Reality TV is bigger than ever. The fact that it is cheaper to produce is always appealing to the networks, and that goes double with the news that TV viewership down and the country teetering on the precipice of a recession. The genre blossomed during the Writer’s Guild strike, and it’s a staple of summer viewing. All that is good news for reality TV editors who, unlike their brethren in scripted television, haven’t missed a beat in logging footage and hours in the edit suite.

Editing reality TV has always been a special beast. With all those inexpensive digital cameras rolling, day and night, the resulting amount of footage is staggering, especially for a weekly TV show. Unlike a scripted TV show, in which editors work creatively within the parameters of a script, the reality TV show editor has to create the story or stories from amidst the chaos of a cast of characters, lots of action and, often, no obvious way to wring the maximum compelling viewing experience out of every second.

Many of those decisions lay with the editor, which has given rise to the term “preditor,” not a new species of aggressive editors hunting for prey, but a compacting of the words “producer” and “editor” to describe what they do in the edit suite.

“The trend is moving a lot towards editors crafting their episodes in a more producer-like manner versus a couple of years ago when I’d walk in and things would be more laid out for me,” said Jamie Pedroza, editor on Project Runway. “It’s really in the editors’ hands to sculpt the stories how they want to do it, in collaboration with the producers. When the footage comes to post, we get the first stab at it. That’s really exciting. That’s why I like editing reality.”

Many reality shows-Biggest Loser, Survivor, The Bachelorette, Amazing Race, Baby Borrowers, Big Brother, Dancing With the Stars, and American Idol, to name a few-choose Avid editing systems, in part because Unity allows them to string together a dozen editing bays to keep the work moving forward.

“Increasingly, I’m taking on the role of a producer because I have access to the best storytelling tool,” added H.A. Arnarson, an editor on Survivor. “Whoever has access to the keyboard of the Avid is the one who can make the story work, change the story. He has the ultimate storytelling tool with the Avid, like the word processor for the writer. I’m the guy who makes the reality in reality TV.”

But for editors (and preditors) confined to an edit bay for long days at a time, keeping up with the latest technology can be a challenge. To help that process, Avid Technology recently brought the latest news and Avid system editing features to the “League of Extraordinary Editors.”

“We network, refer jobs, and keep in touch with trends and each other,” said League co-founder Sharon Rennert, who just finished working on The Real World. We joke that because you’re in the editing room for six months working on a show, when you step out, all the software has changed. Events like this help us to stay in touch with what’s going on.”

Reality TV editors are finding themselves increasingly pressed by the need for quick turn-around. “The schedule is one challenge for reality TV editors,” said Derek McCants, editor on Big Brother. “The hours aren’t getting longer, you just need to work faster.” “The biggest challenge for me is the tighter schedules,” agreed Pedroza. “Especially when you have so many people who are fluent in Avid software and able to do it quickly. Budgets are getting lower and schedules are getting shorter but the demand for quality is just as high.”

Another pressure is the imminent transition to High Definition. Some shows have already made the transition, but the others are on the verge of doing so. Switching formats in the middle of production is a hairy proposition at any time, but given the tight and inexorable deadlines of reality TV, it’s got many editors/preditors on the edge of their seats.

“We are transitioning to HD,” said Rennert. “I haven’t personally worked on any HD shows, but we’re seeing more and more of them.”

That transition can go smoothly and easily, said Avid evangelist Matt Feury, who noted that Avid software is now running on both Apple’s Leopard OS and Microsoft’s Vista OS. He also described useful features for reality TV editors in Avid’s new HD line-up: Media Composer 3.0 software (which will incorporate users of XpressPro, which Avid will no longer manufacture); Media Composer Mojo DX; and Media Composer Nitris DX. All these products, which rolled out in June, come with a considerably lower price tag: $2,500 for Media Composer 3.0, $10,000 for Media Composer Mojo DX; and $15,000 for Media Composer Nitris DX.

