CASE STUDY : HIGH PERFORMANCE SYSTEMS

The Daily Show is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning program that takes a reality-based look at news, trends, pop culture, current events, politics, sports and entertainment with an alternative point of view. In each show, anchorman Jon Stewart and a team of correspondents, including Aasif Mandvi, Wyatt Cenac, John Oliver, Jason Jones and Samantha Bee, comment on the day's stories, employing actual news footage, taped field pieces, in-studio guests and on-the-spot coverage of important news events.

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Control Group Solution

Control Group was brought in to design a new technology platform for the shows’ transition from Standard Definition (SD) to High Definition (HD). Because of the nature of their business, upgrading to HD was like undergoing a brain transplant. It affected all aspects of their business from their infrastructure, which required an order of magnitude increase in performance, to their workflow, which needed to be re-architected to support the changes in production. Control Group spent six months reengineering the entire system and training the staff on new processes and technology.

From a technical standpoint, the show needed nine new workstations for the artists, including several 2D design suites, 3D design applications and a host of supporting plugins. Several render farm servers had to match these workstation setups so that the creation of HD elements could be distributed. We also replaced their data-sharing platform, which had formally been separated due to security requirements. We designed an integrated data sharing platform that increased efficiency while still maintaining their security standards..