Studio:
- EIKON Group
Location:
- California, United States
- London, United Kingdom
- Sydney, Australia
Solutions
The SCL Centralized Server generates efficiencies and scale like no other solution in today’s marketplace. It works perfectly within our bespoke workflow and environment creating additional capacity through smart thinking and design."
Background
EIKON Group, a leader in digital mastering and versioning services, quality control (QC), subtitling, scripting, audio services and more helps the world’s biggest movie studios and streaming platform companies to localize and master their content for global distribution. Facing the challenges of mastering and checking hundreds of pieces of content in a day at its screening room suites in Burbank – California, London and Sydney, EIKON turned to GDC for its SCL Centralized Playback Server solution to reduce ingest time.
Challenges
EIKON’s legacy workflow required transferring Digital Cinema Packages (DCP) from its SAN storage and ingest them to cinema server(s), leading to additional labor costs and possible delivery delays to the client:
- Short Time Frame for Large Workload: With new movie releases, EIKON often had limited turnaround time to complete projects. The need to finish mastering and testing within a short time frame was crucial for timely DCP distribution to various cinemas. For instance, EIKON completed over 400 Composition Playlists (CPLs) for Avatar: The Way of Water, implying they needed to quality check at least 400 versions for just one movie.
- Time and Cost-Consuming Manual Ingestion: Manually ingesting and verifying DCPs was a time-consuming process. This manual effort added to operational costs due to the labor involved. EIKON took, on average, 43 minutes to ingest a 250GB DCP from SAN storage with a standard ingest speed of 1Gbit (850Mbps) to a screening room’s media server. EIKON could quality check a maximum of 8 DCPs per day per screening room (3 hours per DCP, with 1 hour for ingest and 2 hours for QC).
Actions
To streamline the workflow, EIKON uses GDC’s SCL Centralized Playback Server. Once DCPs are mastered, EIKON ingests and verifies the DCPs only once when ingesting to GDC’s SCL Centralized Playback Server, which streams the required DCPs to the screening room’s playback server for QC purposes.
- Real-Time Streaming: DCP content streams in real-time from the SCL Centralized Playback Server eliminating local manual ingestion and verification.
- Flexibility and Efficiency: The SCL Centralized Playback Server enables just-in-time playback, allowing for last-minute schedule adjustments. Additionally, show playlist can be generated automatically to improve the efficiency.
Results
EIKON has experienced rapid changes without compromising quality. Their adoption of GDC’s SCL Centralized Playback Server yielded impressive results:
- Time Savings with Network Share: The SCL Centralized Playback Server allows one-time DCP ingest eliminating the need for ingesting content to the screening room’s server(s). Prior to SCL, it took 43 minutes to ingest a DCP to one screening room’s server. Now it only takes, on average, 5 minutes to ingest a 250GB DCP to the SCL Centralized Playback Server with a high ingest speed of 10Gbps (7500Mbps), which has reduced ingest time by 90%. EIKON can now quality check a maximum of 11 DCPs per day per screening room, saving time to QC content by more than 30%.
- Centralized Content Management with Scalability: The system is scalable for peak traffic during holidays and sudden changes. The SCL Centralized Playback Server allows direct access to manage content at a centralized file system level, EIKON can add DCPs to the screen seamlessly for streaming playback immediately.
In summary, by reimagining their workflow, EIKON achieved significant ingest and QC time savings. EIKON’s satisfaction with GDC’s SCL Centralized Playback Server extends beyond traditional multiplexes—it’s a game-changer even in non-exhibition environments.