Serving The Technical and Creative Needs of Production and Post Professionals with the Avid Nexis | Pro
By Jim Bask
“Each client has their own project-manager who accompanies the project through the individual production/post-production processes within the establishment and operates as a communicator between the client and the internal or external employees working on the project,” Seemann said. “Individual project-managers each specialize in an area, such as cinema or TV. At other Cine Plus outlets throughout Germany, a variety of alternative workflows are implemented for different formats such as news or commercials. These outlets use the Avid NEXIS | PRO systems, sometimes in combination with different software.”
What sort of environment are we specifically looking at here though? How do these details influence the sort of work and projects that the team can take on?
The Cine Plus headquarters are based in Berlin. The three story industrial building houses 36 Media Composer editing suites, over 20 Media Composer logging workstations, 15 Pro Tools editing suites, 10 DaVinci Resolve digilab workstations, 1 DVS Clipster mastering suite, 3 grading suites based either on Filmlight Baselight or DaVinci Resolve (4K and HDR capable) and one grading DCI cinema with 39 Seats and a small 90qm Studio.
Their central storage consists of an Avid NEXIS | E4 120TB with System Director Appliance, an Avid ISIS | 5500 64 TB, a Avid NEXIS | PRO, and a bunch of other file-servers with around 500TB, along with about 1PB of additional disk storage. Apart from that, the headquarters are home to the management and technical support departments that also supply the other Cine Plus outlets throughout Germany and the Netherlands.
As a media contractor, the Cine Plus contributions to projects consist mainly in providing services for various production companies, but as Seemann mentioned, their work also includes original projects, which in some ways gives them the best of both worlds. Figuring out how these tools can and should be utilized on projects is a different discussion though, as different projects require different workflows, and the specifics of those workflows matter. A workflow example for a television production would look like this:
- Beginning with the data ingest (predominantly from Sony XDCAM) over an ingest-workstation to central storage. (Avid NEXIS/AVID ISIS).
- The material is then logged on logging-workstations with Avid Media Composer.
