Drive to Survive adopted Creative Remote as a solution to the countless problems faced by the film and television industry during the Covid-19 Pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. When traditional post-houses were forced to limit access to their cutting rooms, the Drive to Survive team were able to adapt quickly using our remote systems.
 
The flexibility Creative Remote offers allowed the team to tailor our services to their needs. A challenging show with many editors, assistants, EPs and loggers required a variety of Creative Remote services to keep them in the race.
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There is no time to waste on a show like Drive to Survive. Creative Remote has provided full offline services for the production since Season 5 and has transformed the way in which the series approaches the editing process.
 
Media is captured in a variety of ways, all of which require a different approach. A few days after each race a large drive, containing all of the race ISOs from that race weekend, is couriered from F1 headquarters in Biggin Hill to our headquarters where we mount and scan the media. On completion of our security checks, the media is copied into the Nexis via our 10GB point-to-point connection.
 
Production shot media is managed on location by media management specialists The Collectv. They DIT, back-up and transcode media on location, building out an AVID project to a predetermined spec. The transcoded media is then uploaded to our landing pad portal, or shipped on a drive to our HQ for ingest. Smaller shoots can easily be uploaded directly from location ensuring timely ingest from anywhere in the world.
 
Once ingested, the media is then presented to their team of assistant editors for any additional transcoding, syncing and grouping. The Assistants make use of dual-AVID profiles, with an added performance boost in the way of additional memory and the inclusion of systems such as DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Suite. This enables them to manage multiple processes simultaneously, dramatically shortening turnaround time for media becoming available to editors.
 
From this point, media is immediately accessible by the series’ creative teams via the use of our bespoke AVID Lite systems. Unlike the often outdated logger laptops commonly found in post houses, these are full media composer licenses working from virtual machines. The only difference on these profiles being a more appropriate CPU profile to accommodate the smaller workload. This gives Showrunners, Directors, Producers, PDs, Researchers, Loggers and anyone else who needs to view footage an unapparelled level of performance for a much lower cost. Additionally, our virtual systems can be utilised from anywhere in the world – so the PDs can review edits, pull selects into bins for editors and apply markers to timelines direct from the shoot, be it Silverstone, Monaco or Melbourne.
 
Although predominantly editing from the UK, Drive to Survive is cut by editors across Europe and further afield, with Creative Remote enabling their seamless integration into the team. Editors have access to all of the wide-ranging AVID plug-ins, and are provided any bespoke requirements as they arise. The editors on Drive to Survive demand a lot of their AVID Projects, with editorial timelines frequently containing over 50 audio tracks, multiple video layers, editorial effects, titles and subtitles pushing the media composer hard.
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Exec viewings have to run to an incredibly strict schedule of live-viewings. We support live-streaming from the AVID, enabling the Netflix execs to join the production team to live-view an episode without the delay of rendering, playouts and uploads. Notes can then be given immediately after the viewings and sections can be re-watched or tweaked in real-time. Where the creative execs span both London and LA, this capability allows for seamless cross time-zone collaboration.
 
Box to Box Films have numerous edit suites in their Hoxton facility, using Mac mini systems to log into Creative Remote infrastructure. The flexibility we offer allows the Drive to Survive post team to boost the efficiency of the existing real estate commitments, limiting the business' exposure to rising rent costs. Edit teams can share a suite, only using the room itself for a few days when they need direct contact with execs while the other user works from anywhere else. Swapping projects takes as long as it takes to input an ID and password. Some editors also make use of the Creative Remote supplied Edit Kit Packages. Delivered to an editor's home, our Edit Kit Packages are especially useful should an editor suddenly not be able to attend the edit in person and need to pivot to a WFH plan. Equally, we can have an editor connect to Creative Remote from their own kit perfectly securely.
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At picture lock, the handover to the final post supplier Picture Shop, in the case of Drive to Survive, is seamless. Turnover is prepared by the team of assistant editors, and this is uploaded to Picture Shop’s portal. A copy of the rushes media is suppled on Nearline storage to act as the conform master – this ensures smooth handover from offline into final post, and means that any late re-edits can be passed along without the need for continual resupplies of rushes media. The same goes for any editorial deliverables required by the broadcaster. Creative Remote can write these deliverables to LTO, or assist in the delivery to any network cloud storage.