Viacom Music & Entertainment Group Taps Pronology mRes Multi-Resolution Encoders for Mobile Units

Viacom’s Music & Entertainment Group has been using Pronology’s range of media asset management and recording solutions at a series of high-profile events in its new Atlas and Gracie mobile production trucks. Pronology’s mRes standalone multi-resolution encoder is scheduled to also be installed in the entire fleet of Viacom’s Music & Entertainment Group’s trucks, including Magnus and Nereus.

Pronology, a developer of tapeless workflow solutions, has supplied key links for the workflows of several challenging Viacom’s Music & Entertainment Group productions this year, starting in January with the successful production of Grease: Live and continuing with the 2016 MTV Movie Awards and several MMA and professional boxing events. In late July, the trucks captured the finals at Montreal’s Just for Laughs event for the Comedy Network in Canada and Comedy Central in the United States and was also used at the recent 2016 MTV Video Music Awards.

Pronology’s new mRes — the company’s first standalone encoder — seamlessly records uncompressed video for each SDI input channel prior to compression and wrapping, without missing a frame of action: a high-resolution media file, an edit proxy and a live web-streamable proxy, are all created immediately from the uncompressed recordings while offering users unparalleled flexibility, reliability and ease of use at a low cost point.

In Atlas, mRes is installed alongside the Sony PWS-4500 4K/HD Live Server System and Small Tree shared storage. The Sony servers are controlled by Pronology’s CenterPoint Core. In the Gracie edit truck, mRes is part of a workflow involving Adobe Premier Pro CC and numerous edit suites.

“Viacom’s Music & Entertainment Group is visionary in the way it is preparing its new trucks for 4K acquisition,” says Jonathan Aroesty, president of Pronology. “Viacom’s Music & Entertainment Group’s commitment to Pronology and its latest mRes encode system is proving itself valuable as part of its latest production fleet. We look forward to being a part of its evolving mobile 4K workflows.”

In providing full turnkey support for this sale, Pronology has been training Viacom’s Music & Entertainment Group staff and rolodex of freelancers on how to use mRes and Screener, a scaled-down version of mRes that only makes H.264 files for screening purposes.

“Pronology and its products and support have been key for several productions this year as our Atlas truck debuted,” says George Epley, Sr. VP Technical and Production Operations, Viacom’s Music & Entertainment Group. “Atlas is one of the largest and technologically advanced production vehicles in its class, and is used for HD and 4K location work at live events, with dozens of upcoming productions scheduled. The ability to have access to media in a variety of compression formats instantaneously is critical for the wide range of production situations we encounter.”