Shoplife is a BBC observational documentary shot entirely on location at the Metro Centre shopping mall in Gateshead in the north-east of England. The nature of the production meant that 900 hours of footage was shot, which needed to be available in London to be edited into six one-hour episodes.
Rather than ship the camera cards 400km to London, BBC elected to use the Aframe cloud production and asset management platform. Content was uploaded to Aframe from site, making it immediately available to producers and editors anywhere. As well as getting footage into post much more quickly, it also saved the production budget the capital cost of around 20TB of storage.
The Aframe service includes triple-redundant storage on its own servers, rather than a third-party cloud provider. It means that producers can turn on the storage they need for the duration of a project, then turn it off again when the production is complete.
Once in the Aframe cloud content can be accessed using a web browser, with automatic creation of browse resolution versions so the team can work online without downloading full resolution content. On Shoplife the production team in Gateshead logged the footage online with keywords, helping producers, directors and editors find the shots they needed.
“We have a long affiliation with the BBC and are proud to help them achieve cost savings that otherwise could not be accomplished,” said David Peto, CEO of Aframe.
