9 years of short films in full end-to-end workflow
Silver Trak, one of Australia’s largest digitisation, duplication and authoring companies, today announced it has won the contract to digitise the last nine years of finalist entries amassed by the Mudgee International Short Film Festival – Mudfest. The film festival which celebrates its 10th anniversary next year will be archiving all the movies with Silver Trak’s unique Media Sphere™ end-to-end media asset management (MAM) solution.
Mudfest co-founder Mike O’Malley said, “We have been working with Rod Capon and the Silver Trak team since the very first Mudfest as they are the partner we use to master all of our movie entries. From the early days of VHS, DVD and Digi-Beta tapes, through the HD revolution Silver Trak have helped author and master all the movies that will be shown at the festival. This year’s Mudfest was no different except that during the event we asked them about also using Media Sphere to digitise and store all our finalist entries from the last nine years. After some further discussion it was clear Media Sphere was the perfect solution for Mudfest’s digital requirements.”
Media Sphere is the first MAM solution in Australia to truly encompass all aspects of digitising, transcoding, technical assessment QC and digital distribution workflows.
O’Malley continued, “Silver Trak have been dealing with file-based formats for some time so they are very familiar with the technologies that surround the workflows. In fact this year’s Mudfest entries were all file-based or links to FTP sites, none of which presented any issues for the Silver Trak team. Our concern for the future was preserving these valuable assets and that’s where Media Sphere came in.”
The Mudfest organisers decided it was critical that they preserve and archive all the entries through Media Sphere as the system was developed especially to serve organisations with a high volume of broadcast assets such as TV stations, TV networks, production houses, post production facilities, movie distributors and movie festivals.
O’Malley added, “By digitising and archiving the entries with Media Sphere we have ensured the content is stored correctly with proper redundancy and safe, easy web-access. Media Sphere also has a very clever ‘viewing room’ function where we can not only play the movies but also share a watermarked proxy copy with clients and sponsors.”
Last year O’Malley and Mudfest took part in the annual G’Day USA bi-coastal celebration that brings Australian film and business to a US audience, something he says would have been even more effective had they had the Media Sphere option available to them. He continued, “At G’Day USA we played a Mudfest compilation DVD at the historic Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood to show the A-listers what Mudfest is all about. Next time as we will have instant access via Media Sphere we can present from any location with Internet access. In fact for the next G’Day USA we’re currently investigating a sponsorship deal with an Australian themed business in the USA where Media Sphere will give us the perfect distribution platform across their outlets nationally. This is another bonus of having all of our entries stored on Media Sphere as we can view the movies on any PC, Mac, tablet or smartphone.”
Nine years of movies constitutes a fair amount of footage which O’Malley says is now in the best place it’s ever been. He added, “It’s literally hundreds of films from all over the world that we no longer have to worry about in terms of storage and preservation. Media Sphere is very much the way of the future as it preserves our history, our most valuable assets and gives us the perfect platform from which to use them in the future. The digitisation process so far has been seamless and our assessment of Media Sphere is simple, we like the fact that it’s a modular solution and love the fact that it actually works – two basic criteria that many other MAM systems we assessed don’t seem to have yet mastered.”
Silver Trak MD Christian Christiansen said, “We are delighted to have won the Mudfest digitisation and archiving contract. Mudfest is now the second most-entered film festival in Australia and it continues to grow. There is a trust that needs to exist when you are taking care of important assets for people and we are honoured that Mudfest chose to trust us with theirs.”
For more Media Sphere™ go to: www.media-sphere.com.au
or contact Silver Trak Digital Digital on +61 2 9436 0848
For more press information contact Salvatore Di Muccio on +61 412 64 99 64 or at salvatore@wellabove.com
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