Evolutions

Evolutions is a British post-production company that has reached third place in the TV Producers Poll in Televisuals Top UK Post Houses ranking. We spoke with Will Blanchard, Head of Engineering at Evolutions Bristol, to find out what this post house is focusing on in terms of the technologies that are currently being developed in the industry. With detailed opinions, you will learn about what this company is emphasizing in terms of investment and infrastructure for remote post production workflows, cloud or artificial intelligence.

How was Evolutions born? How has the company grown from what it was to what it is today?

Evolutions launched following a management buyout from ITN in 1994. With a broadcaster’s attitude to technical standards and an independent facility’s approach to client care, Evolutions quickly became one of the most popular and successful post production companies in London.

Another management buyout in 2004 was the precursor to a period of growth and expansion, leading, in March 2006, to the acquisition of Nats Post Production, another of Soho’s most popular fullservice post houses. 2008 saw continued growth with the opening of a further Soho facility in Great Pulteney Street, and in June 2013 Evolutions opened its first regional facility in the UK in the heart of Bristol’s media district.

In April 2014, a brand-new, purpose-built, facility in

Sheraton Street, in central Soho was opened. Further expansion in September 2015 lead to the opening of Berwick Street, a beautiful 30-suite facility in the heart of Soho.

Evolutions is now one of the largest independent, full-service post production companies in the UK across it two-city sites. Evolutions Bristol has now been part of the South West’s production and postproduction community for ten years, and has grown from a small facility with one Colourist, one Dubbing Mixer and a handful of offline suites to one of the regions most respected HETV facilities offering creative talent. We have a credit list ranging from blue chip natural history, to drama and animation.

In 2023 Evolutions were ranked 3rd in the TV Producers Poll in Televisuals Top UK Post Houses.

Their services encompass workflow consultancy including complex VFX work, in-facility, remote and hybrid offlines, UHD HDR Baselight grading, Flame Online suites and Dolby Atmos Audio.

How much added value does technology bring to Evolutions?

This is a tricky question to answer. In terms of value specific to Evolutions we don’t believe we will stand out because of our technology. We believe that it is assumed that every post production facility can gain the same technology, so the way we stand out is being operationally and creatively excellent. That said obviously we wouldn’t be able to function without technology. It’s difficult to put a value it though.

What are the house specialties?

High end television (HETV) post-production in natural history, documentary, drama, etc.

What recent projects has the company been involved in?

I would highlight some contents such as “Epic adventures” (Wildstar, Disney); “Serengeti S1,2,3” (John Downer, BBC/ Discovery); “Lloyd of the files” (Ardman/CITV); “The Doghouse” (FiveMile Films, ch4); and “Gangs of baboons” (True to Nature, Sky Nature).

What have been the most challenging and why? What has technology brought you to solve these challenges?

“Gangs of Baboons” was our first UHD HDR delivery that included sound in Dolby Atmos. We upgraded one of our 5.1 audio suites to accommodate 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos. The most challenging aspect of this was to meet the Dolby specification for speaker placement. We already had 5.1 but some of those speakers needed to move slightly and we needed to move the listening position. Then, obviously, adding more speakers. Once the monitoring was all in place we upgraded the audio IO to an AVID MTRX with suitable option cards to connected to a Dolby RMU to be able to process and render out Dolby Atmos content.

We have also bought in Auto Desk’s Flame product to overcome some of the colour pipeline issues we were having in picture finishing.

Technology is evolving very fast. Postproduction techniques are not far behind. What are the evolving trends in technology that Evolutions has identified and is betting on?

In general, everyone seems to be centralising compute power. Whether or not it’s cloud, data centre or on premise MCR, moving everything centrally solves a few challenges and opens up other technology opportunities. Having all the compute in one place can make some of the remote solutions easier to manage. It also helps if you want to start virtualizing workstations and servers. We have embraced virtualization. For us, the main advantage is security, backup and recovery.

In terms of production, we are seeing increasing engagement with VFX. This is often handled by outside companies, as the production company usually has a preferred supplier (although Earth is our in-house visual effects arm). The challenge is that, with UHD HDR, even sending small clips/plates to a visual effects studio can increase the amount of data that needs to be transferred. Along with the files being bigger, the amount of VFX work per episode has increased. We have expanded our finishing support department and increased the number of workstations and network speed to enable them to process plates and shape visual effects more efficiently.

HDR and UHD (4K), or later (such as 8K), have already become a production standard. How has Evolutions adapted to the demands of these new formats?

There are a few aspects that are challenging when moving to the high-end workflows.

The obvious being, everything needs to be bigger and faster. Storage needs to be bigger and faster, networks need more bandwidth, workstations need more power. These are all the obvious challenges anyone needs to overcome. In the natural history space we have a fairly unique challenge as the amount of footage captured by a production is massive. Due to the nature of the production stage it is not easy to predict how much footage will come to us. But with an average or around 400:1 shooting ratio we end up with a lot of data. In the region of 1-2PB per series. The time from receiving the first rushes to delivering the final programme can sometimes be measured in years so we need to take that into consideration when specifying storage and workflow.

We have put in data centre grade storage with a 100G network backbone, which should future proof us for a time. We are also in R&D on the next generation of storage infrastructure, looking to make things more efficient, cost effective and faster.

