records directly to digital files, eliminating costly VTRs from the capture process, with full-quality Replay to review and critique takes.
• Media is recorded directly to the EditShare XStream shared central storage with user-level security, mirror copy and offsite backup in EditShare Ark. Content is available for editing.
• During recording, EditShare Flow, the production asset management system, creates low-res proxy files in real time that everyone can then view from their desktop, eliminating tapes and DVDs while significantly improving the review quality and time. Users can review and rough cut media via EditShare Flow and drag and drop clips and sequences into their NLEs.

"EditShare has given South Pacific an ingest-to-archive workflow with metadata management, instant access and comprehensive administration capabilities for controlling and tracking assets," said EditShare business partner Doug Braddock of AV Intelligence. "And with a single vendor, there are no complex integrations; there’s also a clear line of accountability for system reliability and performance."