Australian Matchbox Pictures opts for Avid Edit On Demand cloud solutions

Matchbox Pictures, a film and television production company with offices in Sydney and Melbourne, implements a complete remote production platform supported by a Avid integrated by its technological partner Digistor.

Catherine Durr, production executive at Matchbox Pictures, explains that "we were looking for effective remote work solutions that did not require VPN tunnels or physical computers in our offices. Matchbox produces in every state in the country with the philosophy that we employ the best people wherever they are. The Avid Edit On Demand system proposed by Digistor allowed us to apply best practices in post-production, even though our Real Housewives post-production editors and producers were located in different states, regions and cities."

Matchbox Pictures' requirements were very extensive. They needed a remote editing solution that worked for and with a large production that had already started filming. Your current workflow, with shortcut boxes Amulet, presented several infrastructure and remote connectivity problems that also had to be overcome.

With five editors and three producers spread across Australia, all of whom needed quick remote access, they needed 350+ TB of secure online storage. They had decided that traditional shipping of hard drives was problematic and a thing of the past.

Andrew Hogan, sales specialist at Digistor, proposed together with the local Avid team, led by Coconut pods, ANZ partner account manager for video, a solution that included an Avid Edit On Demand subscription with eight Media Composer outposts for editors and producers with the ability to work from the Nexis cloud storage.

Matchbox Pictures' supervising technical producer on the series The Real Housewives of Sydney, David Oliver, states that "the Avid Edit On Demand solution provided by Digistor allowed us to bypass cumbersome VPN tunnels and unnecessary physical computer setups in our office and deploy exclusively in the cloud. It allowed us to keep all of our physical hardware free to supply to team members as they came in and out of contracts and made it extremely easy to manage the entire system."

"We especially liked the flexible nature of Avid on Demand services, as we could purchase rights based on the expected duration of production, upload it to the cloud, and then shut it down. This meant lower upfront costs and no ongoing asset costs," he adds.

Oliverius continues to emphasize that “we used the new Avid solutions to do all the offline editing work for season 2 of The Real Housewives of Sydney. All post-producers and editors were working from home and could easily connect to the system to all work on the same Avid Nexix. “Assistant editors could also connect to help the team with group work, synchronization and exports.”

Avid On Demand allowed Matchbox easily scale your flexibility, performance and storage requirements required by the editorial staff. Typical jobs using Avid's Digistor solution included offline editing by editors and review of a significant amount of material on the Avid system by post-producers.

"With this solution, our entire Avid workflow moved to the cloud. Essentially, all editorial facets of high-end, multi-camera, non-scripted reality production - in this case, The Real Housewives of Sydney-, which would previously have required a significant investment in on-premise storage to ensure the performance of concurrent editors. Now everything was remote and at our fingertips,” Oliverius acknowledges.

In a seamless workflow, Matchbox Pictures processed rushes and synchronization on a local Avid setup in their office. Once the Avid proxies were generated, they were automatically uploaded to the cloud while the editing assistants synchronized and organized the material. Once the material was organized, local Avid projects were mirrored in the cloud to provide collaborative access to remote editors across Australia.

Oliverius comments, "This solution made the daily workflow extremely clean compared to setting up some kind of VPN to allow team members to connect directly to physical computers in the office or use software like Jump Desktop. Avid Edit On Demand is even more efficient as it runs on Azure servers, so we don't have to worry about our office network at all. The system is completely self-contained and extremely reliable. From an administration standpoint, it's also easy to troubleshoot any issues users are having and reboot the system. It is as simple as pressing a button.”

"No solution on the market is as efficient and scalable for Avid NEXIS and Media Composer editors. Edit On Demand also provides a consistent experience between editing in an on-prem environment versus the cloud," concludes Oliverius.