Studios de Marseille (NEWEN France) selects Limecraft for Managing their Production Workflow

Limecraft’s long-standing Innovation in Continuous Drama now extends to Enabling Remote Collaboration for Newen’s Studios de Marseille

Studios de Marseille, a division of the Newen group, has selected Limecraft® to provide the content production and media management platform for the production of their daily drama ‘Plus belle la vie’. The announcement was made today by Virginie Izard, Executive Director, Studios de Marseille, Ralph Chaloub (CEO, Magic Hour), and Maarten Verwaest (CEO, Limecraft).

Over the past ten years, Limecraft has helped several producers and post-production facilities in their ongoing technical innovation to present their audience with state-of-the-art scripted entertainment on a variety of channels. Building on their experience with Newen’s Belgian subsidiary De Mensen, Studios de Marseille now extends the use of Limecraft Flow for the continuous drama ‘Plus Belle la Vie’.

“It is a real force for us to be able to share tools and practices withing the group, as a complete European company. We were looking for a tool to add a feature to our in-house production data manager and it appears that Limecraft was the ideal solution for us” said Marianne Carpentier, Head of innovation at Newen Studios.

“We were looking for a tool to add a feature to our in-house production data manager and it appears that Limecraft was the ideal solution for us” (Marianne Carpentier, Head of innovation at Newen Studios)

To further expand productions from Studios de Marseille and Paris, enabling remote and on-site workflows producing content for linear, OTT and social media platforms, this is the cornerstone of a wider deployment of Limecraft’s solutions.  

Studios de Marseille is also using Limecraft Edge for creating dailies and orchestrating the ingest workflow, as well as Limecraft Cloud Connector to integrate Avid NEXIS® shared storage and Media Composer®, connecting different stakeholders working on various locations, allowing them to collaborate in real-time for content production and delivery.

“We are in constant search of innovative solutions to make our workflows evolve, as we manage an industrial production of 260 half hour episodes per year, and we are really happy of this new partneship with Limecraft and Magic Hour” said Virginie Izard, executive Director of Studios de Marseille.

“The most challenging aspects of daily drama production are the sheer amount of raw material and the short turn-around time to make the story more enjoyable and accessible across different consumer platforms,” said Maarten Verwaest, CEO of Limecraft. “It’s Limecraft’s privilege to continue working with Studios de Marseille as they raise the bar in scripted entertainment production, with teams collaborating in real time while maintaining a consistently high quality.”

“With ‘Plus belle la vie’ produced and delivered to their audiences using Limecraft going forward, we have demonstrated our ability to deliver a solution capable of servicing the most challenging production environment, and our ability to scale technical infrastructure in line with the studio’s size,” said Ralph Chaloub, CEO of Magic Hour. “Year upon year, Limecraft’s platform and tools have help us to meet our customer’s ambition to perform well above and beyond the rising demand for our programming everywhere audiences can experience watching entertainment content.”

Innovating UHD Content Creation

For the first time, Studios de Marseille will enable their editing and marketing teams in Marseille and Paris to access all available content of ‘Plus belle la vie’ simultaneously and instantly upon production. Original footage is shot on Sony F55 in XAVC 100 HD format and processed overnight by Limecraft Edge, delivering original copies on a NAS, h264 proxies to Limecraft Flow for review and selection, and MXF OP Atom DNxHD 185 on Avid NEXIS® for cutting. Limecraft Flow maintains overall consistency, whereby pre-cut decisions, descriptive information and comments can be reconciled in various formats without manual intervention. This strengthens their production capabilities, increases efficiency and enables Newen/Studios De Marseille to output multiple versions of the same episodes at marginal cost.

Click here to download a pdf-version of the press release in French or in English.

About Newen Studios and Studios de Marseille

Founded in 2008, Newen Studios is one of the European leader in audiovisual production and distribution. The Group’s output is produced by its subsidiaries: Newen France and Blue Spirit in France ; Tuvalu, Pupkin, Nimbus and De Mensen in Northern Europe ; Reel One in Canada, Ringside in United Kindgom ; iZen in Spain and Flare Film in Germany. The Distribution is developed by Newen connect and TF1 Studios. Within Newen France, Studios de Marseille handle the complete post-production and part of the production of the 16years old daily soap “Plus Belle La vie”.

About Magic Hour

Magic Hour is a distribution, service and consultancy company on a mission to offer the French and European market top-of-the-range tools for broadcast television, production, film and video post-production. Since its incorporation in 2002, Magic Hour has surrounded itself with suppliers and partners whose products, technologies and services meet the growing demands of producers, post-production facilities and television channels. As a result, Magic Hour is now a global solutions integration company, offering dedicated audiovisual products in combination with local hard-and software, as well as best in class software as a service, all of which are custom designed and deployed.