Arrow Media, an award-winning producer of documentary, factual and non-scripted content, creates high quality programming covering a wide range of subjects. Established in 2011, the company serves major international networks such as A&E, BBC, Discovery, Disney+, History, Investigation Discovery, National Geographic Channel, PBS, Sky and Smithsonian Network.
Dan Carew-Jones joined Arrow Media over a decade ago and helped establish its in-house post-production facility. He also oversaw the transition from an earlier sharing and collaboration tool to Limecraft’s solution back in 2019. Limecraft is an online workspace used by content producers and post-production facilities to more easily organise and exchange media assets. It keeps track of content locally stored content and uses AI transcription and image recognition to index video and related content. The platform provides no-code workflow design and automation, AI-supported media asset management and content delivery, enabling producers and post-production facilities to focus on creative storytelling.
“My role has changed since the early days at Arrow,” Dan Carew-Jones comments. “More recently, I have been focusing on the support systems we need to make footage available as quickly as possible to relevant people. Limecraft was recommended to us by one of our suppliers in 2018. We met the Limecraft team at IBC and adopted their solution in early 2019.
“We have editorial and archive professionals in a variety of locations so it is crucial that we share and move content around securely and efficiently. Our shows contain a mix of real footage including interviews, archive material, B-roll footage, and drama reconstructions. The interview footage often informs the look and feel of the reconstructions so it is helpful for us to assemble and share these interviews with the drama teams and collaborate on how we think the reconstructions should be shot. We are also shooting and assembling content across three or four episodes at any given time so there are always plenty of plates spinning when it comes to review and approvals.
“In the bad old days, material would often be downloaded to a drive that would be physically shipped but that was very inefficient. Being able to share it quickly and securely helps us make faster decisions and produce better pitches. Limecraft helps us keep on top of it all.
“The way we are using the Limecraft platform has changed a lot since 2019. Our rushes are our key assets and we have a policy of always having these in three places at once for security and redundancy. That used to be very manual but we’ve now effectively automated the process with Limecraft at the point of ingest. We’ve also begun using the Limecraft platform to extract key metadata and produce archive logs of finished programmes.
“Looking ahead, facial recognition, speech and character recognition and even emotion detection will help us extract even more metadata and hence more value from our content.
“Ultimately, we are trying to consolidate the systems we use and we would prefer to have all of this functionality – ingest, MAM, sharing, collaboration and content delivery – in one integrated package. That is clearly where Limecraft is heading. It is highly flexible and has complemented our workflows rather than us having to change to suit the platform. I think we are going to get even more benefit from it in the years to come.”
