Molinare Accelerate Feature Mixing Workflow with Avid NEXIS | F2 SSD Storage
As one of the UK’s leading full-service post-production houses, Molinare has built a reputation for creative excellence across film, drama, documentary, and games. That same commitment to excellence continues with the world-class Jack Cardiff Theatre, opened in 2022, which offers cinema-scale Dolby Atmos mixing and mastering and has hosted projects such as Paddington in Peru, That Christmas and Matilda the Musical.
The state-of-the-art Dolby Atmos feature mixing room in central London is equipped with dual Avid S6 consoles and multiple Pro Tools | HDX workstations all linked via a Pro Tools | MTRX routing and I/O system. But handling hundreds of tracks of playback and recording exceeded the capacity of the audio department’s third-party storage solution, and often meant moving projects to local drives.
“It wasted a lot of time, and when updates got sent it was always a pain,” explains Molinare Creative Group’s CTO Darren Woolfson. “Picture would be played back from a different source and it just wasn’t very streamlined.”
The team needed a shared system that could deliver the huge performance requirements of a multi-system film mix.
The latest generation Avid NEXIS | F2 SSD was an obvious place to look, with multiple enhancements designed to enable feature-level audio workflows which need responsive record and playback performance across huge track counts. Tested for up to 8000 channels per engine and 6x faster audio punch-in performance, the F2 SSD and NEXIS filesystem guarantee performance when you most need it.
Levelling Up
While the facility was familiar with Avid NEXIS storage––using it to power their 40+ Media Composer-based edit suites––it was essential for Molinare to test the new F2 platform in their own facility, on a real project from start to finish.
Avid’s pro audio partner HHB installed an Avid NEXIS | F2 SSD test system, qualified to stream 1000s of audio channels with super-snappy performance over its 10Gb connections.
“They were really good in supporting the proof-of-concept testing; both Avid and HHB actually,” says Woolfson. “That was really key to making the purchase decision”.
Final Mix
Molinare needed the system to just work in high pressure scenarios––on the largest sessions, with the client in the room. The NEXIS F2 SSD now provides the backbone to support projects at scale.
The Jack Cardiff Theatre has up to five Pro Tools | HDX2/3 workstations running in parallel, alongside Dolby’s RMU recorder and high-resolution video, all connected to the NEXIS.
Another 10Gb connection routes to a switch that feeds editorial systems, facilitating seamless access to projects between the rooms throughout a project’s lifecycle, and optimising room usage. The system is also connected to Molinare’s larger multi-site network infrastructure, allowing media to flow between departments.
Even simply having a single storage hub between the systems within the theatre has made a significant difference.
“From our point of view,” reflects Darren, “the purchase has very much been justified by this. It means there's less prep time for the mixes. It means we're handling updates more efficiently, more quickly. It’s working really nicely and the team are really pleased with it”
About Avid NEXIS
Get unmatched media storage performance and scalability for on-premise and cloud workflows. Optimized to accelerate media workflows, Avid NEXIS—featuring the Avid NEXIS | VFS virtual file system and Avid NEXIS | FLEX subscription—enables video and audio production teams to collaborate and adapt fast to the changing needs and unpredictability of today’s media production. Integrated with the next-generation Avid NEXIS F-series storage engines, or as a cloud or hybrid deployment, Avid NEXIS enables teams of all sizes to work from anywhere, delivering secure access to media and metadata across all tiers of storage.
Dolby Atmos is a registered trademark of Dolby Laboratories.