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Illuminate Hollywood manages data loads with AJA Diskover Media Edition

Illuminate Hollywood has provided production, post, and technology services to major Hollywood studios, TV networks, digital platforms, and indie producers and distributors for nearly three decades. Since the boutique shop opened its doors in 1995, it has done scanning, editorial, color correction, digital intermediate, VFX, 2K/4K distribution, audio conform and layback work for episodic and feature film productions spanning “Sons of Anarchy” to “Gone Girl”.

As production and post processes have grown more complex with growing adoption of high resolution, high dynamic range workflows, CEO Jim Hardy and President Sandy Crawford have evolved the studio’s workflow to keep pace, adopting new technology like AJA Diskover Media Edition data curation and management software to manage an ever-increasing volume of data.

“We’re a small company competing against organizations with massive technological and staffing backbones”, shares Crawford. “So we’re continuously evaluating and adopting emerging technology like AJA Diskover Media Edition, while also developing proprietary tools.”

Many clients come to Illuminate to remaster television shows from uncut negatives, which means the team must ensure they have all the correct physical film assets from the client. Using its proprietary technology iConform, Illuminate is able to take uncut dailies negatives and scan them in 4K 16-bit DPX files across multiple projects.

“We have to replicate exactly what was done with the original broadcast master, so there’s no cutting corners for us. It’s part of the reason we’re working with petabytes of data”, explains Crawford. “The volume of work that we go through on a weekly basis to meet the deadlines is astounding. A project passes through twelve different departments from film scanning to color correction and final creation of the master file that’s going to be reused for all the platforms. Our tech is essential for enabling us to produce six 60-minute shows a week.”

“We knew we might encounter missing film, which meant we needed a process to replicate the quality so that it didn’t impact the viewing experience”, adds Hardy. “Our conversion solution isn’t real-time, which helps us create an end-result that looks as if the image originated in HD, 2K, or 4K.”

Across projects, Illuminate manages a massive load of data stored across its Aberdeen and XStor storage systems, which requires well organized files and data, and an easy way to access them. To streamline this work across departments, it adopted AJA Diskover Media Edition. Data operators use the software to gauge how many files the facility has across all of its volumes and servers. They can type a keyword into the search and see all the information in the user interface.

On the administrative side, Hardy and Crawford use Diskover to get a holistic view into Illuminate’s data; if a client wants to know what they have in house for a file or title, they can pull it up, versus having to check with operations first. The technology has also reduced file clean up, as they can flag files for removal if the client no longer needs them.

AJA Diskover Media Edition has also enhanced the studio’s quality control (QC) pipeline. Using the CineSys CineViewer Player Plug-in, the Illuminate team can review rejected or questionable files flagged by the QC operator, instead of having to visit a bay or separate facility to review. “We can look at it ourselves, take a screenshot, and send it to each other, which saves us a lot of time, versus having to visit a QC or color bay”, notes Crawford.

AJA Diskover Media Edition also allows Illuminate to grant team members unique access permissions and see the file sizes on a moment’s notice, ensuring they only see the files they need to see in a timely manner, without jeopardizing their integrity, which Hardy explains is paramount.

In addition to leveraging AJA Diskover Media Edition, Illuminate uses AJA gear across its facility, including analog to digital and digital to analog Mini-Converters, Ki Pro recording devices, and audio embedder/disembedders.

(Photos: AJA Video Systems/Illuminate Hollywood)

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