ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
A Final Cut Pro Editorial ‘Brotherhood’
by John Taylor with Terry Kelley, A.C.E.
 The Brotherhood editorial crew atop the roof of the Foundry building in Providence, Rhode Island, from left: Terry Kelley, A.C.E., John Taylor, Lise Johnson, Jen Lame and Anthony Redman, A.C.E. Photo by Megumi Nishikura |
Those of us who own personal computers and a digital video camera know how easy it is to make movies at home––plug the camera into the computer, use an inexpensive editing program like Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas, iMovie or Final Cut Pro, and easily capture the footage onto your hard drive. Most of these programs make it simple to organize the digitized clips, place them in a timeline, change their order, trim them up, add effects and titles, and output them back them to your camera or to some kind of digital file to load on the Internet, show to your friends on MySpace or Facebook, or burn to a DVD.
Given that this workflow is so easy, why is it that when we're working on a movie or a television show shooting on HDCAM tape, we're still using telecine labs and online bays? We send out 23.98 tapes to telecine where they sync up the production audio to a copy of the HDCAM camera masters, then dub down to 29.97 tape stock or receive digital files on a hard drive. Then we either capture the files into our editing systems and remove pull-down, or copy the digital dailies onto our own media drives. Eventually, we send our lists or sequences out to an online bay to make the online edited masters.
All this is extremely expensive, costing thousands of dollars per day for telecine, and even more for onlining. This all takes time, of course, and there are regular problems we've all encountered, such as the takes being one to three frames out of sync. Sometimes, there are missing takes, audio and missed slates, and all too often telecine bays are down or telecine operators call in sick, so that the dailies arrive late. It also seems counterintuitive to create 29.97 dailies tapes from 23.98 camera originals. Why can't there be a workflow that allows us to capture the 23.98 camera tapes directly into our editing systems, sync the dailies ourselves in the cutting room, cut offline at 23.98, and then do our own onlines?
Well, that's what we're doing in the post-production for Brotherhood. Brotherhood, which is shot and posted in Providence, Rhode Island, is an episodic dramatic series airing on Showtime and currently finishing Season three. It’s set in an Irish neighborhood in Providence, and focuses on family conflicts in an Irish family caused by two brothers on opposite sides of the law: one a gangster (Jason Isaacs) and the other a politician (Jason Clarke). The editing style of our show is very straightforward, cut for emphasis on character and story rather than visual flash, and we use very few video transitions or digital visual effects. What few visual effects we do need are commonly created right in the cutting room since we have direct access to the HD materials.
 Final Cut Pro Online locked picture edited Master for Season 3 episode of Brotherhood, ready for final audio mix. |
We bought Sony’s HDCAM JH-3 playback deck and HDCAM HDW-1800 record deck. We copy the camera tapes (which have discontinuous time-of-day time code) to new HDCAM stock with continuous LTC time code. While we're making the copy, we also capture into Final Cut Pro (using a Kona 3 card), creating re-sized files, which are standard DV, 720x480 at 48kHz and 23.98 fps, and also simultaneously feed video and audio out to a DVD recorder to make a master DVD for distribution to the executives and showrunners. Then, the assistants copy the DVD-Rs from the production sound mixer onto their media drives, and sync up the digitized video to the 24-bit production audio the old-fashioned way: They line up the video and audio on a timeline by way of the slates and then create new clips, with which cut. When we're done cutting, the project files are transferred to our high definition expert and assistant editor, John Taylor, who then re-digitizes the offline sequence from the copies of the HDCAM masters, thereby creating an online edited master in the cutting room.
The first season of Brotherhood was also shot in the Sony HDCAM format. We sent the camera tapes to a telecine facility, where the dailies were synched and dubs were made. A 30fps pull-down DVCAM tape was made for editorial and loaded into the Avids. While digitizing, the 3:2 pull-down was removed so that we could cut at 24fps. We sent our sequences and EDLs out for onlines, but all the post sound work was done from 30fps DVCAM tapes.
 Presets for capturing Brotherhood HDCAM dailies into Final Cut Pro using AJA Kona3 Card. |
For the second season, our first to have post-production on location in Providence, Terry Kelley, A.C.E., one of our two editors, approached Showtime and explained our alternative workflow. The company approved and so it began for us. We decided to use Final Cut Pro because we could afford to purchase the equipment instead of renting. Also, Final Cut uses standard QuickTime files rather than a proprietary codec, and works with a large variety of standard hardware.
