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Despite being one of the UK's longest running soap operas, 'Hollyoaks' is anything but old fashioned. In fact, it's without a doubt one of the most progressive soaps in the UK - both in the issues it covers as well as in the technology the show uses to make its intersecting storylines come to life on screen.

Now in its 20th year of production, 'Hollyoaks' is produced by Lime Pictures and airs each weekday on Channel 4 and E4, with an omnibus - the entire week's worth of episodes edited into one long feature - airing on the weekend

HD ENTERS THE SCENE
Lime Pictures has been in the business of producing some of the UK's most dramatic television since the 1980s - before it was even Lime Pictures. Whether the drama is real or scripted, it's safe to say they've perhaps found several formulas to success on the telly. In addition to producing groundbreaking programs that have changed the landscape of television in the UK, Lime Pictures has pioneered cutting edge technology, and was even one of the first drama production companies to go completely tapeless in 2001. In 2008, under Lime Pictures leadership, 'Hollyoaks' became the first soap to transition over to an HD environment.

"We use ES Connect, GeeVS & Flow to help integrate our material in our production workflow" states Alistair McMath, Media Manager at Lime Pictures. Alistair describes the 'Hollyoaks' workflow: "We have four key areas in our workflow, starting with acquisition. We then have the management side of preparing & making media available to view and edit, as well as creating back up, followed by the craft phase and finally archive."

With up to 1TB of content ingested on a daily basis, Lime Pictures needed a solution that would not only store its media, but also help them keep it organised in a way that they could easily retrieve it.

"To manage this heavy-duty acquisition, we have four galleries equipped with Geevs Studio MC," he says. The Geevs video servers capture all this content from a number of permanent sets into the 224TB EditShare XStream shared storage. For added security the Geevs records directly to its internal drives and to the EditShare in parallel, so that in the event of a network outage production does not have to stop on set. Once the recording is finished, a copy is moved to the EditShare Ark Disk storage for nearline backup.

Providing multi-channel synchronised ingest of up to 16 cameras, Studio MC also manages automatic incremental metadata, including episode, scene, shot and take information - a feature that has proved invaluable for Lime Pictures. "An important factor for us is the ability to make each recording with the metadata already entered at the front end. It's then there for the duration of the media lifecycle, which is roughly eight weeks."

Studio MC allows productions to stay organised, regardless of the volume and complexity of on set acquisition. Project set up is crucial; designating folder structure and naming conventions, with clips stored by episode number. Production personnel can see what they're shooting, when they're shooting, as well as see everything that's already been shot. It's particularly helpful to the talent, enabling them to review shots for continuity and pickups for dialogue, meaning they can play back 10 seconds or so of a scene's clip so the actors can better understand the scene they are walking into.

GOING WITH THE FLOW
Location capture is on Sony SxS media, which is logged and ingested using EditShare's Flow Ingest to the shared storage by a team of operators in a central ingest area, The operators add metadata to each clip, and then the file is ingested and rewrapped. Flow makes an H.264 proxy for every file as part of the ingest process.

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