Super fast connectivity helps Australian cinema strike gold
Super fast connectivity helps Australian cinema strike gold
Australia has positioned itself to earn a greater share of work on blockbuster movies such as Lord of the Rings and The Last Samurai with the launch of a super-fast broadband network to link Australian post-production and digital content companies with Hollywood studios.
Over the weekend, South Australia’s Minister for Education and Children’s Services and Minister for Tourism the Hon. Jane Lomax-Smith helped officially launch cine.net (www.cine.net.au), a broadband network that has delivered a payback from day one by underpinning millions of dollars in business for the South Australian film industry.
cine.net has already enabled a massive increase in business for leading Australian visual effects specialist Rising Sun Pictures. Last year, the super-fast network assisted the Adelaide-based company to win prestigious post-production work for Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. The multi-million-dollar company has doubled in size in the eight months it has used the network.
cine.net is a generational leap beyond ADSL. With Internet connection speeds as fast as 1 gigabit per second (Gbps), cine.net is able to transfer massive film files from Adelaide to LA in a matter of seconds. It allows Rising Sun Pictures to transfer an average of 60 Gb of data each day – equivalent to more than 90 compact disks – to meet the needs of its Hollywood-based customers.
Rising Sun Pictures director Tony Clark – one of the cine.net founders – said the digital revolution in film had opened up the studios to delivering post-production work anywhere in the world. “Producers shop around for the best suppliers,” he said.
“Nowadays Hollywood regularly looks beyond the post-production facilities that had clustered around its studios during the 20th century.
“cine.net gives us the ability to compete globally, letting us meet a client’s needs better than our rivals in the US. cine.net now makes these world markets accessible for any Adelaide company creating digital content.”
cine.net is a specialist network that was conceived to provide a cost-effective service for screen media production, post-production and digital content. It is designed to assist film producers, editing facilities, visual effects providers, sound facilities, DVD producers and games companies.
Enabled with substantial support from the State Government, cine.net was designed to assist these companies to serve national and international clients with super-fast, burst-usage oriented broadband. Inaugural customers include Rising Sun Pictures, Kojo Group, the Adelaide Motion Picture Company, the SA Film Corporation and Integrity Data Systems. The network will also allow a new era of collaboration, potentially making Adelaide an integrated full-service post-production facility.
Internationally successful director Scott Hicks (Shine, Hearts in Atlantis) commended the State Government for supporting the development of cine.net. “It has removed a roadblock,” he said.
“We have a cluster of highly proficient digital effects and post-production companies that will collectively benefit from this piece of infrastructure. These companies work at the highest level in the entertainment industry already, so this shared infrastructure improves their ability to share facilities and service clients internationally.
“For example, on Hearts in Atlanta, I had a composer in Toronto, a recording studio in London, the sound mix in Sydney, the picture edit in Adelaide and the studio in Los Angeles, so it was a truly global production. Over time, this kind of infrastructure will facilitate more communication at that level.”
SA Film Corporation CEO Helen Leake said cine.net offered a terrific opportunity for companies to become part of the virtual production world. “cine.net means you are not physically bound to be in the building next door,” she said.
“Through the SA Film Corporation link, we have the opportunity to offer access to cine.net to the productions that use our facilities. It gives us the ability to collaborate with other businesses as if we were almost next door. The 10 percent growth we expect due to cine.net will return the initial investment in just six months."
Cinenet Systems, the company that runs cine.net, is a not-for-profit organisation that reinvests surplus cashflow into providing better services and lower subscription costs.
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