Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/455278
www.postmagazine.com 38 POST JANUARY 2015 BUYING GEAR ITV STUDIOS NORDIC ADOPTS AVID EVERYWHERE FOR TV SHOW PRODUCTION BURLINGTON, MA — ITV Studios Norway, part of ITV Studios Nordic, one of Scandinavia's entertainment production com- panies, has adopted Avid Everywhere to streamline its media production and management, and facilitate remote collabo- ration across its facilities in Norway, Sweden and Finland. The Avid (www.avid.com) platform will enable ITV Studios Norway to accelerate production of its popular TV shows, while gaining significant operational efficiencies and cost savings. Part of ITV Studios UK, the UK's largest commercial produc- tion company, ITV Studios Nordic produces or co-produces more than 40 international television programs for broadcast- ers in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland, including Keep- ing the Nation Alive, Night Patrol, Come Dine With Me, Hell's Kitchen and The Chase. Faced with handling a rapidly-growing volume of media across its sites, while working with an outdated, labor-intensive and inefficient infrastructure, ITV Studios Norway made its switch to the Avid MediaCentral Platform. Remote collaboration has enabled production, editorial and engineering teams dis- persed across the region to work together in realtime to create, manage and distribute content. According to the company, by centralizing its content management workflow, ITV Studios Norway can more efficiently and cost-effectively manage its production pipeline. And automating existing manual ingest and transcoding processes has further reduced operating costs. "Our first priority is to create compelling and entertaining content to help our clients attract and retain audiences," says Jon Sverre Høiden, COO of ITV Studios Norway. "But we were spending too many man-hours performing mundane tasks, and couldn't access and manage our content easily, which led to production inefficiencies. By investing in Avid Everywhere and getting on the platform, we now benefit from a tightly integrat- ed, open, end-to-end workflow that has vastly improved our operational processes and productivity." The workflow, installed by local Avid partner VideoUtstyr, comprises solutions from the Avid Media, Avid Artist and Avid Storage Suites. Centered on the Interplay | Production Facility Package, ITV Studios Nordic benefits from Interplay | Production asset management and remote workflow capabilities, including Avid MediaCentral | UX and Media Composer | Cloud. On-prem- ise editing is handled by Avid Media Composer | Software and the workflow is supported with Avid ISIS 5500 shared storage. ANIMATRIK BOOSTS MOCAP SERVICES WITH NEW OPTITRACK PRIME SYSTEM CORVALLIS, OR — Animatrik (www.animatrik.com), a Canadian-based motion capture services provider that works across the feature film, video game and experiential industries, recently pur- chased an OptiTrack (www.naturalpoint.com/optitrack) mocap system featuring the company's Prime 41 cameras with Motive software. According to Brett Ineson, president and CTO of Animatrik, the small form-factor of the Prime 41's is just one of the stand-out features he says is extremely beneficial when shooting on-loca- tion and the cameras need to remain hidden and out of scenes. Ineson says he also chose the Prime 41 camera for its performance. "The sensor and the lens combination [OptiTrack] put together is really sensitive to the infrared light, which is what we care about, so we can see markers from very far away. Something else that's simple, but that we really like, is how the cameras all connect with off-the-shelf Cat-6 networking cables. We can buy these cables anywhere and make them any length. That's very handy because on-set, cables tend to get ruined by getting run over by forklifts and other gear. If it's a proprietary cable and you're left there with a broken one, you're going to be down a camera. Also, OptiTrack was able to offer an attractive price. When you need so many of them, that helps a lot." Considered by OptiTrack as the "premiere offering" in its Prime Series line of high-perfor- mance motion capture and tracking cameras, the Prime 41 is optimized for large volume motion tracking. It features a 51-degree angle FOV and is able to track a 16mm mocap marker from over 100 feet away. Infrared strobes and a specially engineered band-pass filter allow the Prime 41 to easily track reflective markers outside in full sunlight, while the discreet illumination prevents per- former distraction. The 4.1 megapixel resolution enables simultaneous body and finger tracking in large volumes. With GigE and PoE+ connectivity, the Prime 41 cameras transmit power and data via a single cable. Genlock, SMPTE timecode and external sync in/out enable realtime synchroni- zation with external data sources for easy integration with advanced production pipelines. The OptiTrack Motive software was designed to work seamlessly with the full range of Opti- Track cameras for a motion capture pipeline that produces clean 3D data, while enabling larger capture volumes. OptiTrack offers different Motive software solutions, including Motive:Body for entertainment applications, and Motive:Tracker, which is geared toward life sciences applications. All versions of Motive software include a 64-bit, multi-threaded architecture that facilitates the realtime tracking of more objects and actors, longer recordings, larger file sizes and support for hundreds of cameras per system; easy camera setup that can be handled by one person and with 75 percent faster configuration; and drag-and-drop selection that establishes groups of cameras with common settings, while retaining control of individual camera parameters. "The software is the communication with the cameras, but it also reconstructs the 2D that comes off the cameras into 3D data and then that's the format that we need to deliver to the rest of our pipeline," explains Ineson. Additionally, Ineson says the new system has integrated well with his existing pipeline. "We are able to talk to our other systems, hard disk video recorders and our shot tracking system from the Motive software, so that's very handy," he says. "Of course, the system is designed to genlock to all our other systems, so we know we're recording the same frame, timecode locked, whether it's using our face cameras or reference video cameras, or the mocap system itself." — BY LINDA ROMANELLO