The Farm Group is using the PL Ultimate PRO Workstations which are built upon the AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO Processors.

The Farm Group 

Since launching in 1998, The Farm continues to provide the very best post-production talent, remote and facility solutions for award winning programmes in London, Bristol and Manchester in addition to partnerships with BBC sport and UKTV. The creative care along with attention to technical detail and client service remains second to none.

The Farm measures success not solely by the large number of awards for creativity, but by the immense loyalty shown by their staff and clients. The Farm’s capabilities encompass picture, sound, and location services for both unscripted and scripted content. 

As a company with a powerful technical core and cross-site connectivity, they are known for excellence, innovation and reliability. The combination of their gifted creative teams and technical expertise provides each project with a fully collaborative workflow and positions The Farm as the go-to post production partner for every type of challenging and ground breaking production.

We were introduced to The Farm by Proline reseller, Jigsaw 24. We immediately got to work and built two Ultimate PRO workstations based on The Farm’s high-bandwidth requirements with AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO processors at their core to deliver outstanding processing and shipped them to The Farm in London. Our relationship has grown from there.

Interview with Adam Morris, Technical Director, The Farm Group. 

What Workstations have you used over the last couple of years?

“The majority of our workstations are from the larger manufacturers, mainly HP and Dell. These are used primarily in our Avid estate and range from ‘mobile workstations’ (laptops with GPU), through the single proc mid-range, and up to the high-end dual processors which we use for finishing workflows as they require more power to process high data rate video often in complex codecs. All these are Intel-based systems. However, we use slightly more niche systems for our grading, VFX and mastering solutions, AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO processors give us the ability to provide more power at a lower cost.”

What software do you run on the PL Ultimate PRO?

"For Picture Finishing, Mastering & VFX: Avid Media Composer, Black Magic Resolve, Digital Vision Nucoda, Autodesk Flame, MTI Cortex, Colorfront Transkoder, Greymeta Iris, Autodesk Maya & Foundry Nuke.

For Audio Mixing, Avid Pro Tools."

Since switching to the PL Ultimate PRO, how has your workflow changed?

"The Proline Workstations gave us the ability to prepare & transcode video content at a quicker pace than we are used to. This allowed our team to work at a higher level of performance and productivity. The ability to turn projects around faster is a huge advantage to us and has transformed the way we work."

“Blackmagic Resolve fully utilised the increased CPU and GPU resources available. We especially saw the performance boost in Resolve as it benefits from using a higher-end processor and when using more than one GPU. In this case the AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO Processor."

A Summary from our Chief Technologist James Lupton.

"It is incredibly exciting for us to work with The Farm, a highly respected company in the media and entertainment industry. We are thrilled with Adam and his teams resounding positive feedback on the build quality, attention to detail, and performance of our workstations. Feedback like this is a real triumph and indicates the lengths we go to, to ensure the delivery of high quality, high performance systems."