EditShare Powers Hollyoaks

Employing EditShare‘s ingest to archive workflow, the UK’s longest running soap opera, Hollyoaks, leverages the latest technology to make its story-lines come to life on screen.

“EditShare provides us with a single point of contact, with ingest, storage and archive being managed by an EditShare solution,” states Alistair McMath, media manager, Lime Pictures Ltd. “This infrastructure also enables scalability at an affordable price, plus flexibility when it comes to choosing our NLE and the workflow we want to follow.“

In its 20th year of production, Hollyoaks airs each weekday on Channel 4 and E4, with an omnibus – the entire week’s worth of episodes edited into one long feature – airing on the weekend.

With up to 1TB of content ingested on a daily basis, Lime Pictures required a solution that would not only store its media, but also help them keep it organized in a way that they could easily retrieve it.

“To manage this heavy-duty acquisition, we have four galleries equipped with EditShare Geevs Studio MC,” Alistair comments.

The Geevs video servers capture content from a number of permanent sets onto the 224TB EditShare XStream shared storage. For added security the Geevs records to its internal drives and to the EditShare in parallel so that in the event of a network outage production does not have to stop on set. Once the recording is finished, a copy is moved to the EditShare Ark Disk storage for nearline backup.

Providing multi-channel synchronized ingest of up to 16 cameras, 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,” adds Alistair. “It’s then there for the duration of the media lifecycle, which is roughly eight weeks.”

The team also relies on flow production asset management.

“With Flow Browse, we are able to track, from our desktop systems, every clip from the moment it is captured on set through to post-production, nearline storage and finally onto the LTO archive,” says Alistair. “The production staff also uses Flow Browse to check recordings against the scripts and to ensure continuity, as the actors can be in scenes from different episodes in a single day.”

Case study