Jason Harvey explains how real-time editing and video playback help him keep pace with Christina Aguilera on tour

Gone are the days when a few well-placed strobe lights and smoke in the footlights thrill crowds at a concert. Big scale, wrap-around video displays, in sync with the musical performance, are now expected parts of the scenery. They are also the reason why video engineer and editor Jason Harvey-who in the past several years has pumped up the visual volume for such stadium-packing performers as Cher, Bon Jovi, Pink and Madonna-is in such great demand.
Harvey is currently on the road with Christina Aguilera’s Back to Basics tour, a multi-costumed production featuring the singer, the 12-piece Movement Orchestra, eight dancers, various backup singers and three screens of video. Harvey creates his stylized backdrops for Aguilera, as he did for Madonna’s sold-out Confessions tour last year, by streaming and controlling pre-edited video, still images and live concert footage into multi-screen templates he made with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects on two HP-based editing systems. On the road, he says, he can easily adjust his cues for timing, costume or song changes on the fly.

We reached Harvey, the founder of the UK-based video production service Short and Spikey, just before he left for Asia and the last two-month leg of the tour. He talked about the benefits of working in real time, his search for the perfect codec and why the advent of Adobe CS3 and AJA’s new Mac-based 2K cards may just make him a Mac convert.

SM: How does your current suite differ from the one you had on Madonna’s Confessions tour last year?

JASON HARVEY: On this show, we’re using AJA’s XENA 2K board rather than the XENA LS board. Christina’s show is also in standard def, but my main system is working off the 2K card. We actually were sent the 2K card about halfway through the Madonna tour but we didn’t have the breakout box and the cables, so I couldn’t hook it up right away. But we got hooked up eventually, when we were in Europe, and we ended up using the card to do a load of work at the end of Madonna’s tour. When we started with Christina, I took the edit suite with me again because I didn’t know what requirements we were going to have on that show. The content, as on the Madonna show, was being created by a third party, happily, the same company I’d worked with on the Madonna tour and also on Pink’s tour a few years before; we had a terrific working relationship already. They delivered everything almost perfectly, apart from a few clips and bits and pieces that had to be edited on site. We were in Sheffield, in England, and they were in Los Angeles, so obviously we couldn’t wait for changes to come over to us. We ended up doing very, very small tweaks to their work.

Why do you need such a robust system for just playback?

For flexibility, really. For example, one day, production came to me and said, “We haven’t made a piece up for this particular song. Can you put something together and get it back to us for tomorrow night’s show?” I worked something up on my laptop, transferred it over to the big system, and then rendered it all out with time to spare for the next night’s performance. With live shows like this, we need to be able to do those sorts of things on the fly and pull things out of the bag, basically. The show must go on and it must go on schedule. We can’t be going off into the studio miles away.

How are the artistic demands of this tour different from the Confessions tour?

Well, they are certainly not as strained as they were on the Madonna tour. You have to understand that the Madonna show was two and half hours long and probably 85-90% of the show had visuals on nine screens. The demand for actually delivering so much content, as well as the artist being involved in every single element of that, was much higher than it is on Christina’s show, which is only an hour and a half long and features only three screens of video playback. In actual workload or playback requirements, Christina’s is much less. But it’s not that it’s less challenging. It’s a different beast. Madonna’s tour was really the biggest show anybody’s seen for a long while and it was a challenge to put it all back together. We had to get it down to a certain number of streams of video so we could at least control it. On this tour, we have three channels of playback so we’re actually able to put it out there without distorting anything. We’re still using three streams of video, an A, and a B, and a C, left to right, but what we’re able to do now is put pixel for pixel quality up on those screens. What we see on our screens on the system is, pixel for pixel, what the audience sees on the screens on stage. The quality of the video is better. This is because we’re not having to actually go to nine sources. Back on Madonna, we’d wanted to go HD, to improve the image, but our work schedules and client, being Madonna herself, wouldn’t allow us to have the extra time and flexibility we needed to ramp up to HD. There were so many changes to the project, both pre- and mid-tour, that we had to pull the project into SD purely to keep our workflow on schedule for opening night. For the Christina tour, they actually put together all the main content with a studio in Los Angeles ahead of time. We did two pieces during rehearsals, which were very simple for us to do. One was a star background and another was a steel frame that wasn’t in the original pitch but which came up as a concept once they got into rehearsals. Basically, they didn’t want too many black holes on stage, so we filled them in with video. The 2K is, again, helping us with these kinds of things, basically letting us handle any format from a still on up to an HD source and work with it all in real time. It also helps us in emergencies. A couple of tapes sent to us had glitches-fades weren’t in the right place and a couple of stills had flaws, simple things you’d deal with daily in an edit suite. But we just didn’t have time to send those back to LA so they could go back into the masters. We needed a powerful system to let us fix things on tour.

Did you get your masters on tape or hard drive?

