Post Production

The tapeless workflow is a term used to describe video production without the use of tapes. That is to say that from the point the material is recorded in camera to the point it is distributed it never changes from being data. In other words television production has become a profession of data managment as some would say. A few production companies came to give demonstrations of their tapeless workflow system, at least in broad terms. Red Bee and Virgin Media showed how they have collaboratively brought the post production process to being a tapeless one. In order to do this good networking capability is needed and so is storage. They had to digitise over 40,000 tapes as well as face many more challenges. Some of these challenges have to do with meta data. Everyone is used to dealing with tapes. you shoot your material, you label it for post production and then store them for later use. When dealing with data though the mentality is different. Some productions have shot straight to P2 cards, backed up the day’s shoots to external P2 hard drives before sending them from China to London for example. Of course when doing this everyhting must be planned ahead. Part of this planning has to do with the compatibility between recording format and editing. If you get this wrong then you either don’t get the quality you were looking for or you slow down the process. That was part of a case study between Panasonic and two of it’s camera’s during a shoot in China. The second example was between Red Bee Media and Virgin Media in relation to the creative Village. The idea is that when the material is ingested by Red Bee media it’s saved to a central server from which it can be accessed by a number of workstations, from transcribing to tapelogging, editing and producer’s work stations. it also has to be available in two buildings. There are a number of advantages to this workflow. The first is that the work is available to the producers when they have the time to check the material rather than when everyone has ten free minutes. As a result the editor can edit a rough cut and a number of producers at up to two hundred workstations may check the edit and say whether they like it. If they don’t then it’s quick to make any changes that are required. It also means that there’s far less mess and expensive equipment is not tied up. When you’re working on post production dubbing to tape used to take a lot of time, real time and with DVD it’s quickly a messy affair. Files in an edit folder are far easier to deal with. I really like the idea o the tapeless workflow and i’m going to work on that for my own work, first with affordable equipment and then work my way towards more fun alternatives. It’s what we expect. No more ingestion time, no more dubbing time, just straight editing, agreement and finally output to a number of formats. Of course that’s not as easy as it sounds but post production companies are working on making this a smoother process.

Yesterday sound was added to the multicamera in order to add more depth and it’s almost ready. there’s a little fine-tuning left before it’s ready for release. I’m not sure about the documentary because I took a break from it last night. Two days till the deadline.

And so it came to be known that on the fourth day of post-production a number of people watched the rough edit of the multicamera project. They appreciated it and of course, there are some tweaks. Most of it has to do with sound being added and CG. On the docu front, progress has been slow although feedback has been received. Both projects are going along nicely.

It’s the third day of editing and the pressure has been relieved. I’ve captured the footage and edited most of the multicamera show. It wasn’t as bad as I thought therefore there were only a few small things to change. As I’m under time pressure I’m glad there’s less to do although with more footage I may have tried to be more creative. With the myspace documentary, things are going well. We’re up to about ten minutes and need another 2-5 therefore that’s relaxed as well. With that edit it’s a matter of getting the framework finished, finding a few more illustrative shots before finally working on the fine-cut for projection on Thursday or Friday. For the globalisation project, I haven’t had time to speak to that many people so the progression has stalled. 45 credits vs. 15… Both are important but one requires a team to work at all times. The other, only two or three people. That’s it for today.

And there we have it. Day two of editing is over and we’re up to five minutes with a script that’s ready to be fleshed out by a variety of interviews. I love editing and whilst writing this I’m beginning to look forward to tomorrow’s editing. The problem is that I was getting a little tired of being in the same room for so many hours in a day. That’ll change tomorrow as new things occur. We’ve added the sequences to the timeline and it would seem that things are progressing nicely. I have captured the making-of footage for the multicamera project and that should be fun to edit. It will wait until later in the week when the Documentary edit is closer to completion.

Day one of editing has finished and I’ve spent the last two hours resting and relaxing. The editing is quite interesting. We’ve got an interview with someone who was considered as hottest single in the world two or three weeks ago. The documentary is about myspace and it’s effect on the music industry. It’s interesting because we have at least ten interviews, that’s ten points of view, some musical, others more ITish and yet more from the ordinary public. Three segments have been assembled and we have a few more to work on. The duration is only five minutes so far but will progress tomorrow. The rough cut needs to be done by thursday to give an additional week for gathering extra shots and cleaning everything up. I need to make time for the editing of the multicamera project.

Two weeks of editing await me. Both projects have been logged for the most part although now it’s a matter of finding out how to unite all the raw footage, something which may take a few hours. It should be a matter of going through the material and choosing all the most relevant bits, seeing whether they go well together, and then finalising that. Tomorrow I have to work on the documentary. We’ve got a lot of interviews although I’m worried about the shots that can be used for illustrative purposes. I don’t think there are that many location shots, just interview after interview. Tomorrow we’ll see how well they go together.