Pronology MAM System Strikes Oscar Gold for Academy Awards Telecast

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences once again chose Pronology’s media asset management solution to monitor and approve all pre-recorded content for the annual OSCARS telecast. For the seventh consecutive year, the production team behind the Academy’s big night has been relying on Pronology. This year, Pronology’s flagship CenterPoint media asset management platform along with its mRes standalone multi-resolution encoder were deployed for the event.

“We are humbled to have been asked back for the seventh consecutive year by the Academy and acknowledge how important it is that our solutions maintain reliability and accuracy,” says Jonathan Aroesty, president of Pronology. “At Pronology, we pride ourselves on creating reliable products that can manage the many moving parts and assets required for large scale productions, such as the OSCARS. Our goal is to give the show’s producers an easy-to-use platform to view and approve the show’s thousands of pre-produced audio and video elements, quickly and efficiently.”

Pronology’s interactive interface is at the heart of its CenterPoint solution, enabling users to log, annotate, organize, view and remotely exchange content and information instantaneously. This allows all members of the creative team to collaborate in real-time. CenterPoint once again proved to be particularly useful for managing the voiceovers for this year’s nominee packages, which were recorded on-site at the Dolby Theatre at the Hollywood & Highland Center. It also provided a secure portal for the audio department to arrange, share and transfer content to Chainsaw, the edit facility charged with compositing and delivering all the final elements. CenterPoint also addressed data security, which is of the utmost concern, ensuring that show content remained confidential, allowing only designated, authorized personnel access.

In keeping with the traditional workflow, every clip must be formally “approved” by ABC Broadcast Standards and Practices (BS&P) prior to the event’s broadcast. With Pronology, the BS&P team monitored the deliveries coming from Chainsaw in real-time, directly from its offices across town. Immediately after content was created, it could be approved for air, greatly eliminating any potential workflow bottlenecks and further streamlining the process.

An updated version of Pronology’s mRes standalone multi-resolution encoder was also deployed, proving valuable for the performing artists. mRes seamlessly records three tiers of video — a high-resolution media file, an edit proxy and a live web-streamable proxy — without missing a frame of action. Having the secure web-streamable proxy enabled, the performers were able to watch their performances during rehearsals as well as post-event. mRes’ various ingest enhancements include more agile, user-defined metadata, which gives users the ability to quickly modify data on a per-file basis. In addition, it now features the ability to import and export mRes controller settings so that users can easily save or exchange configurations or preferred parameters.

“Just as it has been in years past, Pronology was an essential piece of the workflow puzzle for the 89th OSCARS telecast,” says Academy Awards Engineer-in-Charge Tim Kubit. “It’s critical that each portion of the Academy Awards telecast be reviewed and approved prior to the live broadcast by people who are physically separated from each other. Pronology’s production tools and workflow allowed us to securely and efficiently manage the hundreds of playback elements required to produce this year’s event in a flexible collaborative way.”