Nara gives fast, secure access to media in any format at any of Molinare’s locations – for both staff and clients – and will soon be used to work efficiently across the Molinare Creative Group.
Molinare Creative Group of specialist organisations delivers comprehensive post production services supporting film, television and games content. From DIT and dailies to localisation, and with facilities across the UK – plus a new site in Dublin – the group addresses all stages of the creative process.
Alongside that scope of work, their associated teams require a huge amount of storage and depend on the ability to store archive files in particular formats and colour spaces, segregated across production networks with detailed access restrictions for security. Molinare has recently chosen FilmLight Nara as part of its collaborative media workflows, and plans to eventually use Nara to help their staff work more efficiently across the entire Molinare Creative Group.
Efficient Media Access
“We recognised that a lot of people in our company would benefit from more efficient access to our media,” said Molinare’s CTO, Darren Woolfson. “That might be a post-production manager who wants to see a work in progress, or the marketing team looking at material for showreels. But in any case, such requests would need to go back to an MCR department for transcoding and then come out again for viewing. It was time consuming and used a lot of resources.”
Molinare can now allow the key people to receive secure, instant access to the media files they need – speeding up workflows and efficiency.
“We now have secure access to our production network and can give any individual permission to view any media file – wherever it is located and in whatever format it is stored. Time-consuming transcode requests are no longer necessary, since Nara effectively performs a real-time render on the file and converts it into the required colour space, allowing the media to be viewed instantly.
Molinare CTO Darren Woolfson
“It sounds very simple, but it represents a huge change – until now, no single solution could perform all these tasks with the same level of quality, efficiency or security.”
Play Anything
Molinare’s Senior Post-Production Manager Paul Jones commented. “The ability to browse all the storage across the facility is fantastic. Being able to play basically anything – original camera files, EXR, HDR Pro Res, IMF, DCP – with the confidence that FilmLight is handling the colour pipeline is a real innovation.”
For the Molinare team, another key benefit of Nara is being able to extract vast amounts of metadata about a particular piece of media. For certain genres, particularly those that require pulling in large amounts of archive footage, the post managers can now instantly see details such as resolution and frame rate, which makes planning and estimates much simpler, faster and more accurate.
As well as supporting the internal team, Molinare also recognised that Nara could support its clients with more efficient access to the WIP files they regularly require. “The upcoming Client Review feature is another key reason we selected Nara,” Darren said. “It’s not fully live yet, but we’re working closely with FilmLight on the development of this feature and look forward to being able to provide our clients with secure and instant access to the files they need.”
So far, Client Review can be used to stream media directly to clients, with guaranteed accuracy and secured with enterprise-grade encryption and access controls. Nara’s streaming functionality focusses on colour reproduction and frame-accurate playback, so clients can see exactly what is intended. Clients can also leave time-coded notes and comments directly on the media.
Multi-Site Collaboration
Nara’s ability to enhance efficiency across Molinare’s growing international business was another key part of the decision-making process. “10 years ago, we were a business operating out of two buildings in Soho,” said Darren. “Molinare Creative Group is now expanding internationally with facilities across Europe.
“Our goal is to deploy equipment in one location – be that in one of our facilities, in the cloud or in a data centre – and use collaborative workflow tools to aid communications across sites. Nara supports us in this aim and will be essential to efficient multi-site collaboration.”
“Molinare and FilmLight have had a close working relationship for nearly 25 years, which we look forward to continuing through Nara,” said Sam Lempp, Head of Business Development for Nara at FilmLight. “Because we actively develop the Nara platform based on user requests, Molinare has been, and will continue to be, a large part of this process.” nara.stream