We worked with all tape on this show. Because the actual product had been locked down in LA prior to rehearsals, the masters came to us on DigiBeta. The only changes usually happen when the artist says something like, “Can I extend that last clip by ten seconds so I can make a costume change?” Well, we obviously can’t freeze it, so we need the on-site edit suite to put it back into After Effects and extend the length, all in a matter of a few hours. Unfortunately, the edit suite won’t be going with us to Southeast Asia due to weight restrictions. Carrying 600 hundred pounds of equipment around that you may not use is a bit of a budget breaker, especially in air cargo. We’ve been on tour for seven months, however, so the show is locked down to the main hard drives that control it. We’ve got A and B versions of some recent changes, in fact, so we can call up either one off the computer system. If they need anything new, then I’m going to have to find an edit suite wherever I am or get the LA studio to do something fast and overnight it. We’ve worked very closely with production to be as accommodating as possible with our weight limits. But obviously it’s not just video. The sound department has to leave behind unnecessary cable that they can just as easily rent locally for a lot less than it would cost to ship it via jumbo jet around the world. I may have to get back to the suite eventually if the company creating a DVD of the show wants some of our final rushes as masters, which means I’d have to rescale the originals up to an HD master for them.

Are you using Adobe Production Studio CS3 at all on this tour?

I am, but I haven’t been using it with the 2K card because the drivers weren’t available yet when we started the tour. Also, when you’re dealing with anything live, it’s a bit too risky to have a beta version of software running in your machine. I’m running the beta version of CS3 on the 8200 HP system, running the LS card. Then I’m running CS2 with the 2K card. I actually took that under advice from Adobe and AJA-they didn’t want any glitches riding on their shoulders, either! I don’t mind destroying one machine, but destroying both of our machines would be like driving a car, running out of fuel and having four flat tires.

Both the Madonna and Christina Aguilera tours were produced on PC-based systems. Are you completely PC based at Short and Spikey?

I’ve actually just switched over to the Mac, and that was purely because of CS3. I’m running a MacBook Pro with a dual-boot system, so I can run both CS3 on the Mac and PC, and I’m finding both platforms to be incredibly stable at the moment. At the moment, the PC side is giving us a slight advantage because we can work uncompressed. There is also a great deal more plug-ins available. I’ve been hearing lately that a lot of those manufacturers are thinking about writing those plugs for the Mac side. When Adobe stopped supporting the Mac, some developers jumped ship and have since been working exclusively on the PC side. That’s why we stayed on the PC side all these years. I guess you could say I’m kind of in a halfway house about it at the moment: I like my PC for certain things because there are things that work incredibly well. But there are other things on the Mac that work incredibly well. Some mornings I’m all Mac and afternoons I’m all PC.

Which system will you pick for your next gig?

It will come down to what’s the fastest and most reliable. I’m waiting to hear right now about some exciting things coming up for next year and I’ll see what the workflow and drag on resources is going to be and make a decision then if we go for a PC-based system or a Mac-based one. I have the advantage of software and hardware suppliers, like Adobe and AJA, being able to offer both of those. The advantage at the moment is swinging me toward the Mac because I can actually do a dual-boot system on a G5 with an AJA card in there and boot it as a Mac; the AJA card will know it’s a Mac. When I boot it as a PC, it thinks it’s talking to the PC. For me, I couldn’t get any happier about a system like that. Adobe supports me on both formats now, so that’s a huge plus, and I can pick and choose which format I need to work on, depending on my needs. I think the biggest thing that’s going to push me one way or another is when we can get DVCPRO HD codecs approved for CS3 on a PC or a Mac. That’s really where the decision break is going to come in HD. At the moment, we obviously have to work uncompressed, which is very expensive, not to mention extremely taxing on my system. I run a 1.6 TB system on SCSI, on the road-very big, very pricey, very heavy, very power hungry.

Every editor or designer I speak to is complaining about storage: how big our computers have to be and what codecs we need to keep those files at top quality without hogging real estate. I also don’t want to pay for a codec on a PC and then find out in three months time that this is going to be standard and bundled with a piece of software I also need. The CineForm codec is the only thing out there at the moment but with the dual-boot on my PC, it’s in conflict with certain bits of software on my system. There’s also still an awful lot of processing that has to be done after you convert everything. I’m still not convinced that I want to sit there and render stuff. In my environment, I need to be able to push the button, in real time. If you’re doing a lot of rushes, it’s just infuriating to sit around and wait for things to render, unless it’s a proper piece of animation. So we’re sitting back and waiting at the moment to see if Adobe can get a license back from Apple, which obviously still wants to sell Final Cut Pro. The only reason to go to Final Cut for me, then, is that codec.

What about Dynamic Link? Do you use it?
Absolutely-we use it all the time. That’s Adobe’s advantage over Final Cut, in my opinion. Ever since I first saw Dynamic Link, I’ve used it. I’ve really pushed its limits, too, and been pleasantly surprised at how fast it is. I’ve run it with beta versions of software, too, and it works 100% of the time. If you’re a creative individual or company, and you’re using it just to test ideas with somebody, like we do, it’s invaluable. The bulk of our work involves a lot of previs-can we do this, what does it look like, what have we created here?! I need to know if it will work or look completely awful on the big screen, and I’m able to do that in real time, using Dynamic Link to jump backwards and forwards between After Effects and Premiere and Photoshop. For me, as a director and designer, I couldn’t ask for a better workflow. And if they added a kind of time machine feature that let me squeeze more work into a 24-hour day, then I wouldn’t need anything else.