DOCUMENTARY
CASE STUDY EDUCATING ESSEX
C4’s latest fixed-rig series Educating Essex provides a realistic portrait of life inside a state comprehensive. Turning the output of 62 hidden cameras and 48 audio feeds at Passmores School into a coherent eight part narrative about the lives of a group of GCSE students was the challenge for producer TwoFour and its post partner Evolutions. Evolutions’ operations director
“Our Media Composers proved to be robust and powerful on what was a massive project”
Owen Tyler Operations director Evolutions
Owen Tyler reveals the post house has developed a strong niche on fixed rig shows, which generate huge amounts of rushes which producers struggle to manage with their own inhouse edits. Educating Essex was no different. Even when video and audio was distilled there were 1,500 hours of footage in the form of a three stream mix. Tyler describes the workflow for the show’s seven week
shoot last autumn: “All media was ingested onto Evolutions’ shared storage at both high res MPEG50 and as low res MPEG2, allowing local browsing and logging. The MPEG50 was transcoded to an offline resolution on location and sent back to Evolutions to be transferred to the Avid ISIS 7000 along with synched multitrack BWAV audio files for offline, with Evolutions having seven Media Composer cutting rooms on the go at one point.” Offline editor Joby Gee adds: “The best thing about camera rig shows is that you generate so much material that you can cover stories in a way that you’d never be able to with camera teams on the ground.” But constructing an offline is complicated and painstaking. “Sometimes I had to do 2-3 passes on a lesson to work out what was going
COMPLEXITY OF FIXED-RIG DOCUMENTARY STREAMLINED BY AVID MEDIA COMPOSER
• 62 camera feeds distilled into a three stream mix • MPEG50 footage transcoded to offline res and transferred to ISIS 7000 • Avid Media Composer bin structure helps organise complex workflow
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on. Good sound is key – if you can’t hear what somebody is saying you can’t use that scene,” says Gee. Once final picture lock was completed Evolutions simply linked back to the online MPEG50 media, which was then consolidated back to the ISIS7000 for final post. Gee argues that it would be almost impossible to edit the show without Media Composer. “You have to be incredibly organised, which suites the Avid bin structure and formality of Avid media workflows, which are really good at handling complex jobs like this.” Tyler confirms: “The edit relied extensively on Media Composer’s ability to group multiple streams and channels of audio together. Our Media Composers proved to be robust and powerful on what was a massive project.”
STORIES create
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