BKW, a Chinese TV production company, has adopted an EditShare storage platform to support multiple concurrent editors working on a popular reality TV project.
Love Actually is the most popular reality show on the Tencent Video streaming platform in China, and is available globally on Tencent’s WeTV service. Twelve young people live in the same large house for a month, and the show tracks their relationships as they develop. As well as activities in and around the house, the show tracks its participants as they go out and about their daily activities such as food shopping.
The nature of the production means there are more than 100 cameras shooting simultaneously, generating enormous amounts of content and demanding powerful post-production facilities. After looking at the state-of-the-art in reality TV production workflows worldwide, BKW chose EditShare to design a system tailored to the specific needs of Love Actually.
The system, developed by EditShare and local systems integrator ThinkTone, is built on the EFS450 storage solution, with 13 nodes and around two petabytes of storage, all available online. To enable the fast turnaround show to follow multiple simultaneous stories, there are 56 edit workstations across three production rooms.
Said Bacho, Chief Revenue Officer of EditShare, commented, “The challenge for reality TV programmes the world over is that they generate massive amounts of content, which has to be turned into compelling television virtually instantly.
“To do that cost-effectively while supporting the creative look and feel of the show demands a very special production environment — not just secure and stable storage and effective asset management to track the content, but the huge bandwidth required to deliver it to large numbers of editors working together.“Built on EditShare’s storage and workflows, BKW’s Love Actually is the model for reality TV the world over.”