Bluefoot Entertainment specializes in features and teases, making them ideally-suited to editing ESPN’s hip, current sports variety show, E:60. Matt McCormick, the main DS editor, shares their high-speed workflow reliant on an Avid Unity Media set-up.

What kind of Avid system do you have and how long have you had it?

We’ve had our Avid Unity Media system for about a year and a half. We have 12 TB all together. We have three Avid DS systems up and running and all are on the latest version 10.1. They’re all tied into that one 12TB Avid Unity system. Of the 12 TB, we leave about 2 TB for back-up. We also use Digidesign Pro Tools systems for audio.

How did you get into sports editing? And how did Bluefoot start working on E:60?

I used to work at ESPN myself and we’ve been doing ESPN work at Bluefoot for years before starting E:60. Features and teases are Bluefoot’s strong suit and E:60 is a feature driven show. We work with Andy Tennant, the executive producer, and Robert Abbott, the coordinating producer. They like our suites because we have the space for a group to consult and the flexibility of editors who can and will work extended hours. You can’t go anywhere and have an editor camp out for 24hrs to make deadline.

Can you describe your workflow on E:60?

First, I’ll tell you a bit about the show. E:60 is a 60-minute sports show composed of about five feature segments, such as athlete profiles and investigative reports. It has a great graphics package, created by nailgun, and driving music, composed by Manmade. I would say the graphics and music really help dictate the look and feel of the show.

E:60 is a full end-to-end Avid workflow. The individual feature pieces are cut using Avid Media Composer or Avid Symphony systems at other post houses in the area, including ESPN itself. These facilities might edit and produce at least two of the pieces per show and maybe more. The show airs Tuesday at 7pm, so every Monday at 9am we gather all of the individual components here at Bluefoot and start compositing the show.

When the show started in the fall of 2007, we used to have three rooms devoted to E60: the main room for show composite, another for bumps and teases and a third for the lower third or font sequence. As the latter two rooms were completing what they needed to do, we would input those pieces into the main sequence. Because the media was all on the Avid Unity system, we could just input that sequence into our composite project and splice it right into the timeline.

That seems like working on a very tight schedule!

It is! For the first 10 or so shows, the font room was just utilized for a few hours, but the other two were around the clock. Tim Horgan, Bluefoot’s founder and editor, and I would be here in the two rooms for 24 hours straight. We’d get here Monday at 9am and leave Tuesday at 9am. More recently, the show has really been buttoned down. ESPN is able to do the bumps and teases in-house so we get that content on a tape now. So currently, when we’re just working on the composite, we can function with one room, and only one editor, for 15 to 24 hrs. So our lives have become somewhat normal again.

What’s the greatest advantage of the Avid Unity set-up?

One of the great things about the Avid Unity system is that we’re able to set aside space on our drives to save our music, graphics and sound effects, so that we can share from room to room. In the past we would save these on our own computers. Every week as the show comes up, I know I have the parts I need to build the show and build it quickly. So, the support’s still there when we need it. And it was definitely huge initially to be able to have 3 rooms going at once.

What’s your policy for backing up media?

It’s a judgment call, if we’re dealing with a project we’re going to work with long-term, we’ll back up most of that media. Otherwise, if we’re editing a project that’s in and out in a day, we have a separate drive partition on the Unity system that is not assigned to backup media.

How much do you work on the upkeep and maintenance of the Avid system?

I do the majority of the purging of the media. Mainly, I take it upon myself to see that projects are output and backed up to tape. It’s easy enough to maintain where I can spend a few hours a week checking in on it…just not on Mondays.

Bluefoot Entertainment
977 Farmington Ave., Suite 208
West Hartford, CT 06107
www.bluefoot.tv