The Mill is a highly respected international visual effects company with offices in London, New York and Los Angeles. Six ContentAgents, used as the primary encoding and DVD creation tool, form part of the company’s vast equipment arsenal.
“It’s the ‘Swiss army knife’ of our transcoding and MCR areas,” maintains The Mill’s Head of MCR, Miles Stormer. “The DVD authoring is quick, functional and well-presented.The ability to create uncompressed TGA sequences for onward international delivery is very useful as are the standards and aspect conversion functions. It's great that you can create or transcode to most common files. I like that you are able to write a capture EDL as well as a simple single event capture - having the choice to do both is great.”
Lance Gaunt, Media Transfer Supervisor agrees. “We use ContentAgent systems in our Los Angeles and New York facilities too. As in London they’re used for a multitude of tasks. It’s our first choice for fast turnaround menu-based DVD creation and we use the platinum engine for standards conversion and ARCing whilst transcoding files for clients, either bespoke on a job-by-job basis or bulk transcoding for back catalogues and high- volume work. We generate H264 codec-based QuickTime and AVC MP4 files for clients’ archives as well as files of differing quality from 2 pass Sorenson-based QuickTimes up to MPEG2 50 Mb/s I frame and 25Mb/s long GOP files for domestic and international transmission.”
ContentAgent enables workflow templates to be set up for both bespoke jobs and bulk transcoding operations. Similarly user profiles can be created and locked down so junior staff are able to operate efficiently and with a minimum of confusion.
The net effect is a smoother, more streamlined workflow for The Mill maintains Lance. “ContentAgent allows us to incorporate diverse tasks within a single ingest/transcode solution. The ability to either import via FTP, or capture an uncompressed source from tape and bulk transcode to multiple formats – including standards conversion – all via a single managed workflow template, streamlines the process and minimises turnaround time.
As Miles points out, The Mill was an early adopter of ContentAgent technology and the facility has witnessed its evolution. “ContentAgent has come on in leaps and bounds over the last few years. I know of no other system that offers such a complete encoding, authoring and delivery package with a User Interface that is so easily grasped.”