422 Manchester has purchased a Sledgehammer HD!O system from Montreal’s Maximum Throughput to unify its video and IT domains and simplify the flow of jobs through the facility. Commenting on the purchase, Peter Liston, chief engineer at 422 Manchester, said: “Earlier this year we decided to upgrade our infrastructure and went looking for a system that could bridge the requirements for both our traditional, video-centric gear as well as more file focused IT needs. Sledgehammer HD!O proved to be the only system that could effectively handle both, and at a cost that fit well within our budget,” writes Andy Stout.
422 Manchester deals with a variety of different work, from standard definition to high definition, and handles all aspects of a project from 3D modelling and animation, through to compositing and editing. Liston continued: “We were spending huge amounts of time shuttling data through the facility, formatting and reformatting to our various needs. With Sledgehammer we now simply load the material onto the system and access it from any point in the facility, in whatever fashion is required. In fact, we’ve been able to take on jobs that we would have previously refused without the Sledgehammer in place.
“Looking back, I’m stunned by all the aggravation and wasted time that could have been avoided had we had the system in place sooner. With every new day we’re discovering more and more things that the Sledgehammer can do, from realtime resizing, to offline format conversions and file sequence playout, and I can’t help but wonder how did we get the work done without it,” said Liston in closing.
John Miller, Max-T’s vice president of worldwide sales added the following: “We’re very pleased that 422 Manchester is solving so many workflow issues with their Sledgehammer. The capabilities that we’ve added to the system over the past years were designed specifically to harmonise the video and data realities that every post facility in the world is facing.”
