Matchbox Pictures, a film and television production company with offices in Sydney and Melbourne, has adopted Avid Edit On Demand cloud solutions from Digistor for their remote-working production platform.

The company said it sought a solution that didn't require VPN tunnels or physical computers in their offices, given its nationwide production activities and diverse employee locations.

"We were looking for efficient remote working solutions which didn’t need VPN tunnels or physical computers in our offices. Matchbox produces in every state of the country under the philosophy that we employ the best people wherever they are," Production Executive, Unscripted, Matchbox Pictures, Catherine Durr, said. "The Avid Edit On Demand system which Digistor proposed enabled us to ‘best practice’ this in post, even though our Real Housewives editors and post producers were in multiple and different state, regional and city locations."

The Avid Edit On Demand system proposed by Digistor allowed Matchbox Pictures to work efficiently with their Real Housewives editors and post producers who were in different state, regional and city locations. The company needed a remote editing solution for a large production that had already begun shooting. Their existing workflow had challenges around infrastructure and remote connectivity.

Supervising Technical Producer, Matchbox Pictures, David Oliverius, explained, the Digistor supplied Avid Edit On Demand solution allowed the team to overcome cumbersome VPN tunnels and unnecessary physical computer set-ups in offices and deploy purely in the cloud.

"It kept all our physical hardware free to supply to team members as they came in and out of contracts and made the entire system far easier to administrate," he said. "We particularly liked the flexible nature of Avid on Demand services, how we could purchase entitlements based on the expected duration of the production, spin it up into the cloud, then turn it off. This meant lower up-front costs and no ongoing assets costs."

The solution proposed by Digistor included an Avid Edit On Demand subscription with eight advanced Media Composer seats for both editors and producers, and the ability to work from the cloud-provisioned NEXIS cloud storage.

"Our entire Avid workflow was taken into the cloud with this solution. Essentially all editorial facets of high-end multi-cam non-scripted ‘reality’ production – in this case The Real Housewives of Sydney – which previously would have required significant investment in on-prem storage to assure performance for concurrent editors. Now it was all remote and at our fingertips," Oliverius added.

Digistor was the first Avid partner to sell its Edit On Demand solution into the Australian market. The Avid solutions were used for all offline editing work for The Real Housewives of Sydney Series 2, with all post producers and editors working from home.

"Things rarely go wrong using Edit On Demand but if we have any issues, I always know Digistor has our back and will resolve them quickly. Digistor and Avid allow the team at Matchbox Pictures to work without distraction, spend more time being creative and make the best possible entertainment," Oliverius concluded.