WTFN is one of Australia’s leading independent producers of quality factual, lifestyle and reality entertainment programming, providing compelling stories for a global audience. The company has recently installed Project Parking from Marquis Broadcast in order to streamline its archive and backup workflow within an Avid Interplay and shared storage environment.
“We create TV and film content, from the development stage all the way through to international sales,” comments Mark Irwin, CTO for WTFN Entertainment. “We’re an Avid shop, running Media Composer on all suites and finishing in Symphony, all hung together on Avid Interplay. Currently in production are Paramedics, Emergency, Teen Mom Australia, The Living Room, Bondi Vet, The Great Weekend and a number of other shows. We chose Project Parking to help us archive and move media in and out of the Interplay/ISIS/NEXIS systems, reducing the manual labour required. It’s been essential with Paramedics, where we’re shooting more than 18,000 hours of footage for Season 2 alone!”
WTFN uses a mixture of Avid ISIS and Avid NEXIS systems for its Tier 1 storage, while Tier 2 storage comes from Synology. Material is off-loaded to Tier 2, transcoded to DNX36 and ingested into WTFN’s Avid systems.
“Project Parking allows us to pack-up shows, archive and maintain the Interplay environment much more effectively,” Mark explains. “It also allows us to easily reconstitute a project if we ever have to re-cut or provide different versions to our clients.”
Marquis Broadcast’s Avid platform-certified Project Parking tool is the industry gold-standard for Avid storage management and project portability, providing project analytics, visualisation, management and archiving. It has recently been updated with a new dashboard feature, enabling usage tracking for Marquis Workspace Tools and Project Parking systems, which is especially useful for multi-site companies, helping to monitor their data usage.
“Media for each of our productions stays on the ISIS/NEXIS until the series is complete; it’s the packing up at the end where Project Parking really comes into its own,” concludes Mark. “We have also used Project Parking’s ability to package projects so freelancers can work offsite. The system has saved us a heap of time and storage and ensures we’re running as effectively as possible. We have a fantastic relationship with both CompNow and Intraware, our integrators, who gave us a huge amount of support thorough this project – being able to pick up the phone is a luxury in the modern world! Every one of our shows now uses Project Parking with Avid; it has greatly reduced the manpower required to manage Avid projects and media.”
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