Archive is another issue we face. When creating multiple copies for archive, 1PB of source material can quickly become 3PB of data to write, which is a huge. We have had to double our LTO capacity as well as move up a generation in drives/tapes to accommodate faster speeds and higher capacity.

The HDR colour pipeline is infinitely more detailed than SDR. Even at delivery stage there are many choices of specification. This is dictated by the delivery platform. Therefore we must be geared up to deal with every possible iteration. It’s fairly standard for delivery versions to enter the 10s (per episode) including; HD SDR, UHD SDR, UHD HDR and within the HDR deliveries sometimes multiple different colour spaces for each delivery. Gone are the days when rec709 was the only flavour you had to worry about. From a workflow perspective, we work with a master version of a programme that can deliver all the different ‘flavours’ at the end of the creative process. This has meant we don’t have to repeat work in different colour spaces. Along with the workflow we have also had to accommodate a lot more HDR monitoring so more people can be involved in the process along the way. We now accommodate UHD HDR monitoring in all finishing stages, grade, online and audio (Dolby Atmos) as well as the technical support teams that assist all these processes.

We have added Autodesk Flame to our picture finishing tools. This enables us to utilise a completely native workflow throughout, allowing us to preserve the highest quality images.

We have also added MTI’s Cortex platform which does a number of things but helps us with QC and delivery of UHD HDR content.

Remote production techniques, have changed the landscape of our industry. They became commonplace during the COVID-19 pandemic. What workflows did you modify then? How did the technology help you adapt them? Which workflows have remained today?

We have decided to move a lot of infrastructure to a data centre. This not only gives us some benefits in terms of scale, but allows us to share work efficiently between our physical sites in Bristol and London. Clients have become used to working from home, which has meant that anyone’s geographical location is fairly irrelevant. That’s such a good thing allowing production to put together really strong teams, using talent they might not have used before as they might have been too far away from the rest of the production. Even though a lot of people are ‘back in the office’ the requirement for remote technology is still very much needed. I think a real positive to come out of the pandemic is we are now setup to facilitate this flexible working, which allows production to draw on talent they might not have been able to use previously. Not only can clients work from home a Bristol based production can have editors working on the same project, in our London facility, and vice versa. So we can accommodate distributed production teams in a way that suits them. We manage to do this by our high speed network infrastructure between sites, as well as equipment in our data centre.

We also have systems to be able to review and sign off content remotely, again from home or sit in an edit suite in London reviewing work (live) that is happening in Bristol. This helps clients with distributed teams be more efficient with time, and reduce carbon footprint due to limiting the amount of travel needed.

What capabilities does the introduction of the cloud bring to your workflows, and do you see it as an advantage?

Cloud technologies are interesting from a technology point of view. Obviously the most attractive thing is the fast scale and de-scale allowing companies to accept work beyond their physical technology infrastructure. The challenge we face is the cost. Dealing with the amount of data we do, the ingress, egress and storage charges make the cost prohibitive. Each project we work on now commonly goes into PB of storage, with a project lifespan of 1-3 years, making the bill for storage alone into the millions. Where as to buy the physical storage is a tenth of that. Even when you take into consideration power and space, it’s still not attractive in that domain.

If we do manage to get over the cost hurdle, we also have to consider getting uncompressed video at 12bit 4:4:4 into monitors in our finishing suites. To make best use of cloud infrastructure we have to put the compute element of our system in with the storage to give us the best efficiencies and performance. While lots of software manufactures are doing a lot to make their products work well in the cloud there are still some challenges to overcome in the video monitoring side. Lots of people are using NDI successfully but we want to aim for the highest quality possible. Currently we are viewing UHD HDR 12bit 4:4:4 in our finishing suites, to move to a compressed video format like NDI would be a step back in my opinion. While we have adopted NDI elsewhere, in our finishing suite I don’t think it’s appropriate. SMPTE 2110 may provide the answer but along with the storage costs and other technical challenges has leaded us to keep an eye on the cloud technology space, but has stopped us jumping in with both feet at this stage.

What are the next steps Evolutions will take and what technology will it rely on to take them?

Moving into the future we are looking at our infrastructure and how we best plan for change. The only thing certain in technology is that it will change. The goal posts our clients will continue to change. So whatever you plan for today may become redundant tomorrow. We want to create a flexible infrastructure that can be scaled and accommodate a number of scenarios. More specifically we’re investigating technologies to centralise compute power. This helps solve a lot of challenges.

We use the cloud in other ways, often with 3rd party SaaS platforms for some data transfers into and out of our on premis infrastructure.

We also (being Albert affiliate) consider our environmental impact of using cloud infrastructure. All of this and the above come into our decision making when deciding on how to deploy technology, including cloud infrastructure.

What do you think could be the next big technological revolution in the post-production industry?

We are starting to use more and more AI tools. I think there is a space for AI to add value to post production in providing higher quality conversion and manipulation. We deal with a lot of upscaling and standards conversion for archive footage, sometimes creatively trying to sit amongst newly shot UHR HDR footage. We already have some high end software tools and hardware for this. Last year we started using AMDs Threadripper platform for noise reduction (in picture) which increased the speed of processing around x8. So we have really powerful hardware. The next step for us is to see what value content based AI can give us. We occasionally come across footage that will cause a traditional algorithm based process to fall over and create unwanted artifacts. I’m really excited to see what will happen when the process moves over to content based processing.