Mach2Media selects Elements for production of Gran Turismo Academy series

Mach2Media, a production house located in Germany and the UK and specialising in sports programming, has deployed its recently purchased Elements One server and shared storage appliance for production and post production of 68 episodes of GT Academy, broadcast in 24 countries worldwide. GT Academy, an initiative by Nissan and Sony PlayStation, is the international virtual-to-reality contest that follows the world’s best Gran Turismo video players as they compete for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a real-life professional race car driver.

The television show documents the intense competition and training for the final candidates. Mach2Media chose Elements for its unique embedded Media Library, a web-based workflow management feature, to enhance and simplify the extensive global workflow.

Headed by Simon Südel and Daniel Thomé, two seasoned veterans in sports journalism, Mach2Media served as the production company for the German edition of the GT Academy series for the past three years. In order to adopt and apply the same standard of programming to all other participating countries, Mach2Media was selected as the worldwide production company for the 2015/2016 season to be aired on RTL, Europe’s largest TV network as well as networks around the world.

Mach2Media chose the 24 bay edition of Elements One as their centralised server and storage solution for the entire video content, captured with over 50 cameras around the globe, including RED Digital cameras, Sony F5, Canon DSLR, video drones and GoPro’s Hero4. The all-in-one solution provides up to 360TB of shared storage in only four rack units and enables customers to work in a heterogeneous SAN or NAS environment to share media files natively across all platforms and non-linear editing and VFX applications.

Maintenance is reduced, and complicated workarounds and time-consuming transcoding or copy tasks are eliminated. Located in the Mach2Media production headquarters in Cologne, Elements One provides the international team of editors, based in 24 countries, with 24/7 remote access to all media assets.

“The biggest challenges in a decentralised workflow setup over such great distances are quality control, data security and efficient communication,” said Simon Südel, co-owner and executive producer, Mach2Media. “Elements is the only vendor who was able to supply us with fast and highly secure storage plus a sophisticated, yet easy, user management. But, above all, the great set of features in Elements Media Library simplifies and improves communication.

“For us this was almost a life-saver,” adds Südel. “Not only were we able to continue to work without any interruptions but we were amazed that we could double our storage space without spending twice as much!”