France’s Éclair Group Taps EVS for Film Delivery at Cannes Film Festival

Paris-based Éclair Group, one of the largest digital service providers for the film and TV industries, has chosen EVS as the heart of its mobile postproduction facility to ingest, transcode and master the films for screening at the prestigious 2014 Cannes Film Festival.

Contracted by the Festival de Cannes and the CST (Commission Supérieure Technique de l’image et du son) to set up a mobile mastering and postproduction facility, Éclair Group draws on its expertise to deal with all technical problems on the films submitted to the festival. Aside from the obvious time pressures, entries also often arrive in non-standard formats and on a variety of different media. As a result, many of the films have to go through the Éclair post facility to be checked, transcoded, mastered, wrapped, and delivered as a DCP (digital cinema package) file to the festival’s cinemas.

“We’ve been using EVS OpenCube servers in our Paris facility for some time now,” says Frantz Delbecque, R&D and new technologies manager for the Éclair Group. “The integration of the server in our mobile post-production facility worked out well for us during last year’s Festival de Cannes, so we decided to renew the experience for this year. Having the OpenCube server definitely helps us to address the many formatting challenges in what is a very pressurised and challenging timeframe.”

Senior vice president at EVS Media, Benoit Février says, “Films are produced in such a wide range of formats that it is very complicated to manage the screenings of so many films in such a short time. We are very proud that our technology contributes so crucially to the success of one of the most esteemed film festivals in the world.”

OpenCube is a specialist server dedicated to generating MXF files for streamlined tapeless workflows. At Cannes, Éclair Group uses it to ingest, transcode and generate MXF-compliant files of all the films. As well as distribution, this also allows Éclair to perform any post-production repairs required, such as resynchronising the audio or remastering the subtitles.