A desire to be close to the business
The M6 group called on Aski-da to support them in their project to upgrade their Production Assets Management systems dedicated to magazine post-production on the one hand, and News on the other.
The technical scope covered Avid, Interplay and MediaCentral | Cloud UX PAMs, and MediaComposer workstations.
M6 wanted a local service, supported by our experience in the field and our knowledge of the business, to act as the interface with the manufacturer.
The advantage of an Aski-da team
Working alongside M6 project manager Laurent Langlois, Aski-da set up a project team with Amandine Doucet as project manager and Raphaël Récamier as project engineer.
Depending on the phases of the project, we have the capacity to resize the team. For the deployment phase, we seconded Thanh Trung Huynh, an audiovisual technician, who was responsible for switching over and testing the fifty or so editorial stations. Together with our sister company, lapins bleus formation, we designed and delivered customized training courses for users.
The challenge of planning and server availability
Beginning in October 2023, the functional and technical specification phases for both projects ran in parallel.
Conversely, the target platforms were set up for testing and acceptance, and put into production sequentially to take into account the availability and preparation of MediaCentral | Cloud UX servers between the two projects.
The post-production phase was thus completed within a very tight four-month schedule. Following the weekend switchover of servers and editing stations in February, the new servers dedicated to News were prepared and, at the same time, the fifty or so new editorial workstations were readied for production on July 3, 2024.
Training and Support for the transition
One month prior, user training sessions were conducted by Yohann Costedoat-Descouzeres and Benoît Tricot, both experts in editing tools and trainers at Aski-da Formation.
A custom program was designed to address the major changes in how the installed version of MediaComposer is used compared to NewsCutter. In total, around a hundred newsroom users were able to discover the benefits of this new interface for their daily workflows.
Responsiveness to Breaking News!
In addition to the project team and Aski-da Formation, the M6 support teams were present during the go-live phase to help ensure a smooth transition from project mode to support mode.
These teams successfully adapted to unexpected events: the snap legislative elections in June 2024 postponed the News system’s go-live from the weekend to the following Wednesday.
Thanks to everyone’s presence and commitment, the transition was smooth and enabled the production of the 12:45 p.m. news broadcast on the new system.