DRAMA


CASE STUDY DOWNTON ABBEY


The second series of Downton Abbey – the hit period drama from Carnival Films starring Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern – has carried on where the first series left off, with millions tuning every week this autumn.


For editor Clyde Kellett from


“Avid DS is a pretty robust machine that no matter what you throw at it hardly ever falls over and crashes.”


Clyde Kellett Editor, The Farm


create STORIES


The Farm the success of the show is at least in part due to its high production values and attention to detail in post. His involvement in the second series began with a series of pre-production meetings to discuss, amongst other things, the best workflow for getting the locked off rushes from Carnival’s offline to the conform at The Farm on Avid Symphony, through the grade and finally into Avid DS for effects and online. Shot on the Arri Alexa onto SxS PRO memory cards, rushes were


transferred to external hard drives and transcoded onto Unity. Then they were logged and imported along with the sync audio into Avid Media Composer for offline. Kellett recalls: “The offline is simply transferred into our Avid Symphony, where it can be exported via Avid File Exchange, and read in Avid DS. This gave us all the relevant information needed from the original offline, regarding resizes, speed-ups, motion effects and captions, all of which can be easily recreated and polished in full res.” The Farm was also sent early rushes of various green-screen shots Carnival was planning, to advise how best to achieve the desired results. “It is always helpful to be part of this process before the actual filming of the shot, so we can make sure we get what we need to make the shot


QUALITY DRAMA MADE ON MEDIA COMPOSER, SYMPHONY AND DS


• Offlined on Media Composer at Carnival • The Farm performs conform on Symphony, grade on FilmMaster and up to eight hours of effects per episode on Avid DS


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work and be believable,” says Kellett. For the numerous effects shots Kellett says the Avid DS was the ideal tool in terms of reliability, versatility, flexibility and, perhaps most importantly, speed. “In terms of reliability Avid DS is


a pretty robust machine that no matter what you throw at it hardly ever falls over and crashes. What it does is enable us to work effortlessly between all the appropriate tools we require to get the job done. No matter what effect is being applied the tools can be easily transferred from one to the other, stepping in and out of the composite track layers, with speed and efficiency.” Best of all, its quick, adds Kellett. “That’s vital when we are performing these tasks in real time with 10-bit HD full res uncompressed pictures.”


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