The Farm Group has begun kitting out its fifth central London site, a 20,000 sq ft building that is due to open for business in May.

Christened ‘William’, the Marshall Street facility will provide extra capacity across all the genres in which the post-production firm works.

It is expected to cost £5m and will house 20 Avid suites, 10 audio studios, 10 finishing suites and two grading theatres.

“Over the past nine months, we have had 20 dry-hire suites running, in addition to those we own,” said joint chairman Nicky Sargent.

“For us to put in that number of audio and finishing suites shows that demand is coming from across the board and not just from reality TV, for example.”

Sargent added that the “vast majority” of the 50 staff required to run the facility will be new recruits.

The audio theatres will be equipped with Avid Pro Tools, while the finishing suites will have a combination of Nucoda Film Master, Mistika and Avid Symphony.

“William itself won’t have a facility-style machine room and all of the finishing equipment will work off a SAN based around a Quantum StorNext solution, while the Avids will be connected to Isis storage housed both locally and remotely,” said recently appointed joint managing director David Klafkowski.

“The building will have virtually no baseband video technology; it will be file-based.”

The ingest of material and the delivery of files will be handled by Battery, the Farm Group’s media management resource housed at its Uncle site.

“The Farm building on Soho Square will retain a small machine room because it needs some baseband capacity, but with William we are radically changing the way we work,” added Klafkowski.