Scaling Post-Production with Strawberry

SCALING POST-PRODUCTION WITH STRAWBERRY

Strawberry by Projective brings efficient workflows to one of Germany’s busiest broadcasters.

WELT - GROWING AUDIENCES DRIVE INCREASED PRODUCTION

As one of the two main News Television stations in Germany, WELT delivers 24/7 news and documentaries to millions of viewers every day. Content is served across free-to-air terrestrial TV, OTT and digital platforms, as well as print. The WELT brand stands for progressive, high- quality and dynamic topics such as politics, finance, sports or science, delivering the latest global news and reports to viewers across all platforms. With growing audience demands for both short- and long-form factual content, WELT’s content creation unit required an efficient approach to managing the increasing volumes of projects and media assets. The need to deliver quality output while meeting tighter deadlines called for revamped post-production workflows.

THE NEED

  • Meet the increasing demand for more post-produced content & tight deadlines
  • Efficiently share projects between creative teams
  • Implement IT-standard, scalable production storage
  • Automate project creation and structure
  • Reduce internal support and maintenance

THE SOLUTION

  • Strawberry by Projective to enable collaborative
    post-production
  • Avid® MediaComposer® bin-locking on Dell PowerScale
    storage
  • Use of Strawberry project-based metadata to efficiently store and locate content
  • Easy review & approvals with Strawberry’s Gallery function
  • More structure and control enable to deliver higher production volumes

THE CHALLENGE

PRODUCING MORE WITH THE SAME RESOURCES

WELT’s post-production team works on in-house produced documentaries as well as international documentaries that require localization for the German market. Creative teams had traditionally worked in silos, using local drives and finding it difficult to share projects and content. “I used to call them local heroes …” says Jost Klitzsch, Senior IT Architect at WELT — “the only project-sharing possible was done by exchanging hard drives!”

Jost joined WELT to support their infrastructure and operations. One of the first areas he wanted to address was the ability to centralize and share post-production projects, introducing highly efficient and productive workflows. Having previously implemented and used Strawberry by Projective for several years at another production house, Jost had no doubts that it was the right platform for collaborative documentary post-production at WELT. He had a clear vision to modernize obsolete processes and help WELT’s creative teams gradually move into modern and scalable production.

jost

JOST KLITZSCH, Senior IT Architect at WELT

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BENEFITS

Introducing Strawberry at WELT’s post-production facility has brought tangible gains to both users and technical teams.

CREATE MORE IN LESS TIME

the first noticeable change has been how much users like Strawberry — it makes their day-to-day work much easier, saving them hours of administrative tasks that they reinvest in creative work.
02a more in less
02b project sharing

SEAMLESS PROJECT SHARING

creative teams are now able to share projects without the need for physical drives, so they can quickly locate the content they need.

TAME THAT METADATA

before Strawberry, metadata was logged on spreadsheets… most of the time! With Strawberry, newly ingested content has mandatory project metadata fields that ease content discovery both for production and archive.
02c meta data
02d speedy output

SPEED AND CONTROL

with automated storage structure and dedicated project workspaces, editors have increased their output to meet production deadlines!

REVIEW & APPROVAL MADE EASY

WELT’s editors have discovered the benefits of using Strawberry’s Gallery function, which speeds up production processes and helps accelerate approvals.

02e review approval

“For the technical team, the best thing about Strawberry is that it just works. We barely have much to do with it, and that’s great for peace of mind!”

Jost Klitzsch, Senior IT Architect, WELT

 

Over the last year, WELT has seen a huge increase in the demand for more production volumes, needing to deliver more content across more platforms. Having Strawberry in place has helped them meet deadlines by efficiently managing a growing number of in-house productions with large amounts of content. And all this without increasing the number of editors!

BY THE NUMBERS

01a workstations
01b dell
01c strawberry
01d bin locking
01e editors
01f projects
01g ingest

A LONG-TERM PARTNERSHIP

When the time came to modernize its post-production workflows, WELT’s choice of product was clear: nothing beats Strawberry for efficient collaboration and automated project management. But for Jost, working with the Projective team was also key:

“They are smart and work fast, delivering to the needs of each individual customer and investing in long-term, two-way partnerships.”

At Projective, listening to our customers and implementing the features that matter to them, has contributed to making Strawberry a much better product, ultimately benefiting all our users.

A BRIGHT FUTURE AHEAD

WELT’s technical team plans to continue implementing additional capabilities with Strawberry, such as housekeeping policies and automated reporting as well as rolling out Strawberry and Dell PowerScale to other groups.

To respond to increased production needs, WELT will build new edit suites over the next few months. Now, with Strawberry being independent of the editorial platform, Jost and his team have implemented a project management solution that is future-proof and gives them the flexibility to work with a range of creative tools.

For any production company looking to increase efficiencies, Jost highlights the importance of change management and user buy-in: start with a simple configuration and well-defined workflows. Then gradually introduce more capabilities, allowing users to bring up their own ideas and needs, thus increasing user adoption on the new system.

Are you ready to explore how Projective can help your post-production teams deliver more content, in less time, and more efficiently?

Contact us to find out more.