BBC : Full On Final Cut
BBC : Full On Final Cut
I didn’t want to lose any of the ambition of the series”, explains executive producer Gary Hunter. “Nor did I want to cut back radically on the studio elements. I therefore looked at alternative methods of shooting and editing”.Tight deadlines, stringent budgets, limited resources? No problem. Apple technology provides the backbone of a powerful, cost-effective workflow used by the BBC to produce the topical series, Full on Food.
What drives a broadcaster to implement a radical new concept in programme production? One of the most obvious answers is cost, but in this case, there was far more to it than that. All organisations, whether public or private, need to function efficiently to meet the demands of media-hungry audiences; procedures must be streamlined without hampering productivity, resources and skills must be flexible and transferable without compromising creativity.
This vision of the future of broadcasting, along with the aforementioned cost savings and tight deadlines, is what motivated the BBC to make use of ‘predators’ — part producer, part editor — for the second series of Full on Food. And to help the predators implement this vision, the BBC turned to Apple technology; specifically the potent combination of Final Cut Pro, Power Mac G5 and Xsan.
“The central media store meant the directors could go to any machine and pick up their project — they weren’t tied to a specific machine. They could access anything at any stage.”
According to Gary Hunter, executive producer of the series: “The second series of Full on Food was commissioned with a reduced budget. I didn’t want to lose any of the ambition of the series, especially as regards travelling the world to bring back great food stories. Nor did I want to cut back radically on the studio elements. I therefore looked at other ways of keeping the money on the screen — in particular, alternative methods of shooting and editing”.
Having the predators shoot their own footage was one such method. Hunter explains: “Self-shooting allowed the directors to create strong, intimate, personal films, which gave the series a very strong style. It meant there was a great deal of freedom for directors and it contributed to the programme’s ‘actuality-based’ style because the director becomes more invisible behind a smaller camera”.
Once the shooting was complete, the concept of the multi-skilled predator was married with that of a purpose-built production unit — known as the ‘lab’ — in which the show’s short location-based films could be offlined (which, in practice, meant edited) and onlined (cosmetic finishing, colour-grading, FX, playing out to tape, producing audio files for the sound dub and so on). The unit was comprised of two rooms — one editing room for directors and another online/ingesting room.
John O’Donovan, senior production technologist at the BBC’s Factual and Learning department, says: “We had a digital technician working across the project. He was able to manage media, deal with the entire ingest process, and make sure files were stored in the right places and that everything was correctly digitised. His role was invaluable”.
“Centralisation of the ingest process was very significant as it really facilitated the management of the workflow”, adds O’Donovon. “Plus, the amount of storage we had allowed the directors [was sufficient] to keep the entire programme rushes online throughout the production so they could access anything at any stage. The central media store meant directors could go to any machine and pick up their project — they weren’t tied to a specific machine”.
Apple’s Xsan storage area netorking solution was at the heart of the workflow. The team used two Xserve G5s and two 5.6TB Xserve RAIDs, providing a compbined total of over 11TB of storage, plus a Qlogic Fibre Switch and two Asante Ethernet Switches. The Xsan allowed the centrally-stored media to be shared across a number of workstations — one Power Mac G5 running Final Cut Pro for ingest, three Power Mac G5s running Final Cut Pro with 23-inch Apple Cinema Displays for offlining, and one finishing workstation — a Power Mac G5 running FCP HD, with a 30-inch Cinema HD Display and a broadcast monitor.
What drives a broadcaster to implement a radical new concept in programme production? One of the most obvious answers is cost, but in this case, there was far more to it than that. All organisations, whether public or private, need to function efficiently to meet the demands of media-hungry audiences; procedures must be streamlined without hampering productivity, resources and skills must be flexible and transferable without compromising creativity.
This vision of the future of broadcasting, along with the aforementioned cost savings and tight deadlines, is what motivated the BBC to make use of ‘predators’ — part producer, part editor — for the second series of Full on Food. And to help the predators implement this vision, the BBC turned to Apple technology; specifically the potent combination of Final Cut Pro, Power Mac G5 and Xsan.
“The central media store meant the directors could go to any machine and pick up their project — they weren’t tied to a specific machine. They could access anything at any stage.”
According to Gary Hunter, executive producer of the series: “The second series of Full on Food was commissioned with a reduced budget. I didn’t want to lose any of the ambition of the series, especially as regards travelling the world to bring back great food stories. Nor did I want to cut back radically on the studio elements. I therefore looked at other ways of keeping the money on the screen — in particular, alternative methods of shooting and editing”.
Having the predators shoot their own footage was one such method. Hunter explains: “Self-shooting allowed the directors to create strong, intimate, personal films, which gave the series a very strong style. It meant there was a great deal of freedom for directors and it contributed to the programme’s ‘actuality-based’ style because the director becomes more invisible behind a smaller camera”.
Once the shooting was complete, the concept of the multi-skilled predator was married with that of a purpose-built production unit — known as the ‘lab’ — in which the show’s short location-based films could be offlined (which, in practice, meant edited) and onlined (cosmetic finishing, colour-grading, FX, playing out to tape, producing audio files for the sound dub and so on). The unit was comprised of two rooms — one editing room for directors and another online/ingesting room.
John O’Donovan, senior production technologist at the BBC’s Factual and Learning department, says: “We had a digital technician working across the project. He was able to manage media, deal with the entire ingest process, and make sure files were stored in the right places and that everything was correctly digitised. His role was invaluable”.
“Centralisation of the ingest process was very significant as it really facilitated the management of the workflow”, adds O’Donovon. “Plus, the amount of storage we had allowed the directors [was sufficient] to keep the entire programme rushes online throughout the production so they could access anything at any stage. The central media store meant directors could go to any machine and pick up their project — they weren’t tied to a specific machine”.
Apple’s Xsan storage area netorking solution was at the heart of the workflow. The team used two Xserve G5s and two 5.6TB Xserve RAIDs, providing a compbined total of over 11TB of storage, plus a Qlogic Fibre Switch and two Asante Ethernet Switches. The Xsan allowed the centrally-stored media to be shared across a number of workstations — one Power Mac G5 running Final Cut Pro for ingest, three Power Mac G5s running Final Cut Pro with 23-inch Apple Cinema Displays for offlining, and one finishing workstation — a Power Mac G5 running FCP HD, with a 30-inch Cinema HD Display and a broadcast monitor.
posted by Senthu VJ @ 4:50 PM
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