If you need to start a job in a couple of days, going to the cloud is pretty much a no brainer if you have a quick turnaround. That's where Avid | Edit On Demand solves that. I can add a seat in 15 minutes.
By any standards, this post-production project was colossal. It included an on-location reality show; a cast of 14; 25 cameras shooting 24/7; 2,500 hours of footage; a large, distributed team; and only four weeks to ramp-up a post-production process to begin as soon as filming wrapped.
White Label Productions, producers of the show All Star Shore, a Viacom production for Paramount+, needed full-service post-production that encompassed audio, editorial, recording, mixing, and finishing. Producers turned to Eggplant Picture & Sound, a boutique post-production house based in Toronto, Canada. Eggplant’s project leaders, along with Bruce Fleming, the boutique’s partner, and Joseph Murnaghan, system administrator, knew their best option was an innovative cloud video editing solution. They chose Avid | Edit On Demand and recently shared their project experience with Avid.
Eggplant Picture & Sound project experience with Avid | Edit On Demand
“It's the biggest show I've ever seen like that. The proxies ended up being 60 terabytes,” Murnaghan says. “It's a massive amount of data.”
Eggplant producers had to quickly find a collaborative workflow for the 26-member team of editors, story leaders, and executives located in diverse geographic areas. Fleming and Murnaghan realized that creating an on-premises studio was not realistic.
“In the current environment, it would have taken so much lead time to get the gear and everything in place that it just wouldn't have been possible,” Murnaghan says. “We had to find a solution to have everybody work together.”
JOSEPH MURNAGHAN
SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR, EGGPLANT PICTURE & SOUND
Avid | Edit On Demand offered the Eggplant project multiple advantages including speed, ease of use, security, and a unique SaaS on-demand option to scale up and down as needed.
“With Avid | Edit On Demand you place the order, set up your workspace, and you could be up and running in a day or two,” Murnaghan says. “You don’t need to move facilities to get everything done.”
Eggplant quickly created its Avid | Edit On Demand workflow. The substantial footage was processed into DNX45 proxy, then uploaded into Avid | Edit On Demand, allowing assistants to begin the sync mapping process of laying out the day's footage.
“This is a large multicam shoot. When you have 12 people working and they're all in multicam mode, you're talking about hundreds of megabytes per second, even in proxy mode,” Murnaghan explains. “The playback on the stories that they're working on is very high end. On the Avid | Edit On Demand workspace side, we have 1.2 million individual files.”
The best thing about Avid | Edit On Demand is easy access and collaboration. It kept us on schedule. We wouldn't have been able to deliver the project without Avid | Edit On Demand.
BRUCE FLEMING
PARTNER, LEAD/SOUND, EGGPLANT PICTURE & SOUND
As an administrator, Murnaghan calls the ease of setup and management “one of the best features” of the Avid | Edit On Demand cloud video editing solution.
“And, they're continuing to develop. You can tell this product is constantly evolving. They're trying to make it be the best experience for the administrator and the users themselves,” Monaghan says. “Here's the keys to the admin portal and you're up and running.”
The ability to create a remote workflow using Avid | Edit On Demand is a huge advantage for post-production houses.
“The footprint that we need now on projects is less. We don't have to house 15 or 20 editors in the building,” Fleming comments. “It opens up the borders for us a little bit as well in terms of looking for editorial staff. We're able to use U.S. editors, and we're able to use international editors.”
Both Fleming and Murnaghan credit the SaaS subscription option with simplifying remote collaboration.
Eggplant plans to incorporate Avid | Edit On Demand in upcoming projects and utilize the same cloud video editing workflow used for All Star Shore.