Postproduction teams for the recently released feature film, Closer, as well as the upcoming films Dark Water, Brothers Grimm, Cave, Ice Princess, and Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio used Avid Technology’s Avid Unity™ LANshare EX system for real-time collaborative postproduction.
Postproduction facility Orbit Digital worked with the six postproduction teams everywhere from New York to Bucharest to create networked editing environments that connected multiple Media Composer® or Film Composer® workstations via Avid Unity LANshare EX systems. This type of collaborative production environment reportedly enabled the teams of feature film editors to share footage and perform multiple editorial tasks simultaneously in real time.
“As film productions spread out across the globe and more people contribute to the creative process, portable storage and workgroup solutions are playing an increasingly important role in postproduction,” said Pete Conlin, a partner at New York- and Los Angeles-based Orbit Digital. “Avid Unity LANshare EX affords today’s feature film editorial crews an extremely stable and easy to manage real-time shared-storage solution. Collaborating on the same project, mirroring media, and playing several layers of FX on multiple sequences in real time are some of the many benefits these crews receive. We move film productions all over the world, and the fact that LANshare is so compact makes it easy to ship it out of a European or Canadian city on a Friday night and have it ready to go in Los Angeles or New York on Monday morning.”
Paul Levin, post supervisor for Closer, The Manchurian Candidate, and Bewitched states, “Sharing media lets our editorial teams load new footage, prep footage for dailies screenings, edit with the director, create titles or effects, and output versions of the film to tape using multiple Film Composer workstations simultaneously. All of the media assets are at the fingertips of everyone on our postproduction team, and no one has to worry about moving around bulky storage drives.”
The Avid Unity LANshare EX system includes nearly 3 TB of storage (expandable to more than 5 TB), support for both high-bandwidth Fibre Channel and low-cost Ethernet interfaces in a compact, all-in-one server and storage chassis, and the flexibility to connect to both offline editing and online finishing systems.
For more information, visit www.avid.com.
