LOS ANGELES — Phase 3 Productions (http://phase3.tv) has invested in Archion Technologies’ EditStor shared storage solution to handle its increasing media needs in the production of infomercials promoting vintage television projects being released on DVD, as well as for documentaries featured within those DVDs. Phase 3 Productions depends on EditStor for its Avid project sharing, ensuring company-wide ease of access to shared files for a diverse range of clients.
Photo (L-R): Trocker and Hansen
“Phase 3 Productions started out basically doing broadcast advertising and promotion, but the scope of our work has broadened over the years to include EPKs and even live performances of stage plays,” explains company founder/president Alex Trocker. “We also do a lot of infomercials, so our scope has expanded to include a great deal of live-action production along with our post. We’ve done quite a few infomercials, documentaries, and feature content packages for DVDs recently. These have been for such classic TV series as The Carol Burnett Show, Get Smart, the original Batman series, and Laugh-In, along with specials like the Motown 25 Anniversary, and many variety shows, such as those starring Johnny Carson, Bob Hope, and Andy Williams - even The Dean Martin Roasts.”
Some of these projects include up to 20 hours of original documentary material that the studio produced.
“We have been longtime Archion customers, starting years back when we had their Synergy to expand our Avid Unity system,” Trocker explains. “It integrated into our workflow beautifully, so when it came time to replace the Unity, we went to learn about Archion’s EditStor. As far as the price comparison goes, it can’t be beat. We simply had to have a large, high performance, big media storage system with Avid project sharing (bin locking) in which we would keep all that content online all the time. The Archion EditStor system makes our lives easy. All of us here at Phase 3 are writers, producers or directors, so we are all well rounded generalists. We are all comfortable editing with the Avid and accessing the EditStor for storage. The EditStor shares all of our Avid projects across all editorial needs, including graphics, sound mixing, and final cut.”
“It can handle any format of video file we may use for a project,” notes chief engineer Chris Hansen. “Our workflow is pretty simple: for editing we use Avid Media Composer 8 and Apple’s Final Cut 7, and Adobe’s After Effects or Premiere for graphics and effects. The EditStor can store all of our graphics files – anything we can come up with - a lot of the other solutions can’t do that. Archion handles all three equally well – it’s a beautiful choice. The fact that Archion can support all three workflows equally well saves us so many problems.”
Phase 3 currently has five edit bays, and very often, three bays are working on the same project at the same time. The studio occassionally revisits a project six or nine months later to reversion it for different clients.