Support Partners have recently upgraded the BBC White City Production Village, based in two buildings on the Media Centre Campus, from Final Cut Pro (FCP) version 6 to version 7. The challenge was to achieve this without interrupting the editing schedules for some 40 productions. This meant that the work had to be done over two weekends.

The overall objective was to push the technology to automate many of the manual processes, and for the BBC team to be able to work collaboratively on-site and remotely.

The implementation phase itself was crucial but so was the planning phase and anticipating the support needs of editors following the upgrade.

Neil Bunkell, Implementation Project Manager at Support Partners, said:

“Support Partners created a number of SOE (Standard Operating Environment) templates for the FCP systems. These varied according to the role of the system in the production workflow.

“With such a tight window we had to think of a smart way of implementing the process as efficiently as possible. This was achieved by passing tasks between our team who worked on-site during the day and our central  team, who remotely accessed and worked on the systems out of hours."

Phil Checkland, Head of Business (UK) at Support Partners, added:

“We also had a back up strategy to ensure that there was no risk to production projects during the upgrade. Immediately afterwards our support team was on hand to coach editors on the system's enhanced features.”

This proved to be an efficient method for managing a large scale upgrade within a tight production window.

• There was no impact on editing schedules.
• Support Partners helped the BBC keep to a very limited budget, in fact reducing the upgrade costs from the previous version upgrad.
  
• All systems are now on a common platform which brings improved workflow capabilities to the production process.
• The creation of SOE templates means that there is a much faster restore/re-install process for systems if this is necessary in the future.

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