ITV1 PRIMETIME


SOMETHING EXTRA


PUTTING


INTO THE X FACTOR


For ITV1’s The X Factor The Farm Group heavily utilised


Avid Media Composers and Pro Tools. The post house used bespoke software to auto track changes between the two


The latest series of ITV1’s monster entertainment hit The X Factor produced by Talkback/Syco was even larger than life when it aired last year thanks to the decision to shoot in HD for the first time. It’s not the only daunting aspect to the show’s production. Organisation and editing of all the footage is a mammoth task too, one handled with seasoned expertise by the Avid editors and production team at The Farm. “The audition shows, for instance, which make up a large part of the series, are all shot on single cameras – there’s no outside broadcast as such,” reveals David Klafkowski, technical director at The Farm Group.


MEDIA COMPOSER


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LARGE AND COMPLEX “Each camera is individually recorded, either on Sony XDCAM HD camcorders, or smaller non- recorder cameras, outputting to external disc recorders. This media is then transferred to XDCAM HD, this transfer not only acts as a very stable backup but also ensures everything gets to the Farm on XDCAM discs, with the very useful proxies. “We’re talking in excess of six thousand hours of media,” he says. “You need a hard copy of all media for safety’s sake. So you might as well make the XDCAM discs your master.” Creating The X Factor is obviously a quite different proposition to making your average studio-based shiny floor show. “As The X Factor is shot


with single cameras there is no line cut [live switching between feeds],” says Klafkowski. “So each show is completely crafted from the twenty or so cameras used. To add to this there’s all the other stuff, the behind the scenes footage etc...”


LEARNING CURVE To enable the fast and accurate multi-cam editing of the very large and complex sequences, The Farm set up a transfer workflow to ingest the proxy files and transcode them to a non long GOP format. “We had a big learning curve


in terms of how we needed the Avids to work on this particular show. It’s a very fast turnaround, so this show does test workflows to the extreme.” “The sign off process is very


reactive and right up to the wire,” he adds. “This ability to change, often right up to the last minute, couldn’t be done without an Avid. We just couldn’t make the show without the functionality of the Avids.” Another key aspect of the


Avid workflow is the editing system’s interaction with Avid’s Pro Tools audio editing software. “A lot of work goes into the show’s final mix, so Media Composer’s relationship with Pro Tools is very important. Any picture change made has a knock-on effect with the mix, and when you’re working right up to the wire, as you are on this show, all changes have to track across.


“To keep this process smooth, we have some bespoke software that follows changes between the Avids and the Pro Tools actively updating each timeline” According to Klafkowski, there


are 40 plus microphone channels used on The X Factor. “All of these microphones are available in the mix,” he explains. “There’s a PA mix, but there’s no programme mix as such, we construct the whole thing.”


Klafkowski isn’t boasting too much then, when he describes


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