Studios Choose Avid Technology

Originally Published: December 15, 2004

Avid Technology today announced that postproduction teams for the recently released feature film Closer, as well as five upcoming films – Dark Water, Brothers Grimm, Cave, Ice Princess and Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio – chose the Avid Unity LANshare EX system for real-time collaborative postproduction. Postproduction facility Orbit Digital, which cites increasing demand for cost-effective, portable shared-storage systems in the film industry, worked with the six postproduction teams in a range of geographic locations – 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. Unlike other file server-based workflows, this type of collaborative production environment from Avid enables 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. No other SAN in the same price range can deliver this level of performance and portability.”

Paul Levin, Post Supervisor for Closer, The Manchurian Candidate, and Bewitched states, ”Avid Unity LANshare and Avid Unity MediaNetwork have proven crucial to keeping the productions I have supervised on schedule. 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.”

Using the Avid Unity LANshare EX system, Orbit Digital has created networked environments with multiple Media Composer and Film Composer systems for the recently released film Closer, starring Julia Roberts. Orbit has also delivered similar environments for the upcoming 2005 projects Dark Water, Brothers Grimm, Cave, Ice Princess and Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio. Production for all of these films began in cities outside the U.S. and then moved to either New York or Los Angeles, with Orbit easily transporting their mobile editorial solutions from location to location.

In addition, Orbit Digital has successfully implemented the same collaborative shared-stored workflow with the Avid Unity LANshare EX solution for a number of 2004 summer blockbusters. These films included Van Helsing, one of the summer’s top ten grossing films, and The Village, The Manchurian Candidate, Wicker Park, Hellboy and White Chicks.

”We’re seeing steady growth in the number of feature films choosing Avid Unity LANshare EX as a hub for real-time collaboration,” added Conlin. ”The system offers such good price-performance that our customers – who create some of the world’s most popular movies – just won’t settle for anything else.”

For more information, visit Avid Technologies website at AVID.COM