New Zealand television production company NHNZ has purchased a Quantel Max HD assist station with Genetic Engineering shared workflow infrastructure.
The new systems enable NHNZ to further boost the productivity of its existing Quantel eQ multiresolution editing, effects, grading and deliverables system. Quantel Max frees up eQ time by tackling tasks such as conforms, quality control and playout, allowing NHNZ to achieve maximum throughput, productivity and profitability from the creative eQ suite. NHNZ can work on multiple projects across the eQ and Max without copying media or waiting for transfers using the GenePool shared storage.
Based in Dunedin, New Zealand, NHNZ is one of the world's leading producers of factual programming, working on projects for National Geographic International Channels, Nat Geo Wild, Discovery Science, Travel Channel and Smithsonian. NHNZ has more than 100 hours of television in production this year, including seven series and two pilots.
Stuart Moffat, online editor at NHNZ, said, "There's always been a bottleneck in our workflow around conforming. Previously we had to wait for deck time with our two HDCAM SRs. Now that we are file-based, we can do conforms whenever we want. Max will be ingesting or laying-back while the eQ is grading or in a finishing session. Effectively, I can work twice as fast. I can finish one episode while I'm ingesting the next one. We're looking at our future workflows too. One of which could be to edit, then output as one long HD clip and use Max to scene detect before it goes for grade in our eQ system.
"eQ is great for its sheer 'grunt'. It's fast, it doesn't fall over and it does things in a day that takes other platforms three."