“What is this new product family going to give you?” he asked rhetorically. “The big thing is increased performance. In terms of working with HD, there used to be technical limitations, especially because of its affordability in working with reality TV.”

With Avid DNxHD, an HD codec that provides good image quality at a very aggressive compression ratio, those limitations have been lifted, said Feury. Avid DNxHD offers full frame raster sampling, 8- or 10-bit sampling, and real-time HD multi-camera performance-all features that the League of Extraordinary Editors greeted with enthusiasm.

The ability to choose the native raster allows editors to get full resolution out of the Avid. “I can do seven DVC Pro streams at full resolution in live HD SDI,” said Feury. “The same thing for HDV. HDV is a long-GOP format, so you’re compressing and decompressing on the fly, but now I can get four streams of full resolution HDV playing in real-time over HD SDI.”

HDV cameras, both economical and (quasi) HD, have been popular choices for shooting reality TV programs, and editors have had to deal with some of the resultant difficulties of the format. “Now, there’s no reason to dump HDV footage to another format,” said Feury. “It doesn’t matter now what formats you’re working with. They all fit together well in the same timeline, due to the DNxHD hardware and the thin raster support we have.”

Other features germane to reality TV editors’ particular workflow issues include the ability to create an effect and then copy and paste those keyframes, over and over again for an entire clip

Open captioning is another new Avid feature that comes in handy for the reality TV editor. “You certainly see a lot of captions in reality TV because you often can’t hear people, they not mic’ed,” he says. “This allows you to do titling within the Avid in a much smarter way. You can do changes globally. Usually, reality TV sends the sequence to a service bureau. Now we can add a “sub-cap” plug-in, and add edits as the track goes along. Within the sub-category I can add and align the text, then export the data out as an STL file. You get everything to look the same and then export that as an industry standard file format. If you want to translate it into French, for example, it’ll use the timecode to break it up automatically based on the timecodes we imported.”

Perhaps the biggest hit was ScriptSync, a feature that has been in Avid systems for two years, but not often used by reality TV editors who didn’t think it was relevant to them since they’re not working with a script. They learned otherwise from Feury, who described how the transcript of an interview could be input into the system and ScriptSync will, automatically, based on phonetics, establish an association between the script and the clips.

“You used to have to click on each line of text when you heard it,” said Feury.
“That was a lot of work up front and you’d always be just a little off. Now you can highlight those takes, hit Script Synch and you’re done. The system indexes the clip by using phonetics to break down the script, and I can jump back and forth between the timeline and the script.

“I would love to use ScriptSync,” said Tod Modisett, editor on “The Bachelorette.” “The fact that it can link up phonetically makes our lives easier. I had to do this by hand in 1997, and it was a terrible pain.”

Using the example of a “Frontline” program featuring an interview with Robert Blackwell and the National Security Council, Feury showed how the transcription of the hour-long interview, with a 30-minute clip, was synched in 30-seconds. “How could you not work this way?” he said. He next demonstrated-to applause-how, to change the intonation of a word, he could search for all other instances of that word in a clip, and easily find a match.

“ScriptSync was impressive,” said Larry Druker, editor on “Secret Millionaire.” “Reality editors do get a lot of transcriptions, and that would save so much time. Sometimes I’ll spend 45 minutes looking for an inflection for a word ‘ and this guy did it in 1 minute, 2 minutes tops. That’s amazing. That’s incredibly powerful.”

In closing, Feury stressed that everything he’d demonstrated worked on a Mac or PC, as well as cross-platform. “I can take an external Firewire drive off my PC Avid at work and take it to my Mac at home and keep on working,” he said. “Things have turned around to file-based sources. It becomes how you track metadata and media sources.”

That’s great news for the latest trend in reality TV editing: working from home. “People can own their own systems, and there’s a desire to work remotely, away from the central system,” said McCants. “It becomes more of a possibility as producers become more aware that it works.”