We asked our Senior Editor and Head of Post-Production, Matt Sawyer, how he and the team manages thousands of hours of footage from around the world… 

 

When I first started working in the post-production department for Tourism Media I noticed that the video library was massive with around 100Tbs of rushes. Flash forward several years and that is now a whopping 400TBs – and growing!

With such a rich library of video covering the entire globe we’re in the unique position of needing this 400TB’s of footage online and accessible at short notice. Tourism Media employs a set of tools that enable the production and post-production staff to accurately sort and recall high-quality media in mere moments.

The most important part of any large scale media management operation is to have a set of strict guidelines and standards for sorting files through filenames and storage folders. Guiding this process is an in-house, customised content management system (CMS) called Gearbox. Gearbox houses a complete list of the world’s geography laid out in a simplified folder structure. This structure is our first point of reference whenever we receive rushes from our videographers out in the field. Our data wrangling team carefully takes the video and sorts it through our global folder structure, enabling any new media to plug directly into our existing 400TBs of data.

TM’s large library of rushes is also linked up to a set of in-house and third-party media asset management (MAM) tools that seamlessly create a set of reference frames. This enables our media to be searched extremely fast and reliably. The MAM is distributed to any production staff, onsite or offsite, and enables them to view, sort, tag, review and import footage to be used in film and video creation.

Media is an integral part of this business (and business name!) and we believe the management of media is as important as the content we create. As well as maintaining in-house processes, Tourism Media’s production staff keep an eye on new technologies that can help push the post-production workflow into faster, more creative and more efficient places.

To get an idea of some of the videos our talented team have produced, take a look at the Expedia Travel Guide videos and Norfolk Island projects.