H2O AVID WORKFLOW AND CATDV - with BENEDICT DEGORNET

H2O AVID WORKFLOW AND CATDV - with BENEDICT DEGORNET August 11, 2016

Published on June 23, 2016 Updated June 24, 2016H2O Productions, May 24, 2016

Meeting with Benedict Degornet (Head Post Production) about the workflow set up around the AVID and CatDV solutions.

Hello Benoit, could you please introduce yourself, tell us how long you have worked at H2O and what is your role?I have worked at H2O for a year and I am officially in charge of post-production; I am the technical supervisor for all post production i.e. all edits that are made within the H2O building - daily programmes such as Touche Pas Mon Poste , Touche Pas Mon Sport, La Grosse mission Pour Com die , all the Best of , prime time TPMP and some specials during the year.

What kind of equipment have you set up at H2O since your arrival; what are the needs for programs that you mentioned?We have eight editing suites that are connected to shared storage, Avid ISIS 32TB with a 32TB expansion chassis.

We also have two stations on Mac graphics with After Effects connected to the ISIS and an assistant dedicated to the management of exports and of all the different media to deliver to the channel ingest. DID has set up CatDV MAM which is the heart of the system and an archive system PresSTORE with a Quantum Scalar I40 LTO. CatDV is the database that manages the entire system.

On the other hand, we had a data flow problem with our Avid ISIS storage, it was a bandwidth issue rather than a storage one. In fact, when 15 stations were reading and writing at the same time it was essential to find a solution for increasing the bandwidth and that's what we did with DID adding a chassis 32 TB ISIS. We have not encountered the problem since we doubled the bandwidth. Previously, when there had been excessive system demand, large storage had been the problem!

You trusted DID to work with you on this project, how long have you been working with DID and how has it worked out? Philippe Stoltz, reached out to DID technology and we

have trusted them to implement all our complete MAM solution and all associated development work, such as the PresSTORE archive on a Quantum LTO library and Avid ISIS shared storage to improve our additional bandwidth. The CatDV solution was chosen for its simplicity and modular construction; at first I had studied several alternatives but with hindsight and today's operational needs, we realised that it was the most appropriate and most relevant for H2O. This solution is a pleasure to use and has a Swiss army knife side to it and that is very significant. As as result it is easy to adapt our tool because CatDV offers countless opportunities.

Would you say today that the solution is functional? Are you satisfied with the installation by DID, does it work according to your wishes?Absolutely, the solution works perfectly and saves a lot of time. You mustn't forget that we've come a long way, because at the level of cataloging and indexing of our files, we were starting from scratch; everything was on external drives that were moved from right to left with simple Excel documents for finding projects

These Excel documents enabled us to know what each hard drive contained when we were looking for something such as archaeology; now we have a tool that allows us to access all images quickly and easily. CatDV performs very well for our daily work and it is a very important part of H2O. There is also an extremely important part in the management of our heritage.

In making The Best of show, having a quick overview of our productions, to be able select the best material and to edit in record time is now a pleasure thanks to the CatDV configuration. This saved us a lot time.

DID advised us, we followed their advice, implemented their specifications and had a high quality result.

So is CatDV a work-aid and an essential tool in H2O?Absolutely, it is used daily and is also used in the sale of programme extracts of the Best of ; without our CatDV MAM, production would become a nightmare and now it is a pleasure to manufacture Best of!

You use an Avid ISIS shared storage with edit stations from another manufacturer; is that the configuration stable, would you recommend this to your colleagues? I have already recommended this to others. In a year of activity with a two-chassis Avid ISIS, I have not had a single problem. Given the critical production times and programme distribution which must be done very quickly, we are faced with timing that is very very very short. We need a powerful tool and Avid ISIS is a great help.

What is your view on backing up media, and archiving in general, do you have any preferences? My previous experience has always focused on LTO. At Duran systems I had previously been using Retrospect with DAT tapes. We made Pro Tools sessions and archived them to tape. LTO tape has high durability and for me it is the most reliable solution. It is used for long term archiving.

How much media have you had to archive and on what media? One Terabyte archive a week, that is to say 40 TB for a year. In fact we archive 80TB because we choose to make a duplicate copy. We must not forget that it is the heritage of the Company that is at stake. We wanted to have a version of the archive at the H2O offices and another version located in a secure storage place. The Quantum Library is equipped with 2 players and I've been satisfied with it over one year of use. I recommend it to my colleagues. No worries at the moment; there are 40 slots available and I have a license to use 24. It is well made because I put a cartridge in slot 25 and of course it was not readable. It was only the next day that I realized that I had put it in a slot was not activated; there is some human error at times but it's rarely technical problems.

Regarding the technical support hotline, interventions, w

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