“This technology is changing the way we make programmes by enabling us to make better editorial decisions and therefore make our content better,” says Donna Mulvey-Jones,Head of Post - Maverick TV and North One TV.

The workflow, used for the first time on Born Naughty?, allows production crews to upload content directly from a Sony PMW200 camera over a wireless LAN to the Forbidden Technologies Forscene cloud, eliminating delay between the shoot and post-production.

“We shot more than 350 hours over a year throughout the UK on PMW200s used by self shooter producer/directors,” explains Mulvey-Jones. “A 4G dongle in the adaptor was connected to an app on tablets and smartphones held by members of production for management of the upload of proxy media to the cloud over 3G/4G networks.”

Forscene reads the proxy in XAVC format, transcodes it and loads it into the user’s Forscene account. The material is immediately available in Forscene for production teams to review, log, edit, and give feedback to the on-location crew. At the same time, directors in the field can log in to their Forscene accounts to view and begin putting rough cuts together from anywhere with an Internet connection.

Maverick exported an EDL to complete post and relink with the high-resolution material on their local storage.

According to Mulvey-Jones, the benefits of the workflow meant that the producer/directors were able to view and edit content shot that day on the same evening of the shoot rather than having to wait for media to be couriered to an ingest station and backed-up. “It meant we could begin the edit the same day instead of waiting for a week,” she reports.

She estimates that the data cost around £1.20 to upload per hour so around £350 in total Add in the £11,00 cost of the Sony adapter (actually given to Maverick for this trial production) and it would have cost the producer £1500 to view media for the entire series. A licence for the Forscene software would also have to be factored in although Maverick is already a licensee.

“Even if you are outside a 4G zone the application caches the media,” she says. “The whole workflow probably shaved weeks off the production schedule and allowed greater collaboration among production staff since we didn't have to wait for media to be uploaded at the end of the day or sent on drives from the location to the production centre. Nor did we have to wait for exec producer input.”

[£1.00 = $1.60 or €1.28]