Altered Images Installs & Supports Avid Systems For October Films' Expansion

Altered Images installs and supports Avid editing and NEXIS shared storage systems as part of October Films' expansion to a new facility.

Independent television production company, October Films, has built a new Avid facility, designed and installed by Altered Images, with 17 new Avid Media Composer systems and 120TB of Avid NEXIS storage. The new premises are part of October Films' expansion plans as their busy operation grows.

"We've had a great working relationship with October Films for twenty years," commented Nick Frith, Marketing and Operations Director, Altered Images. "From its early days with the very first Avid systems, we've helped the company transition to Avid Unity, then to around 20 Media Composer systems working with Avid ISIS shared storage. With October Films' latest expansion, which involved building a brand-new Avid facility, we were involved right from the consultation stage. We worked with their builders to ensure the new central machine room – with its new 120TB of Avid NEXIS storage – would operate perfectly with October Films' existing suites, as well as installing 17 additional Avid editing systems."

October Films was limited by the number of edit suites available at its Camden office; adding the new facility in Benwell Road has expanded the company's capacity by 24 new edit suites, allowing greater flexibility when providing edit space for upcoming productions.

"As we have always been a facility based around Avid Media Composer, it was an easy decision to proceed with upgrading to the new Avid NEXIS shared storage," Mo Abdulla, Facilities Manager at October Films, explained. "For us, Avid is still uncontested in its rock-solid media management, which is key to us running an efficient facility, where multiple editors work with the same media shared across different project episodes. As we now have two operational sites, it's also important that we can easily move media between the sites and ensure that everything relinks first time when we open the projects. Avid's media management makes this possible for us and is essential to our workflow."

October Films' Deputy Facilities Manager, Jon Hagan, added: "In recent years, October's workflow has been to ingest and edit footage at native resolutions to allow easy transition to final post without need for a time consuming conform stage. However, with the rise of 10-bit and 4K acquisition formats, this has become less practical and we often now employ a more traditional offline workflow, where camera masters are transcoded down to proxy Avid media at low bandwidth DNXHD/HR resolution for the offline edits and then conformed at picture lock back to the masters. Whilst this does introduce an extra step before we can hand over to final post, it allows us to ensure we have the best quality possible for the grade and online. Also, the recent introduction of the resolution and frame-rate independent DNXHR codec means we can easily keep mixed-rate footage at its source frame rate right through the offline edit within Avid. This means we can hand over to the final post team without having to cut back in mixed rate source media or spend time re-linking in various different frame-rate projects during conform."

For further information about Altered Images and October Films, please visit their websites at:

www.alteredimagesltd.com

www.octoberfilms.co.uk

This article is also available to read in the October edition of Broadcast Film & Video here, page 20.

(JP/LM)