For over 25 years, New Wave Entertainment has been at the forefront of entertainment marketing, renowned for producing the highest quality content, and offering premier post-production and finishing services. Headquartered in the heart of the US movie industry in Burbank, CA, New Wave Entertainment, also operates two sub-brands; hi5.agency,a full-service creative agency producing digital, social and mobile campaigns, and Project X A/V, which specializes in trailers and TV spots for motion picture, television, and streaming services. Combined, the employee-owned corporation provides a complete range of digital and entertainment marketing services, including post-production. With state-of-the-art facilities New Wave Entertainment has been involved in numerous Hollywood productions such as Toy Story 4, Frozen II, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse, Deadpool 2 and Venom, and as well as a host of productions for the small screen, such as Birdbox, Marvel’s The Punisher, 13 Reasons Why and many others.
With its post-production facility New Wave Finishing, Hollywood’s premier destination for motion picture marketing post-production, New Wave Entertainment pioneered the idea of boutique TV spot finishing. The model for ‘on-demand’ services that the company has created continues to lead the industry today. New Wave Finishing has been involved in some of the most extensive movie marketing campaigns in modern history and is responsible for thousands of TV spots, online trailers, digital one-sheets, and social media campaigns every year.
New Wave Finishing also functions as the in-house post-production department, dedicated to the needs of New Wave’s television division, producing countless TV specials and shows for Comedy Central, Netflix, Hulu, Showtime and many others. With cutting edge technology, New Wave Finishing’s service portfolio includes 4k and HD online editorial, color correction, mixing, standards conversion, and transcoding.
Netflix production is on the rise at New Wave Entertainment
Thanks to its formidable track record, New Wave Entertainment have experienced a continued increase in demand for their post-production and VFX services. Over the past few years Netflix has developed into a content producing giant that progressively places more business into the hands of New Wave Entertainment, relying heavily upon the service and support that the company’s staff are able to provide. One major point that New Wave Entertainment have had to consider in relation to their working partnership with Netflix is the stringent set of requirements relating to security and increased security specifications that this broadcasting heavyweight now requires.
When They See Us
More space and more security
Depending on the content produced, the minimum requirement for Netflix image resolution is HD (1920×1080), but they prefer all content to be delivered in Native 4K DCI (4096×2160), UHD (3840×2160), or Native 2K DCI (2048×1080). The final output images should be at least 10-bit (e.g., uncompressed DPX, EXR) or compressed at a bitrate of at least 175 Mbps (e.g., DNxHD 175x, ProRes 422 HQ, or higher). All Netflix content has to be delivered to them in Interoperable Master Format (IMF).
Rick Nowak, Chief Operating Officer
ELEMENTS helped us both expand our storage capacities and boost our network security to comply with Netflix’s requirements.
Rick Nowak, Chief Operating Officer, New Wave Entertainment
These specifications require not only vast amounts of storage space, but also a high-performance server to handle the transcoding workload. Since the existing storage volumes had reached their maximum capacity, New Wave Entertainment had to consider a reorganisation and amplification of it’s resources.
The new division needs new technology
As this overhaul was needed to comply with Netflix’s requirements, the logical step for New Wave Entertainment was to establish a new post-production and VFX department altogether; a self-sustaining island, entirely disconnected from their other resources, without internet access for the workstations, and improved user rights management.
Guaranteeing high-caliber data security is crucial when providing services to Netflix.
Mike Clow, VP Technical Operations, New Wave Entertainment
After some thorough research on what state-of-the-art technology would provide New Wave Entertainment with high-performance storage and customisable and easy-to-use rights management for increased data security, they decided on an ELEMENTS ONE 60bay – with all the bells and whistles.
Mixed environment, uniform server and storage appliance
New Wave Entertainment enlisted the help of ELEMENTS’ Solution Architects to configure the server and storage appliance with some head space ready for future use. Currently ELEMENTS ONE connects various ProRes 4444-XQworkstations. New Wave Entertainment also deploys Adobe Premiere workstations and Autodesk Flames, both applications operating on either OS/X or Linux. wWhilst the Adobe Premiere, Colorfront, and Flame clients predominantly work in 4K, others work in an array of mixed resolutions.
13 Reasons Why
Although ELEMENTS ONE provides Fibre Channel and Ethernet connectivity simultaneously, New Wave Entertainment utilises a 100GbE optical connection to the core switch while connecting the workstations via 10GbE. Bringing Fibre Channel into the mix is a a future development in the making.
Shortly after the deployment of the 60Bay ELEMENTS ONE system, New Wave Entertainment invested in a second ELEMENTS ONE system for their Graphics Department. This standalone system is an ELEMENTS ONE 24Bay harnessing the same advanced, feature rich collaboration tools as System 1. Although the systems are currently kept in separate silos, they can easily be migrated together in the future and managed under one Name Space.
The ELEMENTS advanced storage solution provides the heft and elegant collaboration tools necessary for our team to easily handle 4K HDR projects and much better focus on the end product.
Shawn Stoner, President of Post Production, New Wave Entertainment
ELEMENTS ONE as the “security bubble”
Almost instantaneously New Wave Entertainment were able to see the benefits of the ELEMENTS appliances in relation to user management. Despite its seclusion from the rest of the facility, ELEMENTS storage allows New Wave Entertainment the ability to integrate the new ELEMENTS ONE with their existing Active Directory (AD). By providing the option to import existing users from the AD directly into ELEMENTS’ embedded user management tool their daily business is significantly simplified. ELEMENTS’ comprehensive User and Rights Management tool offers many unique and convenient features though that help to make user and rights management a breeze.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
ELEMENTS’ user management feature is extremely helpful for maintaining data security. And it’s super-easy to use, it can be managed by a non-IT guy.
Mike Clow, VP Technical Operations, New Wave Entertainment
ELEMENTS’ handy tool allows New Wave Entertainment the ability to quickly and easily add an unlimited amount of users, create user groups and assign rights for read/write access for particular projects – directly embedded in the server and accessible anytime from anywhere through ELEMENTS’ unique and fully intuitive web-based GUI. The highly customisable user settings even include an option to set time restrictions on every user – user accounts can be set to expire at a certain point in time. This way, the administrative staff don’t have to remember to disable or delete any freelance accounts after a project has been finished.
Steady stream performance
Aside from the requirement of adding more storage capacity, New Wave Entertainment needed a steady performance of multiple streams in 4K compressed.
ELEMENTS’ performance is great. But we love that our ELEMENTS ONE can be both managed by a non-IT person and also have the implementation of a great filesystem in StorNext6.
Rick Nowak, Chief Operating Officer, New Wave Entertainment
We’re very happy to have New Wave Entertainment on board.
