This case-study is from a large nature documentary produced by NRK.
Norway is a long and challenging country to produce nature-shows in.Stunning untouched nature spread over a long country with vast distances willhave a few practical challenges when you want to shoot and produce adocumentary at 8 locations simultaneously. Normally this would include frequentmeetings in Oslo and manual copying of exchange of files between theparticipants, or using standard un-structured cloud based tools which wouldmean you would need a data-manager at each node to reconstruct thefile-structure at each endpoint.
The challenge here was to do this on low budget with only “normal”journalists as the filmmakers and editors at each node. All editors neededaccess to all material from all other editors, and in the end the project wasto be onlined in Oslo.
This was all to be achieved without a data manger to support the projectlocally and without the budget to fly people to Oslo twice a month to exchangefiles and information.
The challenge was a seven episode documentary-series, shot over a year- following seven main characters spreadacross Norway. In this production NRK used their regular in-the-fieldvideo-journalists to shoot, log, edit, distribute and manage the project, fromeach location. None of these people are “data-managers”.
Additionally an 8th editor was brought into the team in a late stage ofthe production, located in Canada. This created the need to sync editorialmaterial and edit-projects very late in the project through QuineCore and ourproprietary MAT™ technology.
The project was in total about 40 TB of RAW material, typically in 1080AVC-Intra 50 codec and it was a production where NRK used the QuineCore toolsto the fullest.
A bit about the workflow:
When a card was ingested with QuineIngest a workflow was set up so boththe original camera material and the transcoded proxies were directly uploadedto NRKs QuineCore instance in NRK’s Azure and originals were downloaded toNRK’s main storage and the editorials were distributed to each of the endpointsin a structured way so they could automatically link up in the Premiereprojects at each location.
The same workflow - executed witha single drag-and drop operation – also created dailies in the QuineCore webUI,for the participants to browse and discuss the raw-material and thedistribution of tasks and stories between the editors.
All these transactions secured through Quine’s unique CopySafe™technology.
Commenting was done in the webUI and the files and comments were thensynchronized to Premiere with the QuineCore Premiere plugin.
Withthis setup the production was not only able to deliver rough- and final cuts fasterthan with a normal post production process. The production also contributedwith considerablereductions in carbon emissions. When utilizing QuineCore to the fullest in acollaborative production, the systems does not only automate away a lot of tediousfile-management tasks but also contributes positively to a significantly lowercarbon footprint of a production in reducing the need to travel for the sake ofexchanging materials and the need for single-use disks for these transactions,while automatically keeping the entire production and all nodes synchronizedand up to date as the production progresses.
Let’s look at numbers.
By not relying on moving people to and from the main hub in Oslo for thesole purpose of collecting hard drives and distribute them to the differentshooting locations and Oslo, the production saved approximately 300 airplanetrips, 1200 hotel nights and 1200 taxi rides. Additionally they saved the shortand limited life-cycle of 140 “Orange disks”.
Looking at the cost for all this, the production saved a total of 4,5million NOK with equals approximately 500,000 EUR at the time..
Using EU approved tools, for calculating CO2 emissions, there is acalculated saving of +204 tons of CO2 on this single production, vs “doing itlike we have always done it”.
Sustainable post-production equals efficient post production withQuineCore.
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