News

Multi-award winning NHNZ is set to raise the bar further in factual TV production following a hefty investment in its graphics facilities.

Increased demand for High Definition (HD) programming has resulted in the Dunedin-based production company boosting its in-house animation and graphics systems with a huge injection of the latest in content creation, data processing and storage technology.

The upgrade came with a $250,000 price tag and has been completed just in time to begin work on a groundbreaking new commission for Animal Planet that will combine wildlife footage with comic book style animation.

NHNZ general manager John Crawford says commissioning the state of the art graphics facility further cements NHNZ's reputation as a trailblazer in factual television production.

"NHNZ has been shooting in HD for the past decade and is known as an early adapter of new technology so we're thrilled to again be leading the next wave of natural history production.

"There's no limit to what our creative team can achieve with this technology at their fingertips. Audiences should brace themselves because the next generation of productions will be a radical departure from anything previously seen," he says.

NHNZ joined forces with world leading vendors such as Apple and Hewlett Packard to develop its state of the art animation facility for HD productions.

Starting with over 30 terabytes (30,000 gigabytes) of raw storage, Apple NZ has built a fully protected storage system that gives both Mac and Windows users access to all the components needed to create complicated composited effects shots and animated components.

Each of NHNZ's eight new workstations has a further 2TB of local storage, giving a total raw storage capacity approaching 50 terabytes (50,000 gigabytes) - the equivalent of around 12,000 DVD disks.

Mac users are connected to this massive storage system via ultra-fast 4Gb/s fibre-optic connections, while the Windows clients use 1Gb/s copper Ethernet. This connection system allows multiple workstations to access data on this storage system simultaneously, without bandwidth or connection limitations.

To process this data, the new workstations use the latest quad-core Central Processing Units (CPUs), in a dual configuration giving each workstation the equivalent of eight CPUs. This means that video and scene data can be processed at much faster rates, and complicated Computer Generated (CG) shots can be completed much faster to meet the ever-increasing demand for quality HD animation and composited shots.

Mr Crawford says this new hardware, along with the latest in editing software from Apple, animation software from Autodesk and compositing software from Adobe, will allow NHNZ to continue creating award-winning documentaries in the increasingly competitive HD television environment.

"The upgrade heralds an exciting new chapter in the NHNZ story," he says.