The Discovery Channel’s Go For It series deals with extreme activities for the urban adventurer, and the volume of material produced for the show means the post-production process mirrors the fast-paced action depicted on-screen.

The show’s audio and video post teams had the challenge of preparing 100 episodes of field and in-studio segments, turning out massive amounts of video within tight time lines and versioning for international markets to allow foreign broadcasters increased flexibility with the end product.

The series adventures with studio support segments.

One hundred feature items were shot in 13 countries from April to July.

Post-production got underway in May and wrapped recently. The show premiered on Discovery in late September.

The series is coproduced by Discovery u.s. and in the new year will be fed to about 15 international affiliates of Discovery Communications International.

‘The fact that the show was going to be distributed internationally set the stage for how we needed to tackle the post-production,’ says senior editor Matthew Sherman.

In versioning for various markets, ‘We ended up giving them eight tracks of audio splits, which is more typical of a short film,’ says senior audio post engineer Michael Nunan. ‘We provided them with stems on a multitrack digital tape, allowing them to reconstitute a mix.’

The show was recorded in the field with a standard camera and sound crew, with resultant material digitized into an Avid. After clips were identified and captured into the Avid at low resolution, the core segments were edited over about three days for each and then audio was mixed.

Once approval was set for video layout, all audio was sent digitally to a ProTools suite set up at Discovery, connected by Ethernet to the Avid suite.

Sherman and Nunan used Avid’s Open Media Framework, which allowed all audio captured originally, plus all music, effects, etc., to be sent to ProTools in one large file transfer, and, from the audio editor standpoint, to allow elements to be broken down almost exactly the way the picture editor had seen them.

Session files were also sent, so audio post had access to elements like cuts and dissolves.

‘It allowed us flexibility,’ says Sherman. ‘We were never in the position of saying, ‘Gee, I wish I had some ambiance.’ The first time the material was digitized was the last time; first-generation audio was essentially delivered throughout by way of this production process.’

Without visiting an edit suite to cut any material, the shows were finished directly out of Avid AVR 71 and AVR 75 resolutions.

Sherman and Nunan say the synergies between the audio and video departments created by the process save huge amounts of time on a project this size as well as eliminate guesswork and maintain the first-generation quality of the material.