CAPTURE, a specialist remote workflow division of award-winning full-service post-production house ENVY, delivers on-location recording and media management services designed to overcome the challenges of rig productions, with Cinegy Capture and Cinegy Multiviewer at its heart.

Thanks to Cinegy, ENVY has been able to create a series of increasingly compact, highly mobile bundles of kit for on-location post-production that are far smaller than would otherwise be possible. These ENVY CAPTURE mobile rig kits include hardware custom-designed to operate as efficiently as possible with as few people as possible on a set and are very accepting of different temperatures and solar radiation. Each ENVY CAPTURE rig creates high-resolution and proxy versions of the incoming video feeds to provide edit-ready media, removing the need for backup and ingest workflows out in the field.

Initially, the CAPTURE mobile workflow was used on projects such as C4’s Love Trap, Amazon’s Lovestruck High and BBC3’s Love in the Flesh. More recent projects include series 1 of British reality TV competition Squid Game: The Challenge, series 2 of American and British reality TV offering The Traitors, ITV 2’s recent offering Olivia Attwood’s Bad Boyfriends, and NBC’s The Anonymous.

Who is ENVY?

ENVY is a full service, end-to-end post-production facility, with a technical setup that is expertly developed to allow flexibility, offering streamlined and bespoke workflows to facilitate almost any requirement.

Since opening in 2006, ENVY has acquired a wealth of experience working across a wide breadth of projects including documentary, entertainment, factual entertainment, scripted and shortform. Its collaborative approach to every project keeps clients’ needs at the heart of the job.

ENVY in an industry-leading post house, and has been recognized with multiple high-profile awards. ENVY won the Best Post Production award six times, making it the most decorated post firm in the history of the Broadcast Awards as well as the ‘Top Facility’ as voted by Producers in Televisual’s annual facilities Top 50. Its creative staff has also been honored with prestigious recognition with numerous awards including RTS, BAFTA, The Grierson Awards and Broadcast Awards.

 

What Cinegy products were chosen?

In the knowledge that an average show can rack up , it was critical to ensure the CAPTURE workflow could support the ingest of multiple feeds quickly and reliably across different formats when it was on location.

The answer was Cinegy Capture and Cinegy Multiviewer, both of which power the CAPTURE mobile rig recording kits. Cinegy Capture makes ingest as flexible and reliable as possible, supporting a wide range of video formats and creating multiple formats and proxy copies at the same time; this enables the solutions to replace all the separate ingest and transcode machines that are typically required to achieve the same results.

The award-winning Cinegy Multiviewer displays streams from remote locations via SRT, satellite feeds, live camera feeds, playout devices and other local or remote sources for monitoring, analysis and problem detection. All Cinegy products run as services operating on commodity IT equipment and are infinitely scalable.

“Cinegy was the best choice for us by far due to its flexibility,” said Toby Weller, Capture Solutions Architect at ENVY. “We found that other software and hardware options on the market were more inflexible, while Cinegy runs in as many ways as you could ever imagine. Cinegy and their Professional Services team have been excellent at tailoring the product to our specific requirements, we feel like they’re fully on “Team ENVY” and are invested in making sure that every show is .”

In a typical OB environment, ENVY will use Cinegy Multiviewer side-by-side with live production feeds to monitor the stream status and incoming audio, as well as provide the production teams with a confirmation of record.

Integrating Cinegy Multiviewer across the ENVY network in a flexible way was particularly easy, according to Weller: “We have a dedicated broadcast network for it, and we’re able to provide any combination of streams to anywhere we like as long as we can run a network cable there. This dedicated setup ensures optimal performance and reliability, which is crucial in our fast-paced production environment.”

How does it work?

“With hardware and software optimizations, we’ve been able to significantly increase our capabilities,” explains Weller. “In production, we’ve gone from 6 HD record streams per server to 16, depending on the codec. A record stream includes a native, a proxy, and a multiviewer stream encode. This is our current production figure, but with further testing, we’re hoping to achieve even higher numbers.”

 

What results were delivered

One way that ENVY distinguishes itself from other rig providers is to provide quality on scale. “We wanted to offer a much higher quality native XAVC Intra codec as standard and combine that with live-creating proxy versions,” said Weller. “This saves huge amount of time on the back end instead of creating them on other transcode engines.”

Those working on the scale that ENVY does know that it can create storage bottle necks, which is something no project can afford. As Weller explains “The great thing about Cinegy Capture is that it encodes on the CPU. This offers an awful lot of buffering potential; you can choose where those buffers are and how much protection you have, to circumvent the bumps in the road. This enables us to record straight to ultra-fast network storage, allowing immediate creation of LTOs as well as sending data back to base for editing.”

Flexibility is key for Weller, who notes there are many different ways to complete a task and that much depends on what shows they are working on. “We continuously change the ways we design our rigs to make them more efficient and reliable, and we expect our numbers to continue improving. In that same time, we’ve also doubled the quality of our native media, from XDCAM 50Mb to XAVC-I 100Mb. Our proxy quality has also increased from 2Mb h.264 to 36Mb DNxHR LB. And Cinegy use DNx, but inside ENVY we use a lower resolution version of that same codec to help save on storage, which boosts efficiency.”

Recent work on NBC’s The Anonymous also highlighted a new workflow that not only records hothead cameras, that are traditionally lower quality, but also directly records larger, higher-grade camera heads such as Sony’s Venice II., therefore circumventing the process of managing higher quality footage shot to card, backed up and sent back to post.

Cabling large cameras straight into the CAPTURE rig on this show meant all formats were received and controlled by ENVY directly in the rig, delivering similar quality output across the board. “This process is still in its infancy, but The Anonymous was shot like that and it’s a good example of how it can save both money and time,” explained Weller.

Future goals

Looking to the future, ENVY has big ambitions for its CAPTURE mobile rig kit. “With the help of Cinegy, we aim to eke out more performance while reducing our hardware, thus keeping our footprint small,” said Weller. “We want to try to keep it as mobile as possible. Our CAPTURE kit must fit into the smallest area possible, while remaining fully redundant and capable of dealing with all sorts of conditions.”

ENVY has already seen some promising numbers in its test environment: “Right now we see a single record server reliably handle 8 streams of UHD XAVC-I Class 300, as well as a DNx HD proxy, this hasn’t yet been proven in the field but it’s encouraging. I believe that could be more than any other !”

ENVY usually has more than one CAPTURE in the field at any one time and is confident in the template it has created for the very large jobs it has coming up on its books. “When you start to record, you need absolute confidence. Every year, we are trying to improve the CAPTURE rig by up to 20% in terms of efficiency and footprint. Cinegy Capture and Cinegy Multiviewer are central to this success.”

“ENVY is all about the adaptability of workflows and the optimization of resources and there’s a parallel thread here between how ENVY is using our technology and how we develop it in that same fashion,” said Daniella Weigner, owner and Managing Director of Cinegy. “ENVY has been using our products for years and can simply build upon a solid, existing Cinegy foundation for years to come.”