TORONTO—Located in downtown Toronto in the heart of the production community, Eggplant Picture & Sound is a full-service post-production facility and creative studio that provides a combination of video, audio, motion graphics, animation and VFX. We pride ourselves on our ability to handle all of our clients’ post-production needs, without requiring them to work with different facilities.
Our robust portfolio of offerings prompted White Label Productions, the producers of the lifestyle series “All Star Shore,” a Viacom production for Paramount+ to approach us about shooting the series. The reality competition series used four cameras recording 24/7 with 13 more on-set ENG style, ultimately resulting in a staggering 2,500 hours of footage.
Quick Set Up
We had four weeks to prepare our workflow before shooting began and we needed a solution that would allow everybody on our team to work together and ramp up quickly. Given that we had such little lead time to get the gear and technology in place, we turned to Avid | Edit On Demand to get our workspace set up in a matter of days.
The onboarding process with Avid | Edit On Demand is as simple as placing an order and setting up a workspace to get up and running quickly and seamlessly. We processed the footage using the DNxHD LB Proxy workflow, which was then uploaded into Avid | Edit on Demand. The assistants then started the sync mapping process of organizing the hundreds of hours of footage. This is easily one of the biggest shows we’ve ever worked on but Avid | Edit On Demand allowed us to do the job, since there was no way we could have acquired the comparable amount of hardware in time.
The ease of implementing a remote workflow with Avid | Edit On Demand set our team up for success, enabling us to quickly ramp up post production with a dozen editors running on advanced seats working on processing the mass of proxies, which added up to 60TB worth of data.
We also had a team of four assistants and an additional 10 editors running on standard seats through Avid Edit | On Demand, which added up to almost 26 people collaborating on the project. Advance and Standard seats allowed us to save some money on our VMS seats by tailoring the station to the operators’ needs.
1.2 Million Files
With 12 editors working on a project shot in multicam mode, hundreds of megabytes per second are being processed—even in proxy mode—and the playback on the storage being worked off is very high. The ability for Avid | Edit On Demand to handle this volume of data without any hiccups was also key to helping us complete the project on a tight deadline. In our Avid Edit | On Demand workspace, we had 1.2 million individual files; with more than 10 years of experience managing a local system at EP&S, there was no learning curve to get things up and running with Avid | Edit On Demand, which is powered by the Avid NEXIS | VFS intelligent file system.
Avid | Edit On Demand enables us to drastically reduce our footprint on projects since we don’t have to house 20 in-person editors. As a result, we can open our borders and expand our talent pool and hire internationally. Being able to hire remotely has the added benefit of access to artists with the most applicable skills for a project, regardless of location. l
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