DRAMA SERIES
competition in creative terms. Phillips describes the Avid Media Composer which he used on the edit as his first and only tool of the trade. It comes with plenty of useful plugs-ins and tools which Phillips made full use of on Sherlock, including Boris and Animat text tools and 3d warp effects. “One particularly successful innovation was the on screen text messages,” says Phillips. “I developed the text feature using Avid’s tracking and Animat tools to produce on screen text which didn’t look stuck on – which was what I wanted. I was able to track text onto visual features such as walls.
Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s scripts and the direction of Paul McGuigan and Euros Lyn. Says Phillips: “It was a very rewarding experience – the show was fairly daring in some places, and involved a lot of layered effects and innovative transitions and wipes which characterise the scene changes.” There were also vfx sequences from The Mill in the form of explosions plus visual devices such as on-screen text messages which made the editing of the series stand out from the
POLISHED LOOK In other places there are wipe transitions which I tried to make as organic as possible. In one scene in a laboratory there are a lot of glass jars defocused in the foreground which I used for a soft edged screen wipe using Avid’s 3d Wipe tool.” Shot in Cardiff and on location in London, files were sent for online and grade at Pepper Post in London. The principle challenge for Pepper was reproducing and polishing Phillips’ fairly exacting edit. Says Pepper online editor Scott Hinchcliffe: “Charlie was very definite that the offline was exactly how he wanted the online to look. My job was to polish it and give him back something that he – and the director – liked.” Another challenge for Pepper was
dealing with the range of file formats. Approximately 90% of the series was shot on the Sony F35 on HDCAM SR tape, with additional material acquired on Panasonic P2 and Canon D5 as QuickTime files. The tapes were couriered and played into Avid DS for online, while the QuickTimes were uploaded onto FTP, with the ProTools sound mix and audio layback completed at audio facility Bang. Avid DS is the ideal tool for handling complex workflows, says Hinchcliffe. “Sherlock had plenty of tricksy transitions and complicated chase sequences, which is where the Avid came into its own. It gives you a huge amount of flexibility, allowing you to go in and tweak stuff way down in the layers then come back out and review what the changes look like.”
EDGY AND EXCITING Although the series was shot on the F35 at 4:4:4 resolution the ungraded master was produced at 4:2:2. It was then sent to Pepper senior colourist Kevin Horsewood for what Phillips describes as a ‘heavy grade’ on Film Cutter and Film Master. Horsewood’s time in the grade was rewarded with one of the show’s three RTS awards. Post supervisor Sam Lucas concludes: “The result was a high quality, glossy feature film-like version of contemporary London – a dark nightscape which was edgy and exciting without being bleak.”
AWARD WINNING EDITING
BBC1 and Hartswood Films’ Sherlock cleaned up at this year’s RTS Craft Awards, with the judges describing the show’s editing as “innovative”, “complementary” and offering a fresh insight into the Conan Doyle classic
AVID DS
Avid DS is high performance file-based editing and finishing software which provides all the tools you need to create, edit, composite and finish high-end con- tent. For more see:
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