| Broadcast Editor |
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| Written by Loren Blake | |
| Tuesday, 15 April 2008 | |
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Not every broadcast editor gets to play with the kind of high tech toys that Brian Mulligan has at his disposal as senior editor in the postproduction department of WTHR TV, the NBC affiliate in Indianapolis. But even though WTHR is serving the 26th largest TV market, its owners have decided to invest in full featured Autodesk Smoke NLEs fed by Autodesk’s Stone high speed RAID storage system. That’s more prestige that post houses in major media meccas can lay claim to. “Everyone here is wading into the high-definition waters and trying to learn how to swim,” Brian tells us. “Some are deeper into the HD pool than others, but we are also in the process of migrating to tapeless production. Our station just changed over to Panasonic P2 cameras recording DVCPRO HD onto solid state memory cards and this gives us a nonlinear workflow from acquisition to playout to air.” As with any major change under broadcast pressures, there have been a few challenges along the way, or as Brian says, “The people down in the trenches who have to wrestle with all this new technology know that some will work and some will take some getting used to.” An NLE system with the power of Smoke is usually employed for online finishing from offline EDLs, but at WTHR Brian uses it to create content from scratch every day. “Producers come in, we load in the raw video, and hopefully nine hours later we have a 30-second spot cut and polished,” Brian says. “The system can handle large amounts of material, the video is always nice and clean and you have little rendering time.” But it is the workflow issue that Brian has run into that called for a creative solution. “P2 uses the MXF file format and a lot of our legacy equipment, including Smoke, can’t ingest it natively,” he says. “In fact, our Smoke doesn’t like compressed files at all.” But editors are inherently problem solvers. “We bought an Apple Macintosh workstation and installed tether software from Instinctual Software. The tether software can take any QuickTime-supported file format and drag-and-drop them through our Gigabit Ethernet network into the Discreet system’s library. Then I just click on the file and ‘boom’ it is available to edit in the Smoke interface.” Brian knows this is not a knock on Smoke, and I have reason to believe Autodesk is working on an internal solution as you read this. “In the grand scheme of things, there are always going to be issues with a new recording medium,” Brian explains, “and with the rapid proliferation of formats it is hard for any company to keep up with licensing the latest codecs. The turnover rate on technology is simply huge.” Brian alerts us that the next HD codec coming down the line is the H.264-compliant AVC-Intra, and when he spoke with me last winter, none of the edit systems could handle it natively yet. Just wait until next month’s overview of what was shown at NAB2008 in Las Vegas. We expect P2 acceptability and AVC-Intra editing to be a common theme.
No need to worry, though; broadcast editors like Brian Mulligan will still find many problems to solve. “Five months down the road something else will come up,” he says. “That’s what keeps us editors busy.”  |
Iain Blair
James Thompson
Dyana Carmella
