ASA INVEST IN FURTHER AVID SYSTEMS

ANDREW Sumner Associates (ASA) have announced the installation of additional Avid systems at their Manchester-based facility.
The installations, carried out by Tyrell North, includes a second Avid Symphony, the upgrade of their Avid Unity to six seats and 1.5TB of storage and five Avid Media Composer NT systems. A major reason for the purchase was to accommodate footage intensive shows such as ‘I Love The 80s’ for BBC Manchester and ‘The Top 100’ nights for YTV and Channel 4.
ASA are one of the largest post-production facilities outside London and have an impressive client portfolio including the BBC, RDF, Planet Wild, Granada TV, Yorkshire TV and Channel 4. Apart from the ‘I Love The 80s’ series, ASA are also currently working on ‘Songs Of Praise’, ‘Everyman’ and ‘Bare Necessities’. The company chose Manchester based Tyrell North as their technology partner to provide pre-sales consultancy, installation and ongoing support.
Currently showing on BBC One, ‘I Love The 80s’ involves ten ninety-minute programmes that contain an extensive amount of archive footage and tight production deadlines. ASA have been using the increased workflow offering to their full advantage using three suites (two Symphony, one MC1000XL) working in parallel with the upgraded Unity system. The symphony systems have suited this type of ideally due to the Pan and Scan, real time colour correction, real time chromakey and uncompressed features. In addition, the six-seat Unity has been essential in providing the storage volume, media management and digitising capabilities required for this size of project.
Brian Hardman, General Manager at ASA, said: “Unity is a real boon for ASA as we work on many large projects with tight deadlines. It provides significant improvements to our workflow in picture and sound postproduction stages, plus major storage management benefits. The ability to work in parallel with the Avid systems means we can produce high quality programmes to very tight deadlines.”(CMcL)