'Meerkats' film released

The Weinstein Company's first Wildlife feature 'Meerkats' is released. Voiced by the late Paul Newman the film brings the real life story of a family of Meerkats to the large screen.

This has been a huge project for us, says HDHUB's director James Middleton. We had 5 months on location in the Kalahari, followed by 8 months editorial in London. We have been involved every step of the way.

The requirements for this project were unique. Editor Justin Krish (Bend it like Beckham, Nanny Mcphee) required a full feature package with multiple cutting rooms setup in a private game lodge on the shooting location.

We had two Avid Adrenaline edit stations and a Media Composer soft all working from Avid Unity storage solutions, says Jacques Mc Donald, HDHUB technical director. Meerkats had 16TB of Avid Unity storage to cope with the massive amount of footage. We provided projection equipment. A UPS system was essential to cope with the frequent power puts in the area. Equipment was packaged so parts could quickly be flown in and out of the location by private plane.

After 5 months of location work with unique challenges such as flash floods and snakes found hiding in the storage arrays, the production moved to London. We backed up all the footage to tape archive before we moved the Unity storage to London, says McDonald. Three days later the edit continued in London cutting rooms. We shipped the storage array and the new edit systems were supplied by our UK branch Visuals NLE. It was a quick and seamless transition for the production and they were able to pickup the edit exactly where they left off.

After 13 months of work spanning two continents its been a great project for us and a unique experience that we will never forget.