Hollyoaks Turns to EditShare for Efficient Media Management
Employing a comprehensive ingest-to-archive workflow powered by EditShare, the UK's longest-running soap opera, Hollyoaks, has streamlined its media management processes. As part of its 20th year of production, the show airs each weekday on Channel 4 and E4, with an omnibus episode airing on weekends.
With up to 1TB of content ingested daily, Lime Pictures, the production company behind Hollyoaks, required a solution that not only stored media but also kept it organized for easy retrieval. The EditShare workflow, featuring Geevs Studio MC video servers and XStream shared storage, has enabled the team to efficiently manage its heavy-duty acquisition.
Editing Efficiency with Geevs Studio MC
The Geevs video servers capture content from permanent sets onto the 224TB EditShare XStream shared storage. For added security, the Geevs records directly to internal drives and parallelly to the EditShare in case of a network outage. Once recording is finished, a copy is moved to the EditShare Ark Disk storage for nearline backup.
Studio MC also manages automatic incremental metadata, including episode, scene, shot, and take information – a feature that has proved invaluable for Lime Pictures. 'An important factor for us is the ability to make each recording with the metadata already entered at the front end,' says Alistair McMath, media manager at Lime Pictures. 'It's then there for the duration of the media lifecycle, which is roughly eight weeks.'
Flow Production Asset Management
The team also relies heavily on Flow Production Asset Management. 'With Flow Browse, we are able to track every clip from the moment it is captured on set through to post-production, nearline storage and finally onto the LTO archive,' adds Alistair. 'The production staff uses Flow Browse to check recordings against scripts and ensure continuity, as actors can be in scenes from different episodes in a single day.'