DDL boosts capacity in £4m refit

The remodelling of the building, which currently houses the company’s film lab, is expected to be completed within six months.

The new facility will include six new preview theatres for digital and film formats, and increase the building’s digital cinema operation capacity by nearly 80%.

SGI’s CXFS SAN infrastructure will sit at the core of the overhauled facility, which will also have dedicated DVS storage for Deluxe’s proprietary toolset for 3D subtitling, known as Babel.

DDL will increase its storage capacity by 400-500Tb and, within the next month, Meard Street will be coupled to the firm’s other sites by a 10Gbps connection.

DDL technical director Laurence Claydon said the improvements to the facility would benefit the company’s broadcast clients.

“We are able to offer digital cinema mastering and foreign language release as well as downstream deliverables,” he told Broadcast.

“We can look after dailies, grading, visual effects and compositing, and when it comes to mastering for theatrical release, DDL can deal with that and hand off material for broadcast.”

He added: “It is a complete workflow that includes transcoding for IPTV platforms. It’s not just downstream - we can also make theatrical releases for broadcast content.”

As part of the investment, DDL plans to spend £500,000 on boosting its capacity for high frame rate 3D.

“This is fairly small at the moment and standards are a little bit fluid but there is lots of interest in it. Distribution is limited, but film-makers have said they will shoot at higher frame rates, so the industry needs to be ready.”