Molinare focuses on collaborative post-production with Nara (Filmlight)

Nara, development of Filmlight Designed to provide secure, instant access to any media file, in any format, anywhere, for both internal staff and clients, it has been adopted by Molinare, post-production house located in the heart of Soho.

Molinare Creative Group is defined as a unified ecosystem of specialized brands that offers comprehensive post-production for cinema, television and video games. From DIT and dailies to localization, and with facilities across the UK, including a new headquarters in Dublin, the group champions handicraft and efficiency at each stage of the creative process.

To do this, the teams need a lots of storage and rely on files to be saved in various formats and color spaces, distributed across production networks with high access restrictions for security reasons. Darren Woolfson, the company's technology director, considers that this segregation of assets, so intrinsic to current post-production houses, made collaboration between teams difficult: "We realized that there were many people in our company who would benefit from more efficient access to our media. For example, a post-production director who wants to view a work in progress or the marketing team looking for material for a program, but these requests had to go through the MCR department for transcoding and then re-upload them for viewing. It was time-consuming and resource-intensive."

With Nara, Molinare can provide the right people with a secure and instant access to the media they need, speeding up workflows and efficiency. "We now have secure access to our production network and can give anyone permission to view any media file, wherever it is and in whatever format it is stored. Most importantly, there are no more slow transcoding requests, as Nara renders in real time and converts the file to the necessary color space so it can be viewed instantly. It seems very simple, but it is revolutionary: until now there was no solution that could perform all of these tasks with the same level of quality, efficiency or security," explains Woolfson.

Paul Jones, Molinare's director of post-production, elaborates on the benefits of the FilmLight tool: "The ability to easily scan the entire facility's storage is fantastic. Being able to play back basically anything - original camera files, EXR, HDR Pro Res, IMF, DCP - with the confidence that FilmLight is handling the color pipeline changes everything."

Metadata and international processes, with Nara

For the team Molinare, another of the main advantages of Nara is the possibility of extract large amounts of metadata on a specific audiovisual asset. For certain genres, especially those requiring large amounts of footage, PPMs can instantly see details such as resolution and frame rate, making planning and estimating easier, faster and more accurate.

In addition to supporting the internal team, Molinare also recognized that Nara could help its clients with a more efficient access to WIP files that they need on a regular basis: "The upcoming customer review feature is another key reason we chose Nara. It's not fully operational yet, but we are working closely with FilmLight on the development of this feature and look forward to offering our customers secure, instant access to the files they need," adds Woolfson.

Nara's ability to support efficiency throughout the Molinare's growing international business was another key part of the decision-making process: "10 years ago, we were a company operating out of two buildings in Soho. Molinare Creative Group is now a growing international business with facilities across Europe. Our goal is to deploy teams in a single location (whether in one of our facilities, in the cloud or in a data center) and use tools that facilitate collaboration between the different locations. Nara supports us in this objective and will be essential for efficient collaboration in multiple locations."

Desde la perspectiva de FilmLight, Sam Lempp, head of business development at Nara, celebrates Molinare's trust in the company for "almost 25 years": "We are actively developing the Nara platform based on user requests; all the tools we have launched so far have been suggested or designed based on customer feedback. Molinare has been, and will continue to be, a big part of this."