Want to talk about going to extremes? How about hanging out the rear ramp of a C-130 cargo plane at over 200 mph shooting vintage World War II aircraft doing aerobatics in the sky above you? Then you have to bring the footage home and edit four different projects from it within 4 weeks while, at the same time, beta testing the only codec that can handle the new format of HD you are recording. That’s a video production being pushed to its limits.

It is also what filmmaker Jody Eldred of Jody Eldred Productions faced last October when shooting the Gathering of Mustangs & Legends Air Show in at the Rickenbacker Field in Columbus, Ohio, which included probably the largest gathering of P-51 Mustangs since the end of the WWII.
“We had been asked by Sony to shoot this production to help publicize their new PMW-EX1 XDCAM EX camcorders that record to Flash memory on standard PC Express Cards, along with their XDCAM HD camera shooting to optical disk,” Jody tells us. “As a result, we had a totally tapeless workflow and that’s the only way we could have delivered on time.”

With four crews shooting pilots and their planes during the four-day event, Jody had a ton of footage to work with. Two onsite digital management technicians loaded the 1920 X 1080 video onto MacBook Pro laptops at 2 to 3 times real speed thanks to the cameras’ tapeless file transfer capability, and after the last Mustang touched down Jody’s team hustled it back to his studios. There the footage was loaded into two Final Cut Pro 6.0.2 workstations powered by G5 Quad Macintoshes accessing a 11 terabyte Apple Xserve RAID along with a few Fire Wire drives for a few extra terabytes of input. Working at top-flight speed, Jody’s two stalwart editors, Christoph Baaden and Matt Henry were able to rough cut all four different video projects in two weeks.