Matchbox Pictures is a prolific film and television production company with offices in Sydney and Melbourne. The company makes content for a global audience and have worked with every network in Australia plus a multitude of international buyers and producers. When the company had a requirement for a full remote-working production platform underpinned by a comprehensive Avid system, they turned to their technology partner and provider, Digistor.
Matchbox Pictures’ production executive Catherine Durr said, “We were looking for efficient remote working solutions which didn’t need VPN tunnels or physical computers in our offices. Matchbox produces in every state of the country under the philosophy that we employ the best people wherever they are. The Avid Edit on Demand system which Digistor proposed enabled us to best practice this in post, even though our Real Housewives editors and post producers were in multiple and different state, regional and city locations.”
Matchbox Pictures’ requirements were comprehensive. They needed a remote editing solution that would work for, and with, an incoming large production that had already begun shooting. Their existing workflow involving Amulet hotkey boxes had various challenges around infrastructure and their remote connectivity, which also had to be overcome.
With five editors and three producers spread throughout Australia, all of whom needed remote access quickly, more than 350TB of secure online storage was required. They had decided that the traditional shipping of hard drives was problematic and a thing of the past.
Together with the local Avid team, led by ANZ partner account manager for video, Kwasi Kwakwa, Digistor sales specialist Andrew Hogan proposed a system that included an Avid Edit on Demand subscription with eight advanced Media Composer seats for both editors and producers with the ability to work from the cloud-provisioned Nexis cloud storage.
Supervising technical producer for Matchbox Pictures on The Real Housewives of Sydney Series 2 David Oliverius said, “The Digistor supplied Avid Edit on Demand solution allowed us to overcome cumbersome VPN tunnels and unnecessary physical computer set-ups in our office and deploy purely in the cloud. It kept all our physical hardware free to supply to team members as they came in and out of contracts and made the entire system far easier to administrate. We particularly liked the flexible nature of Avid on Demand services, how we could purchase entitlements based on the expected duration of the production, spin it up into the cloud, then turn it off. This meant lower up-front costs and no ongoing assets costs.”
Digistor was the first Avid partner to sell their Edit on Demand solution into the Australian market. By using their significant in-depth knowledge of post-production they were able to further adapt and customize the Edit on Demand SaaS solution to their customers. Digistor have also been particularly successful in leading the post market through the Covid pandemic with their expertise in and around remote workflows.
Oliverius continued, “We used the new Avid solutions to do all our offline editing work for The Real Housewives of Sydney Series 2. All post producers and editors worked from home and could easily connect to the system with everyone working on the same Avid Nexis. Edit assistants could also log in to support the team with group work, sync and exports.”
Avid On Demand enabled Matchbox to easily scale their flexible requirements, performance attributes and storage required by editorial staff. Typical jobs using the Digistor Avid solution included offline editing by editors and sifting through a considerable amount of footage on the Avid system by post producers.
Oliverius said, “Our entire Avid workflow was taken into the cloud with this solution. Essentially all editorial facets of high-end multi-cam non-scripted ‘reality’ production – in this case The Real Housewives of Sydney – which previously would have required significant investment in on-prem storage to assure performance for concurrent editors. Now it was all remote and at our fingertips.”
Digistor https://www.digistor.com.au
Avid https://www.avid.com