It’s been a long couple of months and and as we move forward toward restarting production in Vancouver (hopefully in the next few weeks), I thought it would be good to share some of the remote post workflows that F&P members have been using. Some were hastily improvised like my own, others more preplanned but all of them are continued to be improved upon as we face an uncertain return date for in house post production.
I’m lucky enough to have escaped to Saltspring Island in late March with my family but not without taking the last episode of Big Timber with me. Looking at the massive Avid project file and figuring out how to pull what I needed was the first challenge.
Armed with an 8TB drive, I started by calculating how many full days of multigroup footage I needed to take with me. I was lucky as this was the final episode of the season. Certain stories played out all in one day, reducing how much I had to grab but the final tally was still around 15 days worth. I set the Avid to work each night, choosing the multigroups and consolidating them to my remote drive.
This gave me access to each full day used in my episode. I also took all stringouts of potential stories and consolidated those in a separate bin, adding 5s handles to the clips to give me more editing room. At the end of about 3 days, I had relinked everything to my remote drive and still had 4TB to spare.
But I also wanted to set up a method for retrieving footage or new stringouts and stories while I was on Saltspring. With the help of Teamviewer, I set up a remote control connection between my laptop and my MacPro workstation at the Big Timber office. Then I hooked up an external drive to the same MacPro and synced my 2TB of storage from Dropbox. This allowed me to logon to the office desktop at any time, consolidate any new footage to my dropbox folder and have it sync in Saltspring within a few hours.
In the next 7 weeks, working with my story editor Stephanie Rosloski and co-editor Michael Ellis, we took the nearly 6TB of footage down to a 45 min Broadcast Rough Cut screener. Everything on my end was edited from the family kitchen table on a 2015 Macbook Pro with two drives attached and my two boys being homeschooled at the same table.
As I finished stories and acts, I used frameio to upload the rough cuts. Their upload speeds are incredible and their user interface allows viewers to input notes directly on the video link which can be transferred by EDL right onto the Avid timeline. If any additional beats were added in or if I needed any specific b-roll, I logged onto my office computer with Teamviewer, created a transfer bin for that day and consolidated the necessary media onto my dropbox folder. When we were ready for an output for producers or broadcasters, I uploaded the finished show to Vimeo for review.
The process was fairly painless on my end. Avid is quirky and works in a fairly inflexible fashion. But keeping everything consolidated by Avid and making sure the media files copied over into the proper Avid Media file directory of my remote drive, I had virtually no problems relinking my files. A few annoying things popped up, like match framing to the source multigroup refused to work and a few rogue drone shots would reconnect to the incorrect footage, but I was expecting the editing process to be much more laborious and potentially impossible.
In the tests I did before heading out to the island, Avid had some issues on relinking the consolidated edits with all GoPro and Drone shots going offline. We attributed that to how those files were initially ingested without attributing a disk label. Andrew Notman, our AE, had to manually re-link those clips in the final sequence I delivered. As a backup and to make sure a working copy of the final rough cut sequence made it back to Vancouver, I consolidated the final version with 5 second handles onto my dropbox drive along with a bin containing both full and consolidated sequences. 5 hours later and 155 gigs later, my final rough cut edit had made it back to the main office and I enjoyed a beer in splendid isolation.
I have had the good fortune to work at mainly at home over the past 4 years now but this was the first time I’ve being able to edit a major episode from a media intense factual series with Avid remotely. With the help of Slack, it was easy to keep in touch with everyone on the team throughout the process and make sure we kept on schedule. While I’ll miss the spam cookout lunches, pie competitions and 419 Fridays, this seems like it will work for the foreseeable future until we can all be back together again soon. See you all at the next Zoom F&P Pub chat soon.
