Opening a new post facility in New York City is risky business, but Evolutions already has bookings throughout next year

Evolutions is a premiere post-production company based in London’s Soho district. The company, with 145 staff worldwide, maintains four existing locations; Berners Street, Soho Square, Wells Street and Oxford House, and boasts over 80 suites that include numerous Apple Final Cut Pro HD, Avid Media Composer and Symphony Nitris HD workstations, three linear suites, two Pogle HD grading rooms, a Baselight HD room, eight audio suites, and Avid Unity and LANshare SAN for networking and storage.
Evolutions, whose projects include such popular TV shows as Top Gear, The Apprentice, Shipwrecked, How To Look Good Naked, and A Long Way Down, recently opened a new cross-platform post facility in New York City (in the famous Brill Building), which is now offering full post-production services for the U.S. version of Make Me A Supermodel. It currently houses six edit suites and plans to expand to 25 suites in the next year in order to meet the demand for HD entertainment programming, reality shows and documentaries.

Trevor Hotz of HotCam (X-Factor, The Apprentice, Brat Camp), with which Evolutions has formed a relationship in New York, provided crews and equipment.

Q: How do you guys plan to be successful in a soft U.S. post market (made worse by the on-going WGA writers’ strike)?

A: Actually we’re not finding the post market slow at all. We’ve just had two record months, and are at capacity. HD business in particular is growing dramatically. We’ve got over 30 hours of HD programming going though our facilities at the moment and twice that in the pipeline for 2008 already.

Q: When setting up an HD editing suite, how much storage should I need? How much do you have at Evolutions, and is it available to everyone on the network all the time?
A: In general, you have to figure out what types of projects you work on most often and how many you’ll handle at any one time. That said, you’d need about 600 GB per hour of material for uncompressed 1080i HD. Our Symphony systems have 1.8 TB and our online HD FCPs have 8 TB. For uncompressed HD, the storage has to be local. No network storage is capable of sufficient speed for even a single stream. Very shortly Avid ISIS SANs should be able to support compressed DNxHD 220.

Q: How do you determine when the Avid Symphony is most appropriate for an HD project and when a FCP system will work best?
A: Generally it’s driven by client preference, but Symphony of course integrates very well with the Avid offlines. We will finish on FCP if the clients have been cutting the show themselves on FCP, otherwise, we use Avid wherever possible. It’s more flexible and more robust for most projects.

Q: How difficult is it to have both Avid and Apple HD workstations operating on the same network? What are the challenges there?
A: It’s not difficult at all. It’s all Ethernet. It’s all IP stuff so it’s a doddle.

Q: Can you finish an entire project on FCP HD and maintain good quality?
A: Yes. We’d always recommend coming out into Baselight or Pogle HD to grade though.

Q: How would you compare Avid’s DNxHD and Apple's ProRes HD codecs?
A: We haven’t tested ProRes, but our colorists struggle to differentiate between DNx220 and uncompressed HD.

Q: What's the biggest misconception among clients about HD post?
A: The BBC-perpetuated “cost-neutrality” myth. Actually, most clients realize it’s going to cost them more to post HD, simply because the equipment is newer and more expensive, and they have to spend more time using it. On the other hand, I gather that not everyone’s buying the set designers’ claims that HD paint is more expensive.