In 2011, journalist Eric Goens set out to create a production company to meet the same exacting quality standards as his reporting. The result was Flemish production house Het NieuwsHuis. Today, the company has a reputation for creating high-quality news-related content and boasts a respectable client list that includes both commercial and public TV channels in Belgium.
Het NieuwsHuis quickly outgrew its humble beginnings in the attic of Goens’ home, expanding rapidly over the years. Eventually, Goens took the next step to becoming a first-class media organization and purchased a building to house the burgeoning production company. With a new, modern building, it was also time to upgrade its creative tools and workflow solutions to keep pace with the new business opportunities coming through its doors. The company needed new editing suites and a server to store media assets and support collaborative workflows.
We were looking for a system that we wouldn’t need too much know-how for, but for which we would have great support.
Kristof D’haene, Chief Operations Officer, Het Nieuwshuis
Het NieuwsHuis turned to Belgium-based reseller DigiNet to help find the tools it needed to take its production capabilities to the next level. Under DigiNet’s guidance, Het NieuwsHuis created two new edit suites equipped with Media Composer and Avid NEXIS | PRO software-defined storage. Together, the solution delivers powerful video editing capabilities backed by powerful real-time collaboration.
Four Avid NEXIS | PRO systems provide a total of 160TB of capacity and 2400MB/s video bandwidth, and support for up to 24 editing clients. The storage system’s scalability and ease of use made it the perfect solution for Het NieuwsHuis, providing the storage it needs now and the ability to expand as projects demand in the future. It has also given Het NieuwsHuis a more efficient and reliable workflow to meet faster turnaround times and work with different formats including UHD.
“We were looking for a system that we wouldn’t need too much know-how for, but for which we would have great support,” says Kristof D’haene, chief operation officer at Het NieuwsHuis. “Before, we worked on mobile hard disks most of the time, resulting in many copies of media we hardly knew where the latest versions were stored. DigiNet advised us to go for Avid NEXIS | PRO as it’s not only reliable but also scalable. We’re growing but we don’t want to become a TV channel and therefore don’t need 150 clients.”
What’s next for the team? Moving their entire workflow to the cloud. “We finish our programs here in-house,” says D’haene. “Only some grading and audio post production is done externally. Sometimes the content goes back and forth with hard disks. Sometimes we use the internet. I’d like to do everything via the cloud. But we’re working on that!”
It’s clear that the sky is the limit for Het NieuwsHuis. And Avid is ready to take it there.