ITV Studios Germany GmbH, founded in 1999 as Granada Produktion für Film und Fernsehen GmbH, is one of the most successful production companies in Germany. Owned by the British media corporation ITV plc with additional entities in Los Angeles, New York, Sydney, Stockholm und Paris, the German branch with offices in Cologne and Berlin established an impressive production portfolio, including the 10-year-running daily series ”Das perfekte Dinner“ on VOX and the reality show ”Ich bin ein Star – Holt mich hier raus!“ on RTL, adapted from Britain’s original format “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!“.
Further successful productions are the neo-personality-documentation ”Kessler ist…“ on ZDF, the cooking show ”Grill den Henssler“ on VOX, and various quiz shows like ”Gefragt – Gejagt“ and ”Quizduell“ on DAS ERSTE. Other national and international clients of ITV Studios Germany are WDR, SWR, RTL II, kabel eins, Schweizer Radio & Fernsehen (SRF), and Disney.
One-stop shop, outstandingly continuous
Only very few production companies produce this many TV shows simultaneously; hence, it is only logical that ITV Studios Germany also runs its own post-production facility. With most shows of the category “factual entertainment“ require episodes of between 30 and 180 min program length, ITV Studios Germany maintains nine in-house editing suites. All suites are equipped with Avid Media Composer Ultimate and Sapphire from Boris FX and are connected to the server via 10-Gb Ethernet. The usual editing format is DNxHD120, XAVC-Intra 100 or XDCAM HD 50Mbit, and oftentimes four to nine simultaneous video streams are required.
Depending on the recorded format and quality, the shows are being onlined to DNxHD 185 10bit, before grading.
Stability is the number 1 priority
An outstandingly steady and continuous post-production workflow like the one at ITV Studios Germany doesn’t leave much room for failure. When, in the early days of their small postproduction, the infrastructure periodically caused troubles with data accessibility and dropped frames, and even entire streams failed to perform occasionally, ITV Studios Germany turned to ELEMENTS. Another issue ITV Studios Germany was struggling with, was an inconvenient and troublesome user and client management that complicated the daily business. Time-consuming manual asset management to make media files available across the different platforms increased the effort to fulfill certain tasks noticeably.
ELEMENTS ONE and Media Library to the rescue
Ever since ELEMENTS ONE with the embedded Media Library was installed, the former problems have been eliminated. All editing suites at ITV Studios Germany are connected to the central storage, sharing media files across all applications, including Avid.
- Simplification of Client and User Management
ELEMENTS unique web-based GUI provides all tools necessary to efficiently manage the network. Being fully intuitive, there are virtually no IT skills required to even manage the users and clients easily and quickly.
- Reliable, consistent performance
ELEMENTS innovative and unique technical design delivers consistent high performance by default, providing the best and fastest possible throughput available today.
- Seamless collaboration for all workstations
ELEMENTS ONE grants client access via AFP, SMB and NFS, while providing a truly shared file system by enabling all clients to share files natively amongst virtually all NLE applications.
- Support of Avid bin-locking and Project Sharing
With native Avid bin-locking and project sharing support, ELEMENTS ONE eases the collaboration for every project significantly.
- User-friendly and easy project management
ELEMENTS extensive set of workflow management tools includes a comprehensive project management feature, allowing for easy and efficient management of project without any training required.
ELEMENTS’ user-friendly and fully intuitive web-based interface provides the option to manage both users and systems easily and effortlessly from one spot, while ELEMENTS Media Library with its powerful search engine, makes assets available for users anywhere, allowing to present their media assets through the same HTML5 platform.
For us, the main benefits of the system lie in the outstandingly easy maintenance and management of users and workspaces, impeccable reliability of the performance, and the fail-safe resilience. Also the prompt and knowledgeable service provided by the team at ELEMENTS is remarkable.
Siegfried Bacher, Head of Postproduction, ITV Studios Germany
Still growing
ITV Studios Germany is still growing, adding more editing suites on a regular basis. ELEMENTS ONE handles the increased requirements without any loss of performance.
Success Story Print-PDF, 500 KBELEMENTS is always ready and willing to make adjustments, both regarding hardware and software. The most pleasant circumstance about them is that they never leave me hanging when I have questions.
Siegfried Bacher, Head of Postproduction, ITV Studios Germany
