Reality TV pioneer Bunim Murray Productions is likely one of the main manufacturing firms working within the style and produces anyplace between 4 and ten seasons of tv concurrently at distant areas throughout the globe. One of its greatest reveals shoots throughout completely different nations and continents and is appropriately sufficient referred to as “The Challenge”, which actually describes the method of transferring terabytes of uncooked footage from distant areas again to the editorial crew in LA.Facing the fixed pressures of shorter schedules, tighter deadlines and ever-decreasing budgets, “The Challenge” crew trialed Signiant Media Shuttle to speed up safe file supply. So profitable was Media Shuttle within the workflow that Bunim Murray has now rolled it out throughout each one in all its distant productions, mandating Media Shuttle connectivity as a future requirement when selecting capturing areas and efficiently implementing a 24-hour turnaround objective on key footage.It’s after midnight on location in Thailand…After a number of grueling days of capturing the hit actuality TV sequence, “The Challenge,” a courier for Bunim Murray Productions hand carries terabytes of video content material from two dozen cameras on a 17-hour flight to Los Angeles, the place the complete editorial crew waits. Pressure to supply extra content material quicker pushed Bunim Murray to hunt a essentially completely different technique to transfer contemporary content material — from babysitting drives on worldwide flights each three days to having the footage of their L.A. edit suites in 8 hours straight over the web.For Bunim Murray Productions, transferring content material from distant areas throughout the globe to editors in Los Angeles used to price numerous money and time. “The Challenge,” one in all their greatest reveals in 2023, is perhaps capturing in South Africa for one week, Thailand the subsequent, and Europe after that. That’s only one present. During peak occasions, as much as 250 workers work on 4-10 reveals concurrently from areas scattered all over the world. Transferring terabytes of multicamera footage to editors in L.A. for enhancing as quick as doable each day is mission crucial. With shrinking budgets, shorter schedules, and tighter deadlines, time is valuable. In 2010, XDCAM discs carried by runners by way of airports to L.A. took at the least per week. By 2018, onerous drives shipped by way of FedEx outposts saved a day or two. Still, a 24-hour turnaround objective was’nt doable.After experimenting with different file switch options, Bunim Murray turned to Signiant Media Shuttle. It works flawlessly, making a constant, 24-hour turnaround of key recordsdata, and the variety of hours gained again makes it pay for itself. (Image credit score: Bunim Murray)“the time we saved, the variety of hours we will achieve again, would make sense for us financially,” mentioned Dan Shott, Director, Post Technologies for Bunim Murray. “it labored flawlessly; it labored nice. After a 30-minute coaching session, we have been assured sufficient to construct out for 5 completely different reveals. The issues that we’d’ve needed to depend on high-level tech assist to do with different options, we may do ourselves in 5 minutes with Media Shuttle.On a typical shoot, content material from digicam playing cards offloads onto two native storage swimming pools. As many as three DITs working across the clock acquire round 3TBs of footage day by day, load it onto native storage wherever they will discover ample bandwidth, from the shoot website or the lodge. The uncooked footage is then despatched by way of Media Shuttle into Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. From there, the editorial crew makes use of Shuttle to tug down the content material they want into native Avid Nexis storage in L.A. A typical day can embrace two to 3 terabytes of knowledge.“We discovered it far more of a dependable answer for our manufacturing groups, which have been already scattered and operating tremendous lengthy shifts. We did not need to put any potential downtime or hiccups on them,” says Shott. “We liked that when we switched to Media Shuttle, we may put that [Wasabi] cloud vacation spot within the center and know that it was all the time going to be there, prepared for them to go every time they needed to do a switch.” Shott continues, “Once others heard how properly it labored, everybody requested, ‘Hey, can I exploit it?’ Now, when a present is scouting for a location, accessible bandwidth is all the time the issue. We’re on the lookout for that from day one figuring out that we’ll be utilizing this workflow. Once we put in it, we began discovering different use instances for it. We’re happiest after we’re not speaking about it as a result of it is simply working within the background.”
https://www.tvtechnology.com/equipment/the-bunim-murray-challenge
