What do 8 Sony EX3 cameras, 8 Mac laptops, 20 Flip Ultra HDs, 500 hours of footage and a reality show pilot have in common? An Archive Station.

Last summer, producer David Sutcliffe took a television production crew and 20 other willing participants to a ranch in Laurel Springs, California, to tape a grueling, six-day group therapy session based on the Core Energetics method. The result is a reality show-cum-documentary pilot with which Sutcliffe, an actor known for his work on CSI and The Gilmore Girls, has an unusually personal connection. He says he was transformed by the therapy and as a producer, felt that the method lent itself to the reality show formula of trial and transformation. “The (Core Energetics) work is very dramatic,” he says, producing “very cathartic emotions.” He is currently working with an editor to figure out the episode format while he looks for a home for the series.
Brought into the project by DP Jesse Feldman, Hanton’s long-time friend, DIT Emile Hanton supervised production during the shoot, and with the help of reseller and integrator Media Distributors, came up with an on-set workflow that allowed the crew to loop in multiple cameras and hours upon hours of footage-more than 500 hours in all. Eight main Sony PMW-EX3 cameras captured the primary action and 20 Flip Ultra HD cameras, given to each participant to record their innermost thoughts in any way they saw fit, recorded everything else.

So how exactly do you manage all that footage without disrupting the natural flow of the sessions themselves? Hanton says Media Distributors’ Archive Station, a turn-key solution created for them, instantly archived and backed up to a SAN and LTO drives. The company’s Constellation VCM, built into the single train case-contained system designed by Media Distributors’ Nathan Adams, let Hanton and the crew search, retrieve, back-up and archive all the footage that was downloaded from the cameras onto eight Mac laptops.

“The Archive Station, essentially, with its 12 TB RAID, networked the laptops via Gigabit Ethernet and fiber to a Facilis 24D SAN,” says Hanton. “The MacPro in the system handled on-set editing and file conversion. After we backed up the original card structure, we transcoded everything to editable QuickTime, so it was ready to go when editorial needed it. Overnight, the day’s material would get backed up to LTO tape automatically.”

“There is no linear story, per se, to this show,” adds Hanton. “There is no cash prize at the end. It is about the emotional struggles and personal discoveries of these people. David, the director, and Jesse, the DP, were looking at possibly trying to get the Sony EX3 cameras into the participants’ rooms, and then someone brought up the idea of the Flip cameras as a great alternative to just a traditional, sit-down confession-cam. It also solved the problem of trying to get cameras in the rooms of these participants, without having to worry about all the wiring that goes along with it. They wanted to move beyond the sweeping camera moves and the calculated, big reality show style that has been seen so much.”

The addition of the Flip cameras proved invaluable, although the format added another layer of technical hurdles. “We knew from the start that those clips were going to look different than the EX3 footage,” says Hanton. “But that was more of a benefit than anything else, because we wanted to do more than the usual confession-cam shots, even though on other reality shows, you often get a DV format to signify the shift to the one-on-one confessional. The fact that it was a lower-quality compression was fine. We were surprised, however, at what we ended up with.”

What they got was a broad range of footage with very personal, diary-like video entries. “The material that we got was absolutely incredible,” he says. “And we know that’s because our subjects were freed from any kind of schedule or requirement, like ‘Go to this particular room and tape your confession.’ We were worried that if we had only a few confession cameras, with 20 participants, some might overlap-we’d introduce another stressor. With the pocketsize Flip cameras, they could take them anywhere they wanted to on the entire campus, a beautiful ranch near Santa Barbara. Instead of the same shot of everyone sitting in a chair with a camera, we got people to open up for 30 minutes to an hour, sitting in a secluded but often beautiful spot, opening up about everything that they were going through during the process and in their lives. The footage just adds such a personal dimension to the project.”

The Flip cameras had four dedicated laptops for downloading and transcoding footage, says Hanton. “We decided to convert all the Flip video, through Apple Compressor, to ProRes. We knew that ProRes would be our final form, where we’d do color correction. So it made sense to do this right away. When they came back from the participants, we’d just plug in the USB and download over GigE to the RAID and the NAS. We processed about 200 GB, or 50- 75 hours of footage. They also served as gifts to the participants, so they took them home with them. Some of them are still recording, after the fact, and David wants to use as much of that as he can.”

Wireless transmission was another way the crew kept its footprint on set to a minimum. “On the first day, we had all of our cameras rolling on the participants arriving,” Hanton says. “We spent four days on the group therapy sessions themselves, with a morning session and an evening session, each three hours long. We only had three camera operators in the room at one time to film the sessions. We’d rotate out the operators every 45 minutes. Since we knew we’d be juggling cameras, and we wanted everyone, including the subjects, to be able to move freely, we settled on the IDX CAM-WAVE to capture the full HD signal, via HD-SDI out, from the EX3s wirelessly in our video village. This also let David and Jesse view it in full HD.”

If he has to name the most challenging part of the project, Hanton says it was preproduction. “How quick can we turn around cards, and how fast can we download footage, how many laptops do we need-doing the leg work up front to figure these questions out was the hardest part. Once we got the system in place, however, it was flawless. It was so fast, in fact, that I realized in the end that we could probably have done with 15 less cards because we turned things around so quickly. On set, I manage everything myself, so I couldn’t afford for the workflow to break down. Nathan and everybody at Media Distributors took the time to dial up the system before we got to the shoot, and it made all the difference.”