The producers of BBC3's dog training series Dog Borstal are making use of a new web-based media asset management and shared storage technology to speed up post-production on the series.

Installed and owned by Shepherds Bush post facility Clear Cut Pictures, the PM100 Post MAM system is made by Californian manufacturer Apace Systems.

The collaborative set-up is allowing the producer/director and the editor to work in tandem, using two editing systems in the same suite to access and cut the same material.

According to producer/director Louise Mason, who is five weeks into the seven-week edit schedule for episode one, the new system has proved invaluable as the BBC-produced show generates up to 150 hours of rushes per 60-minute show.

“With three teams filming for four days you can become overwhelmed by the volume of material,” she explained. “But I've found this workflow very liberating because managing the rushes is about efficiency and being one step ahead of the editor. We can effectively do double work.”

Once rushes have been digitised remotely the craft editing is done on a high-end Avid Adrenaline while Mason is using a copy of Avid Xpress Pro installed on a PC in the same edit suite.

The producer/director will view, log and rough cut a sequence and drop it back into the project while the editor finishes a different sequence.

Although the functionality hasn't been used on this project, Post MAM also allows rushes to be viewed and marked remotely via a web browser. For previous series of Dog Borstal, the team used Media Manager from Avid.

Clear Cut also provides Avid Unity for shared project storage but chief executive Horacio Queiro believes producers can save money as well as time by using technology developed by smaller manufacturers like Apace.

“Avid storage is not the right answer for high demand projects like Dog Borstal that work in native resolution,” said Queiro. “It is not only the fact that terabyte per terabyte it is more expensive than the Apace solution, but you also have to pay extra for support and Unity seats.”

Sixty terabytes of storage and the Post MAM were installed earlier this month and, along with other peripherals including Firewire drives, cost in the region of£100,000.

The fourth series of Dog Borstal, an in-house BBC production, does not yet have a confirmed transmission slot.

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