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October 2009 Creative Group Goes Truly Tapeless with Digital Rapids
www.creativegroup.tv
by Joe Franze, Director of Business Development, Creative Group
"[StreamZHD] has dramatically increased our productivity in a short amount of time."
"[It] really gave us the level of scalable, multi-format, high-performance encoding and transcoding capabilities we needed..."
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 For Creative Group, going tapeless was primarily a client-driven process. It began in early 2008 when the Sundance Channel approached us about encoding content for its VOD channel. We were eager to take on the project, but quickly realized that encoding 20 to 30 titles a month through our traditional process through Apple Final Cut would take too long. So we began looking into the various encoding systems on the market, and ended up purchasing Digital Rapids’ StreamZHD for the job. That really gave us the level of scalable, multi-format, high-performance encoding and transcoding capabilities we needed to handle the project and subsequent types of large-scale undertakings.
We chose Digital Rapids for a number of reasons, including ease of operation, fast encoding, professional technical support, and cost value. Our technical operations team was up and running with the application in less than three days, and when we needed to create specific files with detailed technical specs, as was the case with Sundance Channel On Demand, technical support helped us create a profile for the project right away.
As the first piece of our tapeless system, Digital Rapids had successfully fulfilled our needs for encoding all of the Sundance Channel On Demand programs. Now everything from Live from Abbey Road, Shameless, and Carbon Cops to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report are being encoded on Digital Rapids for international distribution. Having the Digital Rapids hardware and software also allowed us to develop a workflow that could produce HD files with closed-captioning embedded. Since Digital Rapids worked out so well for us, we now use it for all our encoding needs, including posting content for client review and moving content around the facility in a tapeless workflow. It has dramatically increased our productivity in a short amount of time.
In the preliminary investment in new technology such as Digital Rapids’ StreamZHD, Creative Group has taken the leap in creating a facility that will be producing and distributing content within a tapeless environment, making the truly tapeless dream a reality.
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