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Post Lab IO is a high-end post production
facility working with productions as early as development to design a
tightly integrated and rock-solid on-set and off-set pipeline for both
narratives and documentaries. Launched in Melbourne in 2015, the facility set
out to define the model of how set to post editorial could be achieved. Before
founding Post Lab IO, Darius Family was a freelance editor, motion graphics
designer, visual effects artist, colorist, and online editor. This breadth of
knowledge is a key contributing factor in how the company approaches
post-production.
The complexity of data access
Feature productions tend to engage Post
Lab IO even before pre-production to discuss set to post requirements for their
project. The facility’s team will devise a custom workflow that typically
includes on-set data management, digital dailies processing and conversion, and
management of original camera files for collaborative editorial.
Before Covid, the editors would work
from their own home edit suites on many productions. When the pandemic hit, it
forced everyone involved in editorial and set to post workflows to work
remotely, often from home.
“Our battle has always been getting the
material to the editor, the director, a VFX vendor, the sound mixer, and
colorist quickly and securely,” says Darius Family, founder, and Managing
Director. “When everyone is working in different places, the complexity of how
people access the same copy of the media, how the files are kept in-sync and
securely backed-up becomes significantly greater.”
Post Lab IO experimented with a variety
of different tools to keep productions up and running. This included shipping
hard drives to editors and using open source tools like Syncthings to keep
data-sets in sync.
“We faced numerous issues including
hassles of administering each system as well as reliability,” says Family. “We
needed to have someone virtually working full time to manage and troubleshoot.
The open source web links worked fine to send material, but it wasn’t an
efficient process and clearly not a good long-term solution.”
LucidLink to the rescue
Post Lab IO is an Adobe Creative Suite
specialist. Through conversation with Jon Barrie, the Strategic Development
Manager CC for Video at Adobe in Australia, Darius and business partner Nicholas
Hower learned of LucidLink.
“We’d never heard of it before, but we
agreed to give it a go. I was quite skeptical initially, just wondering if
LucidLink’s Cloud NAS was too good to be true. Nick set up a test watch folder,
and I opened up Premiere on my laptop at home, and I was able to scrub back and
forth, play around and make edits at the same performance as if it were locally
attached.”
Fluent friction-free production
Post Lab IO has been using LucidLink’s
Cloud NAS for its editors to work from home since 2021. It manages
post-production on multiple productions running on LucidLink at once and has
experienced high reliability.
“For each project, there would be the
feature editor plus one to two assistant editors, along with the director and
the dailies labs – which could be us but could be another vendor. Depending on the
scale of the project, we assign our own team to assist the project in set to
post workflow and editorial assembly. All of them will be working separately,
remotely, in different places and sometimes in different countries, and all of
them will be connected to the same media via LucidLink.”
One recent production hired multiple
editors based in Victoria and another in Queensland (Australia), another in
Israel, one in Brussels, and another in New Zealand. “The LucidLink workflow
functioned flawlessly,” Darius says.
“The editors love it because they get
super quick access to footage. From a management point of view, we loved it
because we have granular user control and clients love it because all they see
is a fluent friction-free production.”
“The other great thing about using
LucidLink is that if a new assistant or editor joins a project, it’s very fast
to set them up. They can have access to the entire editorial data-set and start
working within a very short time frame”
One feature Darius particularly appreciates
is LucidLink’s built-in snapshots. This is essentially a failsafe to recapture
files should a director or editor accidentally delete something.
Administratively too, the LucidLink
system provides tremendous workflow efficiency. “It is really straightforward
in the console to provision a new user, and what’s good is you can set that
user to have access to certain folders. You might have top-level access for a
director and editor to the whole film and subfolder workspace access to
third-party vendors who might only need to work on VFX selects.”
“The whole folder structure on
LucidLink is so simple that anyone with permission can jump in and start work.
We no longer have to think about copying a drive and shipping it. Users can
immediately log in after being granted access.”
Results
Post Lab IO is quickly establishing a
reputation as one of Australia’s leading feature film post-production
facilities. Its lean and agile model that relies on internet and cloud
infrastructure not tied to a central machine room or office suites happens to
be the direction in which all post is headed. Darius had the foresight to be
ahead of the game.
“We’re creative, highly technical, and
really good at identifying weaknesses in the process and coming up with
solutions,” he says. “Most importantly, we’re not afraid to try something new.
We’re always on the hunt for new workflows, tools, and technologies that will
help us get better results and provide you with a better service.
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