Intaj gears up

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twofours54's Intaj unit is putting in place a multi-million dollar facility comprising state-of-the-art production and post production systems geared for 1080i output.

One hundred racks of equipment and more than 100 kms of audio and video cable will be laid out at twofour54's facilities in Abu Dhabi by the end of June. The multi-million dollar installation, pre-built by Sony Professional Solutions Middle East at Dubai's Jebel Ali Free Zone, will be part of Intaj, the unit that is in charge of developing and maintaining the production and post facilities at twofour54.

With the facilities, twofour54 hopes to provide the Arab world with state-of-the-art production and post facilities to facilitate the development of high-quality content.

"It's a tremendous opportunity where you're creating an industry centre that is founded on the vision of creating Arabic content," says Wayne Borg, COO of twofour54.

"What we are trying to provide here is a comprehensive, integrated solution that enables our partners and our clients to work towards a common goal. This facility is also being designed to be adaptable to a number of users for film production, developing short film content for mobiles and even creating pilot programmes for TV shows.

This is not a process that is well known in this region but all our investigations and research point out that a facility like this is essential to facilitate the generation of high-quality Arabic content for different media platforms."

Intaj is no small operation. By the end of Q2'09, it will have five High Definition (HD) studios, fully equipped with the latest production and post production technologies, serviced by a team of resident operations and engineering staff.

These studios will be located at two separate sites in Abu Dhabi until twofour54's purpose-built facility, which is slated for completion in 2014, is ready.

"All of our systems are 1080i but the infrastructure is fully wired for 1080p," claims Hasan Sayed Hasan, head of media technology at Intaj. "We believe this is the format of the future."

The larger studios - a 650m² facility and two of 280m² each - will be located close to the National Theatre while two smaller 60m² studios will be deployed at twofour54's campus in Khalifa Park. The 650m² studio will comprise six Sony HDC 1500 multi-format cameras while each of the 280m² studios will have four cameras. These three studios have been linked in case a client wants to do a bigger production.

Three cameras have been deployed at each of the two small studios at Khalifa Park. All five studios have been wired for two additional cameras.

Besides the HDC 1500 studio cameras, Intaj has also stocked up on a few EFP cameras such as the Sony XDCAM HD cams and the F900 for outdoor shooting. In addition to this, the Khalifa Park facility will house 12 HD post production suites to accommodate video editing, audio, graphics and high end finishing and compositing while the second campus will include 10 HD post suites.

Several different high-end and low-end editing solutions will be available at the facility including Avid, Adobe and Final Cut Pro video editing solutions. The audio suites at the facilities are geared for 5.1 surround sound and equipped with Pro-tools HD systems.

"This Protools system is primarily intended for film and video production although it can be used to record music videos as well," explains Sam Periasamy, head of projects at Sony Professional Solutions Middle East.

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