How a PBS Station Sets Up the Production Transition

WGBH, the Boston-based PBS station that produces FRONTLINE, became a beta tester of Avid's new Symphony Nitris system as the first step in moving some of their programs to high-definition in 2007. Tim Mangini, broadcast director of FRONTLINE, oversees the Outpost, a facility that posts FRONTLINE and other client projects (usually documentaries). Mangini's Avid Symphony editors took the WGBH system for a test drive, and the Outpost ended up buying three. We talked to Mangini about the Symphony Nitris, HD delivery formats, and building a new post workflow.

Film & Video: Why, specifically, was WGBH interested in the Symphony Nitris?

Tim Mangini: We had already determined that Avid's Symphony was exactly the product we needed to put FRONTLINE on the air every week. It had the right blend of user interface, capability, and being able to interface with the rest of our producers. We had been waiting for a HD version of the Symphony for quite some time and instead of going with the DS, which was available earlier, we chose to see if a HD version of Symphony came out.

F&V: What features are most important?

TM: We are heavily dependent on the color-correction. A significant bonus is that we can have multiple formats of video in the same timeline. A producer can walk in with DV media. We can mix that with 2:1 source from another documentary, mix that with 1:1 graphics, and mix it with our packaging. They all coexist peacefully in the timeline. We get a large amount of stock footage from a wide variety of sources, and it significantly reduces the amount of time we spend digitizing material.

[Symphony Nitris has] a new motion tracker, and we use motion-tracking extensively. For example, we may shoot a street scene where we're showing a particular building or person, but we can't show three other people who are in the scene. You have to motion-track them and blur their faces. We just did a program on the Nitris called The Tank Man, about the person who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and all of the interviews were shot green screen. The environment was keyed later with the Spectramatte keyer. The keying in the Symphony Nitris is real-time and incredibly clean. Normally I would have told the producer, 'Do not ever shoot interviews in front of a green screen.' But the producer, on location in China, couldn’t clear it with me. Fortunately, we were able to recover from that and make the effect believable.

F&V: Do you expect to start working in HD in January?

TM:We could do a high-def program today, but we'd have to rent a deck and an HD scope and monitor. I'll be doing high-def programs over the summer for my clients. But every last little trick – the router, the monitors, the scopes, all the decks I want to have – all of that is planned to be in place by January 2007. Right now I could use cables and patches to put things together, but my routing and cabling are SD. Tearing out the entire machine room and put it together? I only want to do that once. We'll wait until we have funding in place, resources in place – and a break in the schedule.

F&V: Have you given thought to a spec for HD footage that you'll accept?

TM: Our standard is going to be HDCAM. We want to have the highest possible quality we can here at FRONTLINE. We don't believe the added quality of uncompressed HD formats pays off because you lose so much in transmission. Going lower than HDCAM is almost a step backwards. Having said that, we do accept and will accept other types of HD. If you shoot VariCam, come on down. We will online it. If you shoot HDV – we have shooters who work in Baghdad, where having a smaller rig has big benefits – we'll online the show. The standard that we hope everyone will adopt for shooting FRONTLINEs is HDCAM as a baseline. Whether that changes based on available technologies, I can't say just yet.

We were just at NAB and there's really a burgeoning middle-resolution HD class coming along. I'm talking about XDCAM and the Panasonic [P2] format. Ikegami has an HD format that records to a card. Having a card-based or disk-based acquisition format is incredibly attractive, but so far the quality is not there yet, and I don't believe the camera-to-offline-to-online flow has been fully sorted out. For an indie filmmaker, many of those make a huge amount of sense. But we turn out a program every week, and I need a very specific flow from offline editors to online suites and mix facilities.