Molinare, the Soho-based post-production facility, has selected Nara as its collaborative media workflow tool. It is the start of a drive that will eventually see Nara aiding efficiencies across the entire Molinare Creative Group.
Molinare Creative Group is a unified ecosystem of specialist brands, delivering end-to-end post production across film, television, and games. From DIT and dailies to localisation, and with facilities across the UK – including a new site in Dublin – the group champions uncompromising craft and efficiency at every stage of the creative journey. With that, the teams require a huge amount of storage and rely on archive files being stored in various formats and colour spaces, segregated across production networks with high access restrictions for security.
Darren Woolfson
“We recognised that there were a lot of people in our company who would benefit from more efficient access to our media,” explains Molinare’s CTO, Darren Woolfson. “That might be a post-production manager (PPM) who wants to see a work in progress (WIP), or the marketing team looking at material for showreels, but these requests would need to go down to the MCR department for transcoding and then come back up for viewing. It was time consuming and used a lot of resource.”
With Nara, Molinare can now provide the right people with secure and instant access to the media files they need – speeding up workflows and efficiency.
“We now have secure access to our production network and can provide any individual with permission to view any media file – wherever it is located and in whatever format it is stored. And, crucially, there are no more time-consuming transcode requests, as Nara effectively performs a real-time render and converts the file into the required colour space so the media can be viewed instantly. It sounds very simple, but it is revolutionary – until now, there was no single solution that could perform all these tasks with the same level of quality, efficiency or security.”
Molinare’s Senior Post-Production Manager, Paul Jones, comments: “The ability to easily browse all the storage across the facility is fantastic. Being able to play basically anything – original camera files, EXR, HDR Pro Res, IMF, DCP – with the confidence that FilmLight is handling the colour pipeline is a game changer.”
For the Molinare team, another key benefit of Nara is being able to extract vast amounts of metadata about a particular piece of media. For certain genres, particularly those which require pulling in large amounts of archive footage, the PPMs can now instantly see details such as resolution and frame rate, which makes planning and estimates much simpler, faster and more accurate.
As well as supporting the internal team, Molinare also recognised that Nara could support its clients with more efficient access to the WIP files they regularly require.
“The upcoming Client Review feature is another key reason we selected Nara,” adds Woolfson. “It’s not fully live yet, but we’re working closely with FilmLight on the development of this feature and look forward to being able to provide our clients with secure and instant access to the files they need.”
Nara’s ability to support efficiencies across Molinare’s growing international business was another key part of the decision-making process.
“10 years ago, we were a business operating out of two buildings in Soho,” explains Woolfson. “Molinare Creative Group is now a growing international business with facilities across Europe. Our goal is to deploy equipment in one location (be that in one of our facilities, in the cloud or in a data centre) and use tools to aid collaboration across sites. Nara supports us with this aim and will be essential to an efficient multi-site collaboration.”
“Molinare and FilmLight have had a close relationship for nearly 25 years, and we look forward to continuing this through Nara,” adds Sam Lempp, Head of Business Development for Nara at FilmLight. “We’re actively developing the Nara platform based on user requests; every tool we have released so far has been suggested or designed based on customer feedback. Molinare has been, and will continue to be, a large part of this.”