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‘Expect the unexpected’ could be Ben Holmes’ motto. When Holmes, who runs his own edit company Edit Out, was hired by Sky Sports as the video tape editor on its Superbowl coverage earlier this year, his first priority was to make sure he could cope with any eventuality. “You are never quite sure what
you are going to be required to do or what kind of facilities you are going to be working with on jobs like this, so you need to bring kit which can cope with all eventualities.” Which is why Holmes rarely travels without his Blackmagic Design Multibridge Pro edit system on a flyaway edit such as the Superbowl, where he was required to edit and send video packages from the stadium compound at Arlington, Texas via satellite to Sky in London. “The most important thing about kit that I pack into a flightcase is that it’s reliable and flexible. It’s a tool – something that should be seen and not heard which allows you to get on with the job in hand. I don’t want capture and playback solutions that only give me SDI video – it has to cover all the bases.” Holmes has three Blackmagic Design Multibridge Pro systems as he finds them the most simple and
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reliable on the market, linking to his Mac Pro with PCI Express for a high quality 10Gb/s connection. “I have never encountered a situation where I wasn’t able to connect up to it,” he comments. “Blackmagic’s kit is well made, good value and, for me, it provides the right combination of connectability, flexibility and price,” he adds.
Holmes’ standard flightcase includes a Mac Pro, a 24 inch Apple monitor, keyboards and Multibridge Pro. Although he’s never had a problem with kit getting damaged in transit, he sometimes takes the portable Multibridge Pro with him as hand luggage in case the rest of the hardware is delayed clearing customs. “That way I can always hook it up to another Mac Pro while I wait for my hardware to ship – because Multibridge will easily hook up to any computer.”
Based in the international compound of the Arlington Stadium in Texas, along with over 30 foreign broadcasters, Holmes edited Superbowl packages using a combination of Fox 720P 60 format material, SD archive footage, and P2 material from his own ENG reporter on site.
“We cut about six features and fan pieces and sent them over the satellite link to Sky HQ as DVCPro HD,” explains Holmes. With P2 cards ingesting into the Apple Final Cut Pro Studio editing systems at five times the speed of real-time, the whole process has become much simpler, says Holmes. Once the edit system was up and running smoothly in the portacabin, all Holmes had to worry about was the weather – which wasn’t so good: “I was looking forward to a break from the cold UK winter, but we arrived in a blizzard with temperatures as low as -20 degrees – the worst snowstorm they had had for 15 years.”
Key advantages
Blackmagic Design’s Multibridge Pro offered the right combination of reliability, connectability, flexibility and price
Holmes’ advanced editing system was ideal
as it works in a wide range of outputs from SD, HD to 2K, in 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 video quality
It’s reliable and flexible... I’ve never encountered a situation where I wasn’t able to connect to Multibridge Pro
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