UNIT Post Production: Joined-up Thinking
Situated at the heart of London’s video community in Soho, UNIT is the UK’s largest all-Mac, Final Cut Studio-based post-production house. Since opening in May 2006, UNIT’s enviable client list already includes Madonna, Sony, Canon, Virgin, BT and Red Bull. In spite of the perceived risks with going the all-Mac route, this forward-thinking post house is punching well above its weight, and business has doubled in a few short months.
Managing director David Peto explains how the London digerati reacted when he revealed his vision for a new breed of post-production house. “People said we were nuts”, he smiles. “They didn’t believe Final Cut Studio could stand up against the competition. But we knew it would work. Put in the right infrastructure — a large Xsan and plenty of storage — and you can deliver an extremely efficient workflow”.
UNIT’s Colour Grading Suite is based around Apple’s Color software, and can handle resolutions up to 4:4:4 HD and 2K.
The plan began when Peto worked at a production company called Split Image with UNIT co-founders Roland Woolner and Tom Bridges. They began making ever more use of Final Cut Pro, until meeting an unexpected challenge. “We landed a music video, which we shot at full 4:4:4 on HDCAM SR. We could take it so far using our own set-up, but we needed to finish it and grade it”, explains Peto, who rang around the London post-production houses in search of an HD online and grading studio based around Final Cut Pro. “The resounding answer was no”, he says. “Most houses offered to transfer it to another vendor’s finishing solution”.
But necessity breeds invention: Peto and his partners assembled their own Apple-based HD online suite. “It worked like a dream”, he says. “It posted so well that we started getting calls asking to use it”. That’s when they realised the potential for a versatile Final Cut-based post facility for London’s video community. And UNIT was born.
UNIT offers 18 Mac-based online HD (10-bit) editing suites, all running Final Cut Studio. Each suite is linked by a fibre optic network to a 120TB Xsan storage area network. UNIT also houses six video effects stations running Shake and Adobe After Effects. There’s a fully-calibrated grading suite based around Apple’s Color software which is capable of handling resolutions up to 4:4:4 HD and 2K. The studio also boasts a 5:1 surround set-up.
Flexibility is critical. At the heart of the facility sits a machine room with ten quad-core Intel Xeon Mac Pros, dedicated to importing assets from different video formats. This means that clients can arrive at UNIT with their footage in any format they choose. These assets are housed on the Xsan so clients can access their footage from any of the edit suites.
Technical Manager Tim Burton explains: “It’s not only speed we offer, but width. The idea is that we can do multiple things at the same time. A client can feasibly have several people working on a project at once, all in different studios. The only reason they can do this is because the project is on the Xsan”.
UNIT had to prove the effectiveness of Apple’s solutions to an industry accustomed to a different way of working. “The point of UNIT was to take a Final Cut Studio and Mac set-up and put it in an environment in which you’d traditionally find other post-production solutions”, says Peto. “Clients don’t feel they are compromising. They get the same set-up they enjoy in a traditional post house, but we offer a quicker, easier and — in some cases — more financially palatable way of working”.
Impressed by the quality of the first few projects to emerge from UNIT, others gave the company a try. The commercial arms of several major music labels grew interested. Within six months, UNIT found itself working on the campaign for Sony’s retail stores.
Today, the majority of UNIT’s business comes from commercial and broadcast clients, including long-form TV series for National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, Channel 4 and the BBC. Peto explains: “The huge advantage compared to other solutions is that it’s one system. It doesn’t matter what you put it on — it can be an old Power Mac G5 in the production office for offline editing — at the same time, you can take the same set of applications, stick them in an Xsan set-up that does uncompressed HD, and do all your online work. You don’t have to worry about learning different applications”.
Joined-up thinking helps, as Peto says: “If you look at other solutions you may have one for editing, another for finishing, one more for compositing — all different. They don’t necessarily communicate very well. You’ve got to look at moving between different tools for different tasks then putting it all back together again”. UNIT’s scalable Final Cut workflow lets editors work with the same set of tools throughout, without exposure to the pitfalls of tape.
“When it comes to Final Cut Studio or Shake, the applications integrate so well. It saves people time and allows them more control”, notes Peto. He explains that clients can complete more preparatory work in Final Cut before arriving at UNIT, and there’s no software learning curve when they begin post-production, saving time and hassle.
The machine room can digitise up to 100 hours of video a day, thanks to its bank of 10 Mac Pros.
Assets from original creation to completion are kept safe and uncorrupted on the Xsan. Apple’s powerful Compressor software allows clients to output their work in the format(s) they need. “We’re data-centric”, confirms Burton. “The entire operation depends on the Xsan. Everyone is working on getting stuff on there, working on what is already there, or working to get stuff out to the client”.
UNIT’s success speaks for itself. Barely a year after it opened, the facility has already expanded, while the quality of its output has generated unique interest. “We’re getting people interested in doing features here, which is amazing for a company that only opened its doors just over a year ago”, says Peto. “Final Cut Pro is a completely viable professional solution. I wouldn’t use anything different. This is the way I see the industry going”.
