A Customer Success
from the Experts in
Business-Critical ContinuityTM.
Absolute Post
Delivering Fast, Flexible and Easy Access to Post-Production Systems
As a full-service transatlantic facility with offices in London and New York, Absolute
Post is a post-production house that creates high-end visual effects for TV
commercials, music videos, films and digital media. Whether it is for trailers for the
movie Prometheus or commercials for MasterCard, Verizon, Rolex, the NFL or its
wide variety of other clients, Absolute Post offers a personal and enthusiastic service
that delivers first-rate effects and innovative solutions. Playing a pivotal role in the
finishing house’s ability to give its clients highly personalized and first-rate service
is the Avocent® HMX extender system that Absolute uses to seamlessly share and
remotely access its high-end post-production computing systems.
Less Engineering Effort, Greater Access to Resources
Company
Absolute Post
Location
London, UK
Type of Business
Video post-production
Business Needs
Deliver faster and easier access to all postproduction systems to any client suite in its
facility.
Solution
Avocent® HMX extender system
Business Benefits
• Saves at least 20 hours per week of
engineering time by eliminating the need to
move and reconfigure systems to address
clients’ requests
• Provides fast access to any computing
resource from any room
• Eliminates large data transfers and data
duplication, saving on expensive high-end
storage costs
• Eliminates downtime, retrofit and installation
labor costs and the expense of more costly
extenders associated with fiber-based options
• Enhances the creative environment for clients
• Improves quality of service offered to
customers by making it easier and faster to
respond and provide access to the variety of
resources requested by clients
• Increases business volume and profitability
through its ability to dynamically adapt
to client requests and eliminate lengthy
equipment reconfigures and lag times
between client sessions
As with many office buildings in London, the varied shapes and sizes of the offices
in Absolute’s headquarters put constraints on what post-production equipment
the company can house in the suites where it works with its clients. To address this
problem in the past, it had used extender systems from another vendor. But that
solution limited the variety of services Absolute could provide its clients at any given
time within its different suites. On nearly a daily basis, a client would need access
to systems not configured for a particular suite, requiring the engineering team at
Absolute to spend four or more hours moving and installing equipment to address
the client need.
“The Avocent® HMX system gives us a lot more functionality
and has made life much easier for our engineering
department as well as our operators and clients.”
– David Bees, Chief Technology Officer, Absolute Post
When Absolute decided to take advantage of the Avocent® HMX extender system, it
eliminated that engineering effort. Absolute also began to enjoy greater access and
flexibility to its post-production equipment.
“The Avocent® HMX system gives us a lot more functionality and has made life
much easier for our engineering department as well as our operators and clients,”
says David Bees, Chief Technology Officer for Absolute Post. “We no longer have to
spend half the day unplugging things, moving monitors, dressing cables and putting
them into a suite to accommodate a client session that requires different software
to complete their advert. Now our operators simply log in with their Active Directory
user credentials, and the resources they need are automatically allocated to them in
that suite. Also, instead of having to move equipment around all day, our engineers
can concentrate on more creative and strategic initiatives.”
A Customer Success
from the Experts in
Business-Critical ContinuityTM.
Smoother Operations, Lower Hardware Costs
In the past, Absolute had to tie individual systems to specific rooms.
Since client projects are often stored on a particular system, this created
problems if a scheduling conflict arose with a room or if the client
needed a bigger room. Addressing this problem in the past meant
transferring that project to a different system, resulting in a significant
amount of data duplication. The Avocent® HMX extender system
eliminated this problem through its ability to allow clients in any suite to
quickly and easily access any system.
“With the Avocent® HMX system, our clients can use any available
room. We don’t have to worry about transferring vast amounts of video
data between our finishing systems, which can take a very long time,”
Bees says. “That also saves us storage space. The cost per gigabyte
on RAID 5 systems is expensive. Every time we have to replicate data,
we waste money. The HMX system took away that unnecessary data
replication and additional storage cost.”
Bees adds, “The Avocent® HMX extenders enable us to provide our
clients with a very creative environment within any of our suites. We
can give them a whole team of people within one room, working
on a multitude of different software and platforms in a way that lets
them visualize their product easier. If they want, they can see the 3-D
elements generated alongside the operator actually doing the finishing
work on their commercial, as well as see all the motion graphics that
might be incorporated and layered into the finished product. It lets
them access what they need, see the different actions taking place and
dictate the workflow that they want–all from within the suite.”
The increased flexibility in accommodating client needs, provided
by the Avocent® HMX extender system, has also had a direct impact
on Absolute’s ability to generate more business and increase its
profitability.
When Absolute first looked for solutions to improve its ability to access
different resources from different rooms, it considered fiber-based
extenders, but that option proved too problematic.
“Going with fiber would have caused major disruptions to our facility
and operations,” Bees says. “In order to do fiber installs, we would
have had to pull out most of our equipment and refurnish most of our
rooms. We wouldn’t have the time or the budget for that. And even
though fiber itself is relatively cheap, the fiber extenders are quite
expensive compared to the Avocent® HXM extenders. But the even
bigger cost with fiber would come from the downtime of our facility
and labor needed to install it. Since we were already wired for CAT 5, the
Avocent® HMX system route was a bit of a no-brainer.”
“Our production crew can get a call out of the blue from a client that
wants to come in and work on a new project or adaptation,” Bees says.
“The last thing we want to tell them is that they have to wait an hour
because a particular room is unavailable. The Avocent® solutions
enable us to adapt and quickly shift things around to meet the clients’
needs so they don’t have to wait. The faster access to resources that the
Avocent® HMX system provides and its ability to quickly accommodate
our clients’ needs keeps our clients from going to a competitor and
enables us to serve more customers than before, which increases our
business volume and profitability.”
Enhanced Client Services
Perhaps of greatest importance is how the Avocent® HMX extender
system enhances the level of service that Absolute can deliver. “The
Avocent® solutions have given us greater flexibility to better serve
our clients,” Bees says. “We can easily accommodate client requests.
If they want three or four different systems within a suite, we can
provide them—and we can do it quickly, which is paramount. If we have
scheduling conflicts with a certain room, or the client simply needs a
bigger suite to accommodate more people, they can use any of our
available rooms and access all the creative resources they need.”
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