The equipment was shipped directly to our location in Providence. We built four conventional offline systems, using MacPros, Final Cut Pro, AJA input/output boxes, and WiebeTech 4-bay SATA hard-drive enclosures. These enclosures are the RTX400-SV model, which can contain four single terabyte Seagate Enterprise drives. They are hot-swappable, so we can easily transport the media to and from the editing systems. Using this “sneakernet” for our storage enabled us to keep our costs down.
In addition, for our HD system, we purchased two Sony HDCAM decks, a JH-3 (playback only), a HDW-1800 (playback and record), an AJA Kona 3 capture card, Sony HD LCD Broadcast monitor, and the G-Tech 4GB Fibre channel 3-TB G-Speed RAID array to handle the uncompressed HD media. After we built and tested the systems, everything was ready to go.
As the original camera dailies arrived, we cloned, digitized and burned an SD DVD master for dailies distribution. One hour of dailies would typically take up to three hours to handle at a post facility. We were able to accomplish that in one hour, again saving us considerable time and money.
Clones are made from the camera originals by putting the camera masters into the JH-3 deck and copying them to the HDW-1800 with new continuous time code. Those copies get used later for the onlines, and provide a safety backup as well. While we're making the clone, we digitize into Final Cut Pro by way of an HD-SDI connection from the HDW-1800 deck to the Kona 3 card. The Kona card also provides us with a standard-definition signal that is used to make our Dailies DVD masters. In FCP, we are able to record the HD as a 23.98 16:9 DV QuickTime file with which to edit. Basically, it is a direct copy that is just scaled down to allow for ease of use in the offline edit. This process is extremely reliable, no conversions are required, and we've had no problems with our offline files in two seasons. The image quality we cut with is outstanding.
Tod A. Maitland, C.A.S., our production sound mixer, records the production audio using the DEVA. Multiple track 24-bit 48khz broadcast .WAV files are given to us on DVD-R. Those files are imported into FCP for syncing. FCP reads all the information from the Broadcast .WAV files, such as time code and roll number.
Once all the media is loaded, it is handed off to Lise Johnson and Jen Lame, our other assistant editors. They sync the dailies, break down the rolls and hand off the scenes to our two editors, Kelley and Anthony Redman, A.C.E. Both Johnson and Lame perform all the normal roles of assistant editors.
Kelley and Redman both cut with high-quality images with the original 24-bit sound. When they finish an episode and the show is locked, the final project file is sent back to Taylor to perform the online. Typically at this point, everything would be sent out-of-house. Instead, we complete the online in-house.
We turn over digital picture to post sound in the form of 23.98 QuickTime outputs from our FCP systems. We also provide EDLs and OMF files, and everything still maintains the original frame rate. The post sound finish, including the final mix, is completed at Warner Bros. TV sound department in Burbank, and all materials are sent to them using Digidesign’s DigiDelivery. The OMFs are at the full-quality 24-bit 48khz audio. Again, there are no conversions or loss in quality.
The online is a very simple process. The offline locked file is “decomposed,” then re-digitized at full HDCAM 10-bit 4:2:2 resolution by using the Kona 3 card. The new timeline is double-checked by Taylor against the offline edit. Once that is complete we have our edited master, which we clone and send to LA for the final color correction and sound layback. By doing the onlines in-house, we can maintain control, quality and accuracy. We also do our own onlines of recaps and free-TV versions. There have been no quality control issues with our edited masters.
Brotherhood’s executive producers, Blake Masters and Henry Bromell, are happy with this workflow. They both like the financial savings, which pay for our editors to be on location. Also, they receive the dailies in one day as opposed to three, as on Season one. When Bromell was working on NBC’s Homicide in the mid 1990s, he had to travel back and forth to New York to be with editorial.
Now, we are only five minutes away from production. Our workflow has also allowed for the post schedule to be shortened by a day for each episode, and we can re-online easily if needed. On Seasons Two and Three of Brotherhood, this has worked tremendously for us, and none of our edited masters have failed quality control with the network. We feel that this is the television workflow of the 21st century, and also puts the work back in the cutting room––where it belongs.
Assistants have been synching dailies for decaades now, and doing it efficiently, accurately and economically. Productions no longer need to spend precious resources on outside vendors for work that can be done in-house. We should all look to the future and see that the old ways of doing things have to be re-examined and updated to take advantage of our technological advances.
John Taylor has been working in the post-production editorial field for 19 years on many studio features as assistant editor, including such films as Dragonheart and Daylight for Universal. He has also spent a few years in post technology development with companies such as Avid, Apple and Sony. Terry Kelley, A.C.E., has a masters degree in art and is conversant in 35mm film and digital editing with Avid and Final Cut Pro. He won an Emmy Award for Contribution in Editing on the 1993 HBO movie And the Band Played On.