This re-investment in EditShare workflow tools will increase the collaborative firepower across Pixcom Productions’ 22 Avid edit suites, 10 story edit stations, two Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve color grading rooms and two compositing/graphics stations.

Explains, Charles Laflamme, technical director, Pixcom International, “Most of the time we’ll have more than one editor on a project. On larger projects, it can go up to six or even 10 people working on it together. The EFS 450 in tandem with the 40NL nodes enable us to easily leverage multiple people on a project, without compromising system performance. It’s incredibly efficient.”

One of the biggest markets for the production house is documentaries, often working on projects for Discovery Canada. The team needed a way to manage the vast amount of media files that accompany such projects. First, all incoming footage from various shoots is ingested to the EFS 40NL nodes and then backed up to EditShare’s Ark Tape archiving solution. Then, the files are down-converted to a lower resolution and hosted on the EFS 450 for screening in story edit rooms and offline editing. 

For easy access, the original footage is kept in the 40NL until the show is approved so editors can quickly access high-res files and relink them to their timeline. Once approved, the final show is archived to LTO 7 along with the original content. Content parked on the 40NL utilizes the EditShare Clean Sweep function, enabling system readiness for the next project.

Laflamme continues, “For high value footage that can be reused on other projects, we log as much metadata as possible in the Flow database so we can find the file easily when we need it again. With Flow Browse, we can screen proxies of files that are not on the EFS 40NL anymore without having to restore everything. The editors can choose exactly which files they want to work with and we can restore them right to their media space for integration into new projects. We can even use those proxies for offline work. One of the great features is if the client is off-premises, Airflow allows us to give them access to the files we need them to sign off on. Flow has become a critical time-saving element for us and it fosters a truly collaborative experience for clients and staff.”