Sponsored by Elements

How Elements Media Library supports creative agency, Wordley’s remote post workflows

For Glenn Collict, Flame Artist and Colourist at Wordley, cloud workflows have much to offer, particularly for remote offline editing and graphics, customer reviews and feedback. Far from being obsolete, on-premises storage still holds value and will do for some time to come. In Wordley’s case, the ELEMENTS ONE helps by being both their media gateway into the cloud, with the ELEMENTS Media Library, and enables them to work internally on high-bandwidth material in real time.

GLENN COLLICT

Flame Artist and Colourist at Wordley

“It’s definitely an ever more virtualised future. I think everyone in post-production would be crazy not to seriously consider transferring more of their workflow and workloads into the cloud.

For us going forward it’s not necessarily about putting everything in the cloud. It’s also about having both a virtualised and real infrastructure on premises. When we look at upgrading some of our machines – which are due for an upgrade within the next year – they will be virtualised workstations hosted in Azure connected to the ELEMENTS ONE on-premises storage.

If you go up into the cloud and you have a hybrid workflow in place, you’re spending less than you would if you were to buy a physical workstation. You can scale it based on both performance and price for the job that you need doing.

For the foreseeable future we still need the Flames running with realtime access to and playback of 16bit OpenEXR and 4444 and where remote desktop protocol only delivers 8bit over the web and is simply not practical for grading. There’s no realistic way for us to trust the colour accuracy of high-resolution media when delivered through a remote desktop protocol. The ELEMENTS ONE copes with our on-premises requirement brilliantly.

Where the ELEMENTS ONE supplements the cloud is through the ELEMENTS Media Library. We use the automation package to back up up our Flames. We can view dailies, send material to clients and communicate cuts. There’s a proprietary media player within the Media Library that allows us to collaboratively view media and sequences and communicate changes back and forward. We have the ability to mark-up specific frames with timecode markers to import into Adobe Premiere or to highlight areas within the frames for online and graphics. All of this both on-premises and remotely.

We have had directors create rough cut material and make selects with the Media Library remotely. The XML will just open up in Premiere and we can start cutting. This allows us to deliver post projects to anyone in the world.

We can run bash scripts on the Media Library and remotely log into our Flames and run scripts to create project archives within the ELEMENTS ONE.  All of this without having to manually make archives or duplicate the drives off the Flames every night. It just runs for a couple of hours at midnight and you can view a log and ensure it’s all running smoothly. It will also create an error message if there’s a problem.

I’m keen to move more workflows up to the cloud as and when we need to for reasons including servicing, performance and price as well as taking into account where our clients work and where the best artists might be. A big door has opened up where we can now work with top quality artists anywhere in the world and this gives us instant scalability based on project.

Cloud storage is very likely to replace Near Line storage rather than Tier One in the near future.

Although the ELEMENTS ONE isn’t in the public cloud, it does allow the remote operator to make selections and run rough cuts remotely without the need to spin up cloud resources or take machines home. We can be more flexible in the way we invest now that low performance tasks can be scaled up in the cloud. While for high performance we can scale up for the extra horsepower, for example rendering. It’s all about scalability.

For Wordley, it makes the most sense to keep the main core of what we do locally – on premises – for security and keeping a handle on how much we actually spend, while always having access to that cloud burst ability when we need it.

 

ABOUT WORDLEY

Established in 1995, Wordley is a Campaign magazine Top 30 Commercial Creative Agency. Its largest customer, Oak Furnitureland was named 2019’s most memorable TV brand of the year by Adwatch, despite a lower advertising spend than all but one in the Top 10. Wordley also conceive, shoot and post campaigns for a broad range of companies including Motokiki, Funkypigeon.com, Glasses Direct and Clarks. The agency has a creative production team of 22 with a dedicated in-house picture post-production team of six.

Based in Penarth, just South of Cardiff, Wordley’s post department offers Avid and Premiere offline within a high-end finishing environment including editing, graphics, VFX and grading with two flames. Since installing ELEMENTS ONE they are able to work natively in 4K from original ProRes 4444 to OpenEXR across all disciplines.

 

ABOUT ELEMENTS MEDIA LIBRARY

Bridging the gap between high performance, on-premises storage with remote users

  • Rich HTML5 browser interface
  • Fast, visual connection
  • Rough cut and collaborate
  • Client review and approve
  • Native cloud connection
  • Built-in automation

www.elements.tv

 

Pictures

Main image: Feel Unique for Feel Unique

First story image: Whatever Makes You Tick for Watch Shop

Second story image: mo-to-ki-ki for Motokiki

Jon Creamer

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