Post Industry Feature

Extreme Post Makeover
By Staff
Dec 21, 2006, 16:20

Producing each episode of ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is a race against the clock. Throughout each season, a multi-camera production crew follows a team of photogenic architects and designers, and their crew of 100 workers, all in a rush to complete an "extreme" home renovation project that would ordinarily take months to achieve. Instead, there's a seven-day turnaround to shoot each one-hour episode and complete the renovation. Turning each show around in post can be just as hectic.

"We stay really busy," says Kenny Fields. As co-owner of Santa Monica-based West Post Digital and finishing supervisor for the show, which aired 28 episodes last season and in August received a second consecutive Creative Arts Emmy Award in the category of Outstanding Reality Program, Fields helped devise an efficient workflow that keeps pace with the hectic network production. The facility relies on its Avid Symphony Nitris system to stay on schedule and deliver episodes on time week after week.

When West Post Digital won the contract for the show's debut season in 2003, Fields and his team knew that they would be working closely with Hollywood-based Lock and Key Productions, the production company that handles the creative edit for the show. Though meticulously planned beforehand, the workflow was revised once production began to manage the considerable amount of back-and-forth synchronization with the offline team and last-minute finishing work required on each and every episode.

"We had originally planned to work on the show all week, expecting to get a final offline edit on a Monday, well before we had to deliver the master on Friday. But we soon realized that it really does come down to the wire each week, with all the hundreds of elements and the many fixes and changes involved," says Fields. The show typically locks late on Wednesday night or early Thursday morning and is delivered, completely finished, on Friday.

Because Lock and Key Productions uses an Avid offline setup with multiple Media Composer XL systems and an Avid Unity shared storage network, the team at West Post Digital can take advantage of a streamlined Avid offline-to-online workflow to give them a head start on the finishing process each week.

"We knew we couldn't wait until the final locked edit to start digitizing-there simply wasn't enough time-so we begin to pre-digitize from the fine cut material that was sent to the producers for approval," says Fields. "There's no time or money to make safety copies, so we work from the original."

Using the Symphony Nitris system's Total Conform feature, which automatically re-creates every cut, effect, title and graphic generated in the offline edit, the online team eliminates the time-consuming task of rebuilding creative work already completed in offline.

To speed the initial digitizing process, West Post Digital uses a Media Composer Adrenaline system to input a range of source formats, including Sony's Blu-ray-based XDCAM, Beta SP and Mini DV, which is used to supply POV shots from camcorders used by the show's talent. An Avid Unity MediaNetwork system with 12TB of mirrored storage ties the multiple Avid workstations together, enabling team members to access and share files with those working on titling, graphics, effects fixes and other finishing tasks.

The digitized media is loaded on West Post's networked storage by Wednesday of each week. Using the Symphony Nitris system, any new material received in the locked cut later in the week can be digitized and quickly re-linked to the existing cut.

"When we digitize, we always leave 20-frame handles on each end of a shot. If we need to adjust any shots, it's better to have the material there, rather than searching at the last minute for a few bits of heads or tails," says Fields.
The workflow details ironed out by Senior Editor Jennifer MacFarlane make good use of every last minute. For example, while the show is still being conformed, West Post's colorist, Paul Roman, begins color correcting the first 10 minutes of the locked cut.

Once the locked cut is conformed, the editors turn to a time-consuming job that's a fact of life for reality programs: logo blurring. "We need to make sure that any of the product logos in the show-from the name on a television set to a sign on the truck parked outside-don't detract from potential advertisers," says Fields. "You may not realize it, but prior to final finishing, our editors spend hours doing blurring for each show."

That's where the speed of the Symphony Nitris system delivers the extra seconds and minutes crucial to on-time delivery. "Compared to our earlier system, the Symphony Nitris is so fast," says Fields. "Meanwhile, if we have to render anything out, we're getting about five times the throughput we had previously."
By Thursday, when the West Post editors get approval on the locked cut, approximately 80 percent of the digitizing has been finished. Popping in any changes, such as new or replacement footage, goes smoothly, says Fields. "That leaves us with only about 250 of those 1,500 clips to re-digitize. The Symphony Nitris automatically inserts the new elements."

Close cooperation between creative post and finishing also pays off. "We rely on the care that Lock and Key takes with its deliverables," says Fields, citing the tight, clean Avid files that Lock and Key's tape librarians and assistant editors post on West Post Digital's FTP site. "This sounds really simple, but something as mundane as correctly labeled reel numbers and accurate timecode is something they have right every time. It saves us a lot of headaches."

Lock and Key Productions, based in the Hollywood Production Center, is one of the in-house editorial teams for Endemol USA, which also produces Big Brother, Fear Factor and Deal or No Deal. The facility currently employs 16 Media Composer XL systems connected via a multi-terabyte Avid Unity shared storage solution.

"The show normally has two crews shooting at once," says Hoot Maynard, post producer for Lock and Key, about Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. "To make the show's deadlines, constant access to every bit of content is a key issue. Often times we are digitizing, labeling, grouping and editing footage from two or more separate episodes on our Unity network. This allows us to keep our 15 editors and five assistant editors working nonstop and around the clock, if we need."

That need became apparent when posting Extreme Makeover: Home Edition-After the Storm. The series of four special episodes, which aired earlier this year, featured rebuilding projects in Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana and Texas following the destruction caused by major hurricanes.

With much more footage pouring in-well beyond anything a single show turns out-Lock and Key rented eight more Media Composer editing bays from Wexler Video. Using features such as multi-cam allowed editors to keep pace with the diverse footage shot in four states. "Most of the time we are shooting with six or more cameras simultaneously. The multi-cam feature allows our editors to see all the clips/angles of the same scene at one time, speeding up the overall editing process," says Maynard.

Fields and partner and co-owner Todd Brown are working on the next step: building a larger facility that will allow them to add an insert stage and open up rental space for Avid editing suites. Also on tap: the latest 4-Gigabit Fibre Channel Avid Unity MediaNetwork system.

"Along with our Symphony Nitris, the [newer Avid] Unity will allow us to move to networked HD finishing," says Fields. "I've used the Avid DNxHD codec for HD, and it looks just gorgeous."

While Extreme Makeover is currently shot and mastered in SD, the Symphony Nitris system provides the flexibility for West Post Digital to handle HD work in the future. That capability is important as many reality shows, along with television production in general, have already moved or will be moving to the higher resolution format over the next few years.

"We loved our old, original Symphony. However, since the Symphony Nitris interface stays the same whether you're in standard def or HD, it was a pain-free move to get our SD-res editors to move to Avid's HD environment," says Fields.


© Copyright 2003 by United Entertainment Media, Inc.