Cinegy Capture’s ENVY’s post-production workflow
CAPTURE, a specialist remote workflow division of award-winning post-production house ENVY, delivers on-location recording and media management services for rig productions, powered by Cinegy Capture and Cinegy Multiviewer.
Thanks to Cinegy, ENVY has created highly mobile, compact on-location post-production kits that are far smaller than would otherwise be possible. These ENVY CAPTURE mobile rig kits include hardware custom-designed to operate efficiently with minimal crew and are very accepting of environmental conditions. Each kit creates high-resolution and proxy versions of incoming video feeds for edit-ready media, eliminating the need for backup and ingest workflows in the field.
Initially, the CAPTURE mobile workflow was used on projects such as C4’s Love Trap, Amazon’s Lovestruck High and BBC3’s Love in the Flesh. More recent projects include series 1 of British reality TV competition Squid Game: The Challenge, series 2 of American and British reality TV offering The Traitors, ITV 2’s recent offering Olivia Attwood’s Bad Boyfriends, and NBC’s The Anonymous.
Who is ENVY?
Since opening in 2006, ENVY has established itself as a full-service, end-to-end post-production facility with expertise across documentary, entertainment, factual entertainment, scripted and shortform content. The company has won multiple high-profile awards, including six Best Post Production awards at the Broadcast Awards, making it the most decorated post firm in the awards’ history. Its creative staff has also been honored with numerous RTS, BAFTA, Grierson Awards and Broadcast Awards.
Why Cinegy?
With productions generating over 10,000 hours of live feeds, ENVY needed a workflow supporting quick, reliable multi-feed ingest across different formats. Cinegy Capture provides flexible, reliable ingest supporting various video formats while creating multiple formats and proxy copies simultaneously. The award-winning Cinegy Multiviewer displays and monitors streams from remote locations, satellite feeds, live cameras, and playout devices.
“Cinegy was the best choice for us by far due to its flexibility,” said Toby Weller, Capture Solutions Architect at ENVY. “We found that other software and hardware options on the market were less versatile, while Cinegy runs in as many ways as you could ever imagine. Cinegy and their Professional Services team have been excellent at tailoring the product to our specific requirements, we feel like they’re fully on ‘Team ENVY’ and are invested in making sure that every show is made as smoothly as possible.”
Technical capabilities
ENVY runs two rigs that can combine for larger jobs. Each CAPTURE rig supports up to 48 HD channels, 24 UHD channels and up to 768 uncompressed audio tracks. Depending on the codec, each Cinegy Capture node records either up to 16 video inputs with 16 mono audio embeds of high-quality data or 12 streams of both high quality native and proxy data — creating a native, proxy and multiviewer stream based on Cinegy Multiviewer.
In a typical OB environment, ENVY uses Cinegy Multiviewer alongside live production feeds to monitor stream status and incoming audio, while providing production teams with record confirmation. All in all, each Capture node creates up to 48 different live encodes, with up to six nodes per rig packed in to create a fully redundant, incredibly dense system.
“With hardware and software optimizations, we’ve been able to significantly increase our capabilities,” explains Weller. “In production, we’ve gone from 6 HD record streams per server to 16, depending on the codec. A record stream includes a native, a proxy, and a multiviewer stream encode. This is our current production figure, but with further testing, we’re hoping to achieve even higher numbers.”
Quality at scale
ENVY distinguishes itself by providing quality at scale. “We wanted to offer a much higher quality native XAVC Intra codec as standard and combine that with live-creating proxy versions,” said Weller. “This saves huge amount of time on the back end instead of creating them on other transcode engines.”
“The great thing about Cinegy Capture is that it encodes on the CPU. This offers an awful lot of buffering potential; you can choose where those buffers are and how much protection you have to circumvent the bumps in the road. This enables us to record straight to ultra-fast network storage, allowing immediate creation of LTOs as well as sending data back to base for editing.”
Recent work on NBC’s The Anonymous highlighted a new workflow that not only records hothead cameras into the rig but also directly records larger, higher-grade camera heads such as Sony’s Venice II, circumventing the process of managing higher quality footage shot to card, backed up and sent back to post. This delivers similar quality output across the board while saving both time and money.
Future Vision
ENVY continues to push boundaries with its CAPTURE mobile rig kit. “With the help of Cinegy, we aim to eke out more performance while reducing our hardware, thus keeping our footprint small,” said Weller. “We want to try to keep it as mobile as possible. Our CAPTURE kit must fit into the smallest area possible, while remaining fully redundant and capable of dealing with all sorts of conditions.”
ENVY has already seen promising results in testing: “Right now we see a single record server reliably handle 8 streams of UHD XAVC-I Class 300, as well as a DNx HD proxy. This hasn’t yet been proven in the field but it’s encouraging.”
ENVY usually has more than one CAPTURE in the field at any one time and is confident in the template it has created for the very large jobs it has coming up on its books. “When you start to record, you need absolute confidence. Every year, we are trying to improve the CAPTURE rig by up to 20% in terms of efficiency and footprint. Cinegy Capture and Cinegy Multiviewer are central to this success.”
“ENVY is all about the adaptability of workflows and the optimization of resources and there’s a parallel thread here between how ENVY is using our technology and how we develop it in that same fashion,” said Daniella Weigner, owner and Managing Director of Cinegy. “ENVY has been using our products for years and can simply build upon a solid, existing Cinegy foundation for years to come.”
