| 
QVC GOES SHOPPING FOR PYRAMIX AND VCUBE
eMerging supplies complete editing system for new tapeless post suite
London, July 2012: QVC, the UK's leading multimedia retailer, has installed a new tapeless post production suite in its prestigious new location at Chiswick Park. QVC has been tapeless for a number of years but took the opportunity to take another look at what was available when the new facility was taking shape. A key factor was choosing a system with very tight integration of video and audio but this needed to be married to excellent audio editing capabilities and the best available sound quality. The final choice was Merging Technologies' Pyramix, VCube, Isis edit controller, fader expander and the DAD AX24 ADDA converter supplied by eMerging; the UK distributor for these products.
Although the majority of QVC's output is from the studio, there is a significant need for location shooting of products not suitable as well as doing promotional inserts and viewer testimonials for each show. AAF files are received from the video editors and imported to the Pyramix. Although the VCube can handle full HD video, it is normally loaded with a compressed working file. The concept of mixing "in the box" was already familiar for QVC but the VST plug-in handling has been a real bonus with tools such as the Sonnox Post Production bundle. The resulting edited and mixed audio track is exported as a BWAV file for recombining with the video. The media server is shared by all the edit rooms at QVC and this is working well obviating the need for any local storage. The imminent move to HD requires that a percentage of output is in 5.1 so it was important that the editing and mixing was fully surround capable and Pyramix ticked the box again.
Any new editing and mixing platform always presents a steep learning curve for the operators but here the ability to have Pyramix Native running on laptops in advance of the on-air date, really assisted in the training process along with a full training program conducted by eMerging. The familiarity with the program inspires confidence and speeds up the workflow from day one.
Gordon Rutherford, QVC's Manager of Sound and Editing had this to say about the choice of Merging products: "The integration between Pyramix and VCube was simply better than the others and gave us the option to publish to the server if we wished. It seemed to us that the software was written with the operator in mind. It is complex but intuitive, so getting started is easy and then you can dig deeper to find genuinely useful features. Having global libraries available for all projects is a fantastic bonus, particularly when dealing with sound effects. Finally, the whole installation sounds great which is the icing on the cake for me."
