Case study

FILM FESTIVAL

About

Stockholm International Film Festival started in 1990 and is today one of the leading film festivals in Europe – with over 130 film premiers from all over the world.

Busy weeks – and a lot of hassle

The hectict weeks just before the festival starts is were all contributions has to be uploaded, quality assured, mastered and then distributed to cinemas. SFF looked into finding a way to streamline this process to make it less cumbersome and prone to delays and communication issues:

Preceding the festival, a solid media managament system is required to organise sales material and trailers, building the foundation.
Invitations to upload contributions has to go smooth, uploading 100+GB of data must be fast and reliable, and need to be tracked properly.
The lab personel need to be able to quickly access and Q/C the material to be able to react if the material is corrupt – fast turn around is key to success.
Managing KDM (DCP encryption keys) is a dance of its own, requiring extra validation.
Distributing the DCPs to cinemas has to go fast and reliable, ideally fully automated to minimise delays before a time sensitive premiere.

The solution

SFF decided to go for accsyn as the central hub of storage and media management, having superior file transfer performance and a verstile delivery and file sharing foundation built-in:

Staff creates the title in the accsyn Media Vault.
Staff uses accsyn Delivery to request an upload from the contributor, the requests are tracked accordingly and reminders are sent if user is delayed.
When uploaded the lab staff uses File Sharing to download, validate, Q/C and master the film. The resulting DCPs are uploaded back to accsyn.
Staff sends the DCP using Delivery to the cinemas that should run the film, tracking the progress and reminding cinemas that are having delays downloading the material.
The main cinema Skandia, installed the accsyn host, facilitating 24/7 delivery of DCPs without human intervention – a huge time saver when there is a premiere next day.

Summary

Thanks to accsyn, Stockholm Film Festival now have full control of their festivals, saving countless hours of coordination and having a much easier life than before.

Also, a solid media and user archive is developed allowing content and metadata to persist, saving precious time next time a festival is launched.

Additional resources

Stockholm film festival

MEDIA VAULT

DELIVERY