On the Issues of Editing HD for Episodic TV and How MXF Makes His Life Easy

Roundabout is a full-service post facility, offering on-line editing, color-correction, 16:9 to 4:3 pan-and-scan aspect-ratio conversions, sound editorial and design, ADR and Foley, re-recording, mastering, worldwide versioning, full QCs and duplication. Stephen Guillen is a highly experienced TV and feature film editor who’s worked on numerous HD projects in the past few years. The majority of work he does today is for TV specials and episodics, which almost exclusively appear on the MyNetworkTV network (formerly the UPN network). Usually working at a frenetic pace, on an average week, the company will have two HD original shows on the air and two HD feature films airing twice a week.

Q: When setting up an HD editing suite, how much storage is required to do most projects?
A: Setting up an HD suite for storage is completely different than setting up a standard editing suite. We use the Avid Symphony Nitris system, which allows you to bypass all codecs and digitize without further compression – 1:1. Using this setting we do not “degrade” the client’s material in any way. Roundabout delivers all formats but primarily on 1080 HDCAM SR (4:4:4) tapes. What enables us to work on multiple weekly HD TV shows, HD features, and HD side projects without compromising quality at any step through the process is a huge amount of storage. A true editing suite allows for multiple projects at any given time, and in the HD post world you can’t afford to run out of space.

We have about 40 TB in-house and use about a half a terabyte to store all the materials for one-hour TV show. Of course, this all depends on the amount of elements involved with a particular project. Some one-hour shows have more to them than others. Also, if you have to store that content for three or four weeks, you want to have extra capacity. So I would say two to three TB is minimum for a small facility that wants to post a normal HD project.

Q: How about the use of metadata?
A: I can’t imagine dealing with 36 episodes a week without the new MXF format. We use multiple Avid,s, and MXF files allow safer media management for our TerraBlock drives. We receive HD material with metadata but Avid can only create closed captioning (CC) metadata-it cannot preserve the captioning on ingest. This created a problem as most of our material is for broadcast, requiring CC embedded and forcing alternate means to preserve CC metadata.

Q: What’s missing in the HD production chain, in your mind?
A: The distribution of knowledge throughout the life of a project is a problem. From HD cameras to HD workstations to HD decks, the knowledge of how equipment and formats interact is still lacking. This is caused by all the options for equipment in production and post-production. Now all the possible delivery options are forcing all parties involved to be informed about more than just their job title.

Q: What’s the biggest misconception about HD production? Where does reality end and hype begin?
A: There are plenty of tools that help HD look almost like 16 or 35mm film. But even with these tools, HD is still noticeably different from film. An HD picture has a finer quality than film. The film tools degrade the quality of HD picture to give the texture film has, but cannot completely match the quality and texture of film. Film will be outdated because people are getting used to the sharp quality of HD picture, and there will be less and less need to recreate a film look.

As for hype, I don’t think there is any hype. Everything you can think of doing with an HD project is possible. Just keep in mind that HD, although it does stay in one format, does not necessarily equal cheaper and easier. A new format usually means new problems.

For more information on the facility, visit http://www.roundabout.com/.