Pow! Pix is making its sixth trip to the Olympics. This year they qualified for the gymnastics event, creating a variety of features, teasers and highlight packages to roll into the live broadcasts, and to re-cut footage from the events if they are not broadcast live. In order to handle the tight turnarounds and loads of HD footage, Pow! Pix bought three new Avid Symphony Nitris DX systems.

Battling jet lag and a lot of prep work, Bob Barzyk, owner of Pow Pix, found the time to email us about the challenges of the shoot and their solutions for delivering top quality programming, in HD, under a tight time crunch while the whole world is watching.

What exactly are your responsibilities on this project? Editorial and graphics?

Our primary mission is to create the features, teases and highlight packages that roll into the show. There are times that we may also need to re-cut segments if the event is broadcast at a later time and not live. In that case, we’ll digitize up to four cameras from a clean line program feed and re-cut the segments in multi-cam mode. The additional camera feeds help us pull up segments by inserting cut-aways that help cover up the time shifting edit.

What are the requirements for the shoot?

NBC required that we could easily handle various HD formats and not require time to render the HD files. The gymnastics events will be shot on Sony XDCAM and we’ll ingest that footage into five Avid Systems ‘ sharing the media on 16TB of Avid Unity (5.1) storage.

At the gymnastics venue in Beijing, we’re connecting three Symphony Nitris DX’s for the heavy editing and finishing of the gymnastic packages, two Avid Media Composer Adrenaline HD systems primarily for digitizing and three more Adrenaline’s for the producers to use in the back of the three Avid Symphony edit rooms.

The producers will use their systems to collect and organize sound bites by making
rough-cut time lines for the editor to use. They can also search for footage, bring in
music – things that will ultimately save the editor from having to do. No one likes to
scroll through hours and hours of footage looking for that shot the producer thinks
is on a reel somewhere. Now, they can do these kinds of things while the editor is
working on something else or fine-tuning their work, which will really speed up the process and ultimately make a better product in the end.

How soon after the live event/interview does this go to broadcast? What camera are they recording on, and what are they capturing on (tape or hard drive)?

Shooting happens pretty much all day, every day for two weeks. We’re required to take the footage as it comes in and create packages [for broadcast] in anything from hours to 1-2 days, depending on the piece.

The systems with breakout boxes are connected to our own internal HD-SDI and RS-422 router which, in turn, is connected to four XDCAM decks, two HDCAM decks, one Varicam deck and an outboard CPU that functions as a Frame Rate Converter (FRC) for all the off-speed footage shot on Varicam. Our router is then connected to external router feeds to the truck and the voiceover booth. We can bring in five sources (such as Program, individual cameras and EVS replay systems) and send back to the truck any one of our five Avids in case playback from an Avid room directly to air becomes necessary. Any one of the three Symphony Nitris DX rooms can record
a voice-over to picture with talk-back with the producer.

Are you ingesting to a certain codec?

All footage is saved on our Unity 5.1 with the expanded XT chassis for a total of 16TB’s.
Each system is connected via fiber and we’ll be using the same standard as NBC –
Avid DNxHD120, the equivalent to Avid DNxHD145 in NTSC. We’re working in 1080i 50 while in Beijing.

Working with Avid DNxHD allows us to get a true sense of the image quality we’re working with, without having to completely overhaul storage requirements because the file sizes are equivalent to SD.

What are you outputting to?
We’ll be outputting to HDCAM and XDCAM as well as EVS using transfer manager
through our gigabit Ethernet switch.

Why did you feel the need to upgrade to the new Symphony Nitris DX configuration? What features are in the new version that you needed for this shoot?

These systems are just blazing fast and very stable from what we have seen so far. While we’re on the ground in Beijing, there is no room for error. We needed a solution that would allow us to get the media into the system, and start cutting right after the competition ends. We love the fact that the new Symphony Nitris DX has no render time – it’s a huge time saving and allows us to get these HD packages to air much more quickly. We’re also excited about the ability to create new looks and feels to the packages that will air. The color correction tools in Symphony Nitris will be a huge benefit as well.

Our decision to upgrade to the Symphony Nitris systems for Beijing was mainly driven by the time savings associated with not having to render and the fact that these systems perform like the old workhorse Meridien systems that the industry has come to know and love. Except now, you get that same reliability, stability and speed working in HD.

What other tools are you using besides the Symphony? plug-in graphics software, etc.?

We also have a Mac on the gigabit network that has Adobe Creative Suite 3 which we use to perform special effects or type work as well as a music and sound effects server with over 50,000 sound effects that the editors can pull up using a search engine and then dragging the chosen effects into their bins. The Symphony’s are running on Macs – everything else is a PC. Sapphire 2 and Boris 5 plugins.

Is there anything else you would like to highlight about editing at the Beijing Games?

This is the sixth time Pow! Pix will be heading to the Olympics and it’s amazing to see how much the technology has evolved. The new Avid systems will definitely allow us to push even further our look and be able to try new ideas as the systems work so quickly we’re not stuck wondering if we’ll make air due to render times. Sometimes, I feel hesitant to add another layer or whatever because I’m still used to the time consequences. Then I figure, go ahead and try it, let’s see if it chokes. Nine times out of 10, it takes on the added load without any problem. I wonder if we’ll ever break the habit of rendering a sequence even though the system doesn’t ask for it!