Following its May launch, Unit Post of Soho has announced that its original 10 Final Cut Pro HD suites will soon become 18 with capabilities more than doubled following its expansion into adjacent premises.
A new all-Apple machine control room (MCR), designed with the help of the systems integration arm of Apple re-seller root6, will ensure a smooth transition as the expansion continues.
The MCR set up is networked via fibre optic to Unit's Apple Xsan central storage. Rather than devote a large proportion of the budget on complex video and audio switching, Unit invested in five Mac Pro workstations running Final Cut Pro with AJA Video Kona 3 capture cards, which are integrated into the same 4GB Xsan fabric as the edit suites. They can work as standalone units for capturing and laybacks or as part of a cluster for high-speed rendering.
Tim Burton, Unit's technical manager explains, "The MCR has enabled us to keep the edit suites cutting 100% of the time, and streamline how we execute ancillary tasks. The biggest gains have been in digital delivery and rendering times, by moving these tasks from the workstations to a 20 processor cluster we have seen a five-fold increase in speed."
