Objective

Addressing the evolving needs of one of the BBC’s best-loved brands required a smart, and intuitive approach to high definition picture acquisition, metadata management, and the broadcaster’s ever more demanding 360˚ delivery requirements.

Solution

The decision to move from film to HD as the Natural History Unit’s (NHU) medium of choice prompted a major rethink within the department’s post production strategy. As the BBC’s decision settled on Panasonic’s Varicam format, Support Partners was able to deliver a robust, metadata-rich solution that permitted early producer culling of excess material, and full resolution editing.

Following the BBC’s Factual and Learning Edit Village integration in London Operations, our team was commissioned to design and install a purpose-built Production Village on-site within BBC Bristol. Constructed from the ground up in a swift 15 days, the system comprises 6 state-of-the-art ingest machines, 15 HD Final Cut Pro edit suites and an 84 TB Xsan.

Client Benefits

A powerful render farm attached to the Xsan can create blisteringly fast viewing copies of programmes in almost any flavour from DVD through to iPod-ready. An innovative production viewing gallery allows a Production Executive to assess the value of changes in an edit directly from his or her own office PC.

Support Partners maintains an embedded team on-site, and also continues to coach existing Avid editors in both a formal and an informal capacity to bring them up to speed on developing applications and workflows