Pixel & Process dailies team in Wales won a contract to support Sky TV series Prisoner, designing transfer pipelines, resilient delivery workflows, and reliable support from Signiant.
Pixel & Process is a dailies company in South Wales, where CEO Howard Colin runs a small team of post production professionals. Recently, the team won a contract to support Prisoner, a new television series production for Sky. For Howard, it was recognition of what he’d been building for years – a test of whether a lean, technically focused operation could inspire the level of confidence and deliver the same performance expected from much larger post facilities.
He said, “Our goal has always been to carry out competitive dailies services and intermediate post. But when the opportunity came through to work with Sky on Prisoner, it was a big leap head for the company.”
The project involved multi-camera shoots and overnight dailies deliveries, calling for speed and flexibility, with extremely reliable underlying workflows. To meet those expectations, the team relied on careful planning and a clear division of responsibilities between set and lab, supported by a file transfer service they could depend on whenever the pressure mounted.
From On-Set to Post Services
Howard’s own path into post production passed first through the camera department. “I started out as a camera trainee in 2012,” he said. “Then in around 2018, I left the traditional route to become a DIT. I enjoyed the problem-solving on set and the technical side of the workflows and processes.”
As a freelancer, Howard most often joined productions where the infrastructure was already in place. Storage, content pipelines, backup strategies and options for scaling operations were usually someone else’s responsibility.
But as he moved between productions and locations, he noticed a growing gap, particularly in Wales, between expectations regarding how quickly footage could reach editorial, and the capacity to deliver it. Productions were becoming more complex and camera formats more varied, yet no local intermediate post services were able to reliably shorten the time between set and post.
“I saw an opportunity to build something that occupied the space between on-set DIT and larger post-houses, functioning close to production, but with the discipline and structure of a proper lab,” Howard said.
Someone Else’s Problem
When Pixel Process launched in 2020 with just two people, what had once been someone else’s infrastructure problem was now entirely his. He would need resilient transfer pipelines, clear delivery workflows, and support he could count on.
Because overnight content delivery was to play a large role in the company’s work on Prisoner, Howard was reluctant to improvise on file movement. What might have been acceptable on small scale projects wouldn’t hold up under the pressure of a high-profile series for a major broadcaster.
Howard had first looked at Signiant file transfer for his content pipeline in 2023 on a smaller production and was impressed by the technology. As the Prisoner opportunity came into focus, he revisited the platform, this time with more at stake, and began seriously comparing it against other options.
“We had used some cloud-based transfer solutions before,” Howard noted. “But they weren’t industry standard or accepted within the network of studios we were trying to work with.”
At that point, Howard aware that he wasn’t just buying a file transfer tool, he was selecting infrastructure his business could depend on. He needed a platform that could support the way the company actually worked, not one that introduced cost or operational friction as volumes scaled.
Tighter Turnarounds
Specifically, Pixel & Process needed fast, secure content transfer and, beyond technical capability, industry acceptance from studios and post houses. Maintaining tight editorial turnaround made reliable performance essential, and would benefit from flexibility to support multiple storage locations and workflows. Howard also looked for predictable pricing that made sense for regularly moving large volumes of data and, when issues arose, responsive support and straightforward ways to scale.
They took time for evaluation, which ultimately led them back to Signiant. From a value perspective, its pricing model aligned well with with real-world production volumes, and it gave the team flexible architecture and a straightforward onboarding process. In these ways, Signiant contributed to the confidence Howard needed to support Prisoner.
Designing Prisoner’s Workflow
With the means in place to accelerate their content flow, Howard needed to establish a secure, efficient pipeline before the first camera card was offloaded. On most days, Prisoner was a two-camera shoot, but some days expanded to three, four or even five cameras across multiple units. Primary cameras included ARRI equipment shooting ARRI RAW, OpenGate and Alexa 35, with drone-mounted cameras and other secondary cameras introducing additional variables. That gave the production scope to scale, but made maintaining security and dependability critical.
One of the defining requirements of the workflow was a deliberate split between on-set responsibilities and overnight processing. Will Cook, DIT at Pixel & Process, focussed on data and live colour management on set to keep the shoot moving efficiently during the day, while Howard took over once media arrived at the office.
“Once the media came in, we’d run an overnight lab service when we were doing the heavy lifting,” Howard said. That included transcodes, Avid syncs, metadata handling, dailies generation, final packaging for editorial, and archiving. This arrangement removed the burden of complex technical problem-solving from set, in order to free the DIT to focus on the DP.
Lab Model
For Prisoner, the lab model introduced its own set of challenges. The team needed to move large volumes of content quickly between South Wales and London, often processing up to five hours of media overnight so editorial could begin work first thing in the morning. On average, four to five terabytes were processed each night, with even more on heavier shoot days.
Secondary cameras added complexity, particularly drone footage captured in ProRes RAW which, at that time, didn’t integrate cleanly with DaVinci Resolve. “We ended up having to make mezzanine codecs and apply colour space transformations to bring everything into Resolve,” said Howard. “The challenge was integrating everything quickly enough into a unified pipeline.”
One of Signiant’s advantages is its ability to extend a customer’s brand. In this case, the team branded separate Signiant portals by production, while also maintaining a company-wide portal when needed.
“Having portals with different storage endpoints is also very useful,” Howard said. “For the client, there’s only a slight difference — but behind the scenes, you have a chance to fix problems in a specific portal as they arise.”
Direct Flow of Assets
Signiant has always remained storage agnostic, meaning assets always flow directly into and out of customer’s storage, whether file or object storage, on-premises or in the cloud, or a combination. On one occasion, that ability to reroute workflows without disrupting production proved critical when things didn’t go as planned. “A power supply had shorted and tripped one of our UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) engines and the SDCX server went offline,” Howard noted. “Basically, we lost our RAID server.”
The SDCX server is Signiant’s data plane software, aware of all assets in the associated storage. It tracks changes such as files added, deleted, or modified. It is capable of performing ‘edge services’ such as metadata extraction and proxy creation Because they had a cloud server configured as a work-in-progress backup within Media Shuttle, the team was able to continue operations and recover quickly.
At Pixel and Process, Signiant’s flexibility and storage independence are proving to be equally as important as the acceleration and reliability. Howard recalls one instance on the Prisoner set. “One camera was a DJI, shot with a deliberately grainy aesthetic. When the DIT Will Cook noticed some artifacts and reported the issue back to the lab, the team used Signiant to transfer the card off the set the same night.”
The media was sent straight to their storage, then on to the finishing house. Because Howard had real-time visibility into the transfer of the shot, he was able to start work on it as soon as it landed in their lab, avoiding the potential for a major impact on schedule and budget.
By the end of their work on Prisoner, the results spoke for themselves. Howard said, “Using that experience as a foundation, we can build further and integrate more into our network.” Meanwhile, Pixel & Process is continuing to grow, with a new storage server installation planned, and internet connectivity upgraded to a two-gigabit pipeline. www.signiant.com
