ITV Studios Daytime and Limecraft Set Benchmark for Online Collaboration

ITV Studios Daytime produces some of the UK’s most-watched television, including Good Morning Britain, Lorraine, This Morning & Loose Women. Behind the scenes, ITV Studios Daytime needed a more efficient media management, ingest and review solution for its post-production teams. With a large volume of daily content (up to 500 hours of raw material per month), the complexity of handling media, transcription and logging, and editing needed a next-level solution. Enter Limecraft.

Limecraft has streamlined ITV Studios Daytime’s workflow, offering file sharing with a single button click, transcription embedded at the core of the Avid MediaCentral platform, and enhanced collaboration across teams. By seamlessly integrating Limecraft and Avid MediaCentral, ITV was able to modernise its post-production process and to eradicate manual work due to logging material and setting up file transfers, thereby improving collaboration and enhancing review processes.

This customer case highlights the innovative use of Limecraft within ITV Studios Daytime’s post-production workflow and demonstrates how modern tools can significantly enhance productivity in large scale media environments.

Key Takeaways:

• Thanks to Limecraft’s seamless integration with Avid, journalists and editors now have transcription and file sharing at their fingertips, saving significant time and effort
• ITV Studios Daytime’s post-production teams were able to move away from cumbersome file sharing processes including manually creating exports and using WeTransfer
• Real-time collaboration and file review processes were enhanced, leading to greater efficiency across departments

The Challenge

ITV Studios Daytime manages an enormous workload, producing over seven hours of live television content daily along with a daily 30-40 minute highlights show of Good Morning Britain for BritBox North America. The post-production team, handling shows including Good Morning Britain, Lorraine, This Morning and Loose Women, faced a bottleneck in ingesting and sharing large media files. File sharing and review processes were reliant on outdated processes based on WeTransfer, which limited collaboration, was slow, and didn’t allow for real-time file viewing without full downloads.

“We were massive users of WeTransfer… but file sharing from Avid was a very clunky process. It was a good tool for the job, but it wasn’t very collaborative. Limecraft transformed that. Now, the ease by which our user base can go into MediaCentral cloud, find content, clip it, and send it out to peers has been a game changer for us.”, says John Barling (Head of Technology).

Additionally, the team struggled with the need for efficient transcription. Manual logging and transcription took up valuable time, and ITV’s library teams had been requesting a better system for managing and accessing logged footage.

Why ITV Chose Limecraft

ITV initially discovered Limecraft’s capabilities and in particular the integration with Avid as part of a redesign of the production technology stack at the Media Production & Technology Show in UK in 2023. What made Limecraft stand out was its seamless integration with existing Avid workflows, and its ability to handle large volumes of media efficiently.

Key reasons for choosing Limecraft:

• Avid Integration: Limecraft offers a robust and very rich integration with ITV’s existing Avid MediaCentral platform, simplifying media transfers and transcription.
• File Sharing and Review: Limecraft provided a modern, cloud-based platform for review and verification, far outstripping conventional file-methods. The ability to view, clip, and share media within seconds was crucial for ITV’s fast-paced news environment.
• Accurate Transcription: Limecraft’s best in class transcription services offer ITV the accuracy and efficiency they needed to transcribe rushes and make content searchable.

What We Achieved

Using Limecraft, ITV Studios Daytime’s ingest and review workflows have undergone a transformation. The platform has reduced the time needed for reviewing and approving content while improving accessibility across teams. Avid users and editors simply drag and drop media directly into Limecraft folders, enabled by Woody Technologies, thereby automating audio transcription and enabling secure sharing of media with 3rd parties for review and verification.

As the transcription of rushes is fully automated, including the creation of proxies, transfer to Limecraft, and retrieving the results, the time to transcribe one hour of material is reduced to less than 5 minutes, whereby the user is notified when the clip or the clips are transcribed. In the meantime, edit producers can work on more resourceful work than standing by and nursing the process.

“The teams that we really wanted to work with it and change their approach, was promos and competitions. Easier review revolutionised their workflow. The promo department, when something needs to be reviewed on the move, they can do it in a couple of minutes. Check Limecraft has become part of the vernacular within those teams.”, explains Nick Thomas (Head of Post-production).

The results of such processing, including transcript fragments and comments provided by reviewers, are automatically fed back into the Avid MediaCentral platform on the right timecode, creating a superior user experience to edit producers.

Specific achievements include:

• Transcription Efficiency: Using Limecraft’s transcription services at the core of Avid MediaCentral platform, drastically cuts down the time needed for ITV’s producers and researchers to transcribe rushes, improving post-production workflows and research capabilities.
• Time Saved on File Sharing: What previously took hours via WeTransfer can now be done in minutes using Limecraft. This has dramatically sped up the file review process.
• Enhanced Collaboration: Remote producers, editors, and executives can now access media, annotate files, and review content without needing to download large files, promoting seamless collaboration.

Summary

ITV Studios Daytime’s adoption of Limecraft has improved the efficiency of its post-production process, transforming the way files are processed, shared, and reviewed. By integrating Limecraft seamlessly at the core of Avid’s MediaCentral platform, Limecraft enables real-time collaboration and media management that was previously impossible.

The result is a faster, more agile production workflow that has improved productivity across ITV Studios Daytime’s post-production teams. Limecraft’s tools have allowed ITV to innovate and streamline their processes, making it an indispensable part of their day-to-day operations.

Fact Sheet

• ITV Studios Daytime, processing 500 hours of rushes per month
• 220 named users
• Limecraft’s transcription and file sharing services, extending the Avid MediaCentral platform

Key Features

• Single button click Integration with Avid MediaCentral
• Accurate media transcription
• Cloud-based file sharing and review
• Annotation tools for collaborative review
• Transcripts and comments automatically flow back to Avid on the right time code

Achieved:

• Significant reduction in file-sharing times
• Streamlined collaboration and media review
• Enhanced transcription capabilities

About ITV and ITV Studios Daytime

ITV is one of the UK’s leading broadcasters, producing a wide variety of television content ranging from drama to reality shows. ITV Studios Daytime produces several flagship shows such as Good Morning Britain, Lorraine, This Morning & Loose Women, providing viewers with seven and a half hours of live television every day. The team behind ITV Studios Daytime handles a vast array of media files, often working under tight deadlines to produce high-quality, engaging content for UK viewers.