The Cutting Room Floor

It seems like Apple is weaving it’s way into the fast these days.  As announced last year, NASCAR Media Group  is preparing for a transition to HD, which will include a move into a new 40,000-square-foot facility in Charlotte  North Carolina. The transition will also mark NASCAR Media Group’s move to an all Apple ProRes workflow.  NMG is the primary television production company for the sport of NASCAR, is using Macs and 16 AJA Kona 3 cards for ingesting the 150 hours of multi-camera footage shot at each race. An additional 18 Kona 3 cards are used for editing playback in NMG’s 10 edit bays, as well as to handle duplication and new media, and to support field operations for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series and NASCAR Nationwide Series.  This polishes their existing DIVArchive System by adding this new Apple Interface. 

“Bringing DIVArchive and Apple together in a unified environment will make it easy for producers and editors working in Final Cut Pro to restore content from anywhere within the system including the datatape library,” said Jeff Lowe, managing director for media and broadcast technology at NASCAR Media Group. “The flexibility of DIVArchive and our close partnership with Front Porch Digital are key to simplifying our production process and helping to secure our valuable media assets while at the same time supporting higher quality new programming by giving our staff even easier access to thousands of hours of historic clips in our archive.”

REVISION* Since the VHS ( and Beta for you Sony lovers ) back in the early eighties, recording formats have been one of the slowest forms of a growing technology in the A/V industry.  Digi-Beta and BetaCam have long been the standard for the industry but as the song goes, “the time’s, they are a changing” .From DVD’s and mini-discs all the way to hard drives, the techies have been plotting to remove tape and install a new standard, and slowly but surely over the past few years production studios have started to come on board.  Broadcast stations have been and are continuing  to make the switch to tapless media both in storage and recording formats, and industry enthusiasts seems ready to make tape a thing of the past. 

Final Cut lost one of it’s better selling features with the release of Avid’s Media Composer v5. Although Final Cut still retains it’s “one stop studio” (similar to that of the more consumer used Adobe Production Suite), Avid has now incorporated the drag and drop format for video and audio along with the ability to import footage without having to transcode. The latter being one of the biggest complaints of Final Cut users when working with Media Composer, since the ability to just grab (most) video formats and simply import them into your project in seconds has always been a primary function of workflow with FCP. Well, now Avid has finally added this convenient little feature to v5, and it will certainly take a little wind out of the sails of Final Cut’s ambitious climb to topple Avid in the post production market.

Well, here we go, yet another blog about one of the great television shows ending it’s series run.  But I’m not here to discuss the finale or debate whether or not this show ended on a high note ( well, not really anyway ).  What I really wanted to do was pay respect to the post production of one of the recent shows whose decided to pack it in after many years of entertaining us all, that show was 24.  As an editor myself, one of the many draws that had me watching 24 for the last eight seasons was the way the stories were told from an editing standpoint.  I’ve never seen a show that did such a unique and brilliant job of bringing in it’s story lines and make such creative use of split screens as 24 did.  When the show first aired, I was completely enthralled with the originality of how it displayed real time and made use of multiple screen shots.  Now after eight seasons, I can actually say that I feel that this show should go down in the annals of television as one of the most original and creative of it’s kind ( at least certainly from an editing standpoint ) .