Adobe Customer Story

UFA SERIAL DRAMA, creating daily dramas for German TV. Production company standardizes on an workflow to efficiently deliver up to 28 TV episodes per week.

“With Adobe Creative Cloud, our workflow has not only gotten faster, but also tighter.” Marc Schwellenbach, post-production supervisor, UFA SERIAL DRAMA

SOLUTION RESULTS Adobe Creative Cloud

IMPROVED WORKFLOW CONTENT CONSISTENCY FOSTERED ACCEPTANCE SHARED KNOWLEDGE Deliver up to 28 TV episodes Maintain greater shot Gave editors ownership of Share knowledge and best per week with faster, tighter consistency by enabling transition to new editing practices related to workflow workflow individual editors to do more platform to help ensure efficiency with other areas of with visual effects success business Adobe Customer Story

UFA SERIAL DRAMA Continuous improvements drive success Established in 1991 For more than 20 years, UFA SERIAL DRAMA has produced some of the most popular serial dramas in Potsdam, Germany Germany. Classic shows such as Good Times, Bad Times (Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten) and Among Us (Unter Uns) have aired more than 4,000 episodes each. UFA SERIAL DRAMA currently runs five daily shows and www.ufa-serialdrama.de can produce up to 28 episodes in a week; for this team efficiency is key. Post-production supervisor Marc Schwellenbach works with the post-production teams to continually refine and optimize the standard workflows to be as quick and smart as possible. CHALLENGES Adobe: Tell us about the shows you produce through UFA SERIAL DRAMA. • Continue to improve workflow for daily television production Schwellenbach: We produce five unique daily serial dramas, which translates to 800 minutes of material • Use standardized workflow across every week. Four of our shows run in Germany. In fact, the first series that we produced back in 1992, productions Good Times, Bad Times (Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten), was the first daily serial drama made for German television. It’s still on the air; we passed the 5,000 episode mark a few years ago. Even our “newest” series • Move editing process to the next level has been around for eight years and nearly 2,000 episodes. Our fifth show is actually a serial drama made • Secure support from editors to for Hungarian audiences. It’s been running for 16 seasons, and it’s one of the top-rated shows in Hungary. transition to new NLE Adobe: Why are production workflows so important to you? Schwellenbach: We work on five shows that run five days a week with almost no breaks. To get all of We recently started looking into the shows ready for air, we may produce up to 28 episodes a week. We need a rock-solid workflow to , and that’s keep up the pace without compromising quality. when we realized the advantages We have one big advantage on our side: experience. We’ve learned over the years to take the time to that we could achieve using think through our workflows and look for ways to improve them. We take it a step further at UFA SERIAL the integration among Adobe DRAMA by standardizing about 90% of our workflow across productions. If one team comes up with a creative applications. new process that helps them work faster and better, we can easily apply their innovations to other teams. Adobe: How has your changed over the years? Marc Schwellenbach, post-production supervisor, UFA SERIAL DRAMA Schwellenbach: Several years ago, we switched from Avid to Final Cut Pro with the intention of becoming more flexible and speeding up workflows in post-production. We worked with the Final Cut Pro workflow for a few years, but we felt that we still needed to move our editing process to the next level. By better integrating editing into the rest of the post-production workflow, we would improve turnaround speed for dailies and increase our overall speed and efficiency. We recently started looking into Adobe Premiere Pro, and that’s when we realized the advantages that we could achieve using the integration among Adobe creative applications. With Adobe Creative Cloud, our workflow has not only gotten faster, but also tighter. We’re tying everything together into one smooth Adobe framework, which helps us get much more power and flexibility out of our daily workflows. Adobe Customer Story

Adobe: How important is the integration of Adobe tools to your workflows? Schwellenbach: We had used and before, but we had never considered how everything could work together in a bigger way. The integration among Creative Cloud applications not only changes how we work, but it encourages us to think about how all of the steps fit together to create the big picture. Previously, our post-production artists would use After Effects to composite green screen shots and hand the finished shots over to the editors. The Dynamic Link between After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro simplifies things so much. Even our editors who are not visual effects artists use After Effects to create their own graphics, or use templates we’ve created for graphical inserts, such as cell phone displays. They can then easily bring these effects into their Adobe Premiere Pro workflows. Edits and adjustments are practically seamless, as we no longer need to wait to export and import clips. We can be much more flexible while maintaining consistent information on the shots. “The integration among We also appreciate how Adobe software invites collaboration. We see lots of great third-party integrations, Creative Cloud applications and with Adobe XMP and panel integration, we can even see ourselves leveraging metadata to develop our own integrations as we need them. The Adobe framework opens up whole new ways for us to speed not only changes how we up and simplify the workflow. work, but it encourages us to think about how all of the Adobe: What steps did you take to transition to Adobe Premiere Pro? steps fit together to create the Schwellenbach: The key to a smooth transition is planning and communication. When you’re changing a big picture.” key component of your workflow, you have to make sure that you think through everything beforehand. We didn’t want to even start the move until we were sure that our editors would be able to work faster right away. Marc Schwellenbach, post-production We talked with editors about the changes that they wanted to see and used their input to design the new supervisor, UFA SERIAL DRAMA workflow. Giving them ownership of the transition helped to assure them amidst the changes. Trainers worked with our editors to help them feel comfortable with the new software and features. The entire transition felt very collaborative with Adobe, with everyone coming together for a common goal. As a result, our transition has been very smooth. Two teams have completely switched over to Adobe Premiere Pro with more still in the final training phases. Our editors are very pleased with the ease and functionality of Adobe Premiere Pro. Other departments have also successfully made the move to Creative Cloud. Adobe Customer Story

Adobe: Are there any other applications in Creative Cloud that you’re excited about? Schwellenbach: CC Plus looks very interesting and has definitely caught the eye of our head writer. We’re currently syncing Word documents with our scheduling system, but Story will help us leverage metadata in the scripts so that we can see exactly what we need in post-production. CC is another piece that’s bound to be very useful. We’re always talking about logging on set, and Prelude Live Logger will provide us a way to log information on set and preserve that metadata in Prelude for the post-production process. We’re already using a digital movie slate integrated into an iPad app, so I could see us using Prelude Live Logger right away. Adobe: What is the future for UFA SERIAL DRAMA? Schwellenbach: We started using Adobe Creative Cloud for teams, but we’re switching to Creative Cloud for enterprise as our business continues to grow and use of the software expands. We’re also talking to SOLUTION AT A GLANCE other businesses in the UFA family. We’ve developed powerful workflows for our fast-paced production • Adobe Creative Cloud. Components and along the way we’ve learned a lot about working with Adobe software. We look forward to sharing used include: our knowledge and best practices with other UFA productions. • Adobe Photoshop CC • Adobe Premiere Pro CC • Adobe After Effects CC • Adobe Prelude CC • Adobe Story CC Plus

For more information www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud.html

Adobe Systems Incorporated 345 Park Avenue Adobe, the Adobe logo, Adobe Premiere, After Effects, Creative Cloud, Photoshop, and Prelude are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. San Jose, CA 95110-2704 All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. USA www.adobe.com © 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. 95021225 9/14