Lee Daniels, creator and director of the hit series Star, has Mariah Carey on set in Atlanta for a 12-camera shoot. It is a crucial scene and Daniels wants a very specific look for his star. To execute Daniels’ creative vision, the colourists need the full-size, original footage to show him exactly what he is striving for as quickly as possible—but they are 2,100 miles away in Los Angeles!
In the past, it would have been an expensive solution to have colourists on set to determine a look and then wait for hours on end. Fortunately, Mango/NewEdit uses Signiant Media Shuttle’s fast file transfer service to work remotely as if they were local, saving time and money.
Beginnings
NewEdit began in 1993 providing editorial equipment and services to hit television show productions like Melrose Place, Beverly Hills 90210, Roseanne, and Third Rock From the Sun. In 2013, they added Mango to provide on-location services. Today, their productions are mainly for streamers like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and Disney+.
With regional production offices to support productions closer to their filming locations, Mango/NewEdit works in a hub-and-spoke business model based on state tax incentives and remote workflows that make security paramount. Stan Cassio, president at Mango/NewEdit explains, “We have offices in all those states, and we hire local talent. We train them how to use everything, including Signiant and how to push files.”
While production locations are all over North America and as far away as Morocco, Spain, and Portugal, editorial for dailies and more takes place in Los Angeles. Signiant is crucial to their workflow efficiency.
Signiant’s File Security and Compliance Enables M&E Business
Just as state tax incentives enable the Mango/NewEdit business model, content security is as important.
Because Signiant has been vetted by all the studios, a mission-critical stamp of approval, Mango/NewEdit doesn’t have to worry about content security when working with large studios.
“The good news is that because a lot of people in our industry know and use Signiant, it’s very easy for us to set up a vendor with a Media Shuttle account,” Cassio says. “It’s not very complex. We send them an email, they set it up, we transmit, they download.”
Signiant’s encryption during transport is essential and a main reason why the big studios have approved the Signiant Platform and its transfer products and allow Mango/NewEdit to work remotely in an efficient and cost-effective way.
Signiant’s Secure and Accelerated File Transfer Pipeline
While Mango/NewEdit has used Signiant on-location to quickly interact with colours remotely, they primarily use Signiant for their dailies pipeline — sending proxy footage made at their regional office to its facility in Los Angeles for camera syncing and editing preparation. It is organised in Avid Media Composer and then uploaded to a Signiant Media Shuttle portal for distribution and remote access by the creative teams.
“We grab everything from the set and process it, generate the editorial files, and transmit those files back to Los Angeles,” Cassio explains. “We use Signiant to encrypt and push the files, and receive them in Los Angeles so the next morning, the editorial team can begin their process.
“Once we know that the [Avid] media and the bins are linking, we’ve already gone through the Signiant process, and everything has landed correctly. We QC it before it transmits. We use Signiant to transmit. Once it lands, we confirm everything is linking and then editorial gets their hands on it.”
On a typical production day, Mango/NewEdit receives about two terabytes of footage and converts it down to roughly 90 gigs of material. After the lower resolution proxies are sent, the original high-resolution footage from the set — 4K, 8K, 16K files — are sent via Signiant Media Shuttle to the Mango/NewEdit facility. In LA, the footage is uploaded via Signiant to the cloud and brought into grading platforms such as Da Vinci Resolve and Colorfront.
Editors on global alert
Notifications and alerts are crucial to the Mango/NewEdit post-production workflow.
“It’s very easy to get alerts verifying that the media has been transferred. Sending those alerts for my team is essential because we don’t have to continually monitor the process. We just get alerts that say it’s complete,” Cassio adds. “If there’s any questions about when it started, when it ended, we can generate reports. It’s a tool that is essential in today’s globalised workload.”
Cassio is also a fan of Signiant’s Checkpoint Restart feature, “If something happens and the transmission stops in the middle of that process, we can reset it and continue from where it left off. Having that capability is definitely a plus.”
Peace of mind
For Mango/NewEdit, the fact that Signiant is mandated by their clients, fast, easier to use, easier to train on, easier to understand the billing model, won’t overwhelm their bandwidth and provides 24/7 customer support made their choice an easy one, but in the end, what really mattered most is peace of mind.
“We started using Signiant when Mango was created 10 years ago. We’ve been a fan since then. It’s like an electronic Federal Express. Package it, FedEx it, receive it, confirm it, we’re done. There’s no question from start to finish. Signiant is definitely the tool we use. We love it.”
