Judi Babcock is manager of post services at Delta, BC’s Big Red Barn Post, an editing shop that specializes in episodic TV, documentaries and independent features. In this article, she weighs the pros and cons of performing offline on location with portable editing systems.

In August 2001, Big Red Barn Post began production on a new 13-part documentary series for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network called Ravens & Eagles: Haida Art, shot on location in Haida Gwaii, BC (Queen Charlotte Islands). Since the show had a very tight turnaround (first airdate of Oct. 6), it was decided to begin offline editing right on location.

Director/executive producer Jeff Bear of Urban Rez Productions brought to the project two Apple DV Final Cut Pro 2 systems, one running on an iBook, the other on a G4 400. With operational support from Matrix Video System’s Gregg Vallieres, Big Red Barn supplied an Avid Xpress DV v2 PowerPack Bundle notebook. Footage was shot on a Sony DXC-D35WSL wide-screen camera and loaded into Final Cut Pro from a portable Sony DSR-40 DV-Cam deck.

Original 16:9 field tapes were logged and edited on Final Cut Pro using a FireWire connection. On-location offline cuts were exported to the Xpress DV using CMX3600 files in order to be cleaned and prepped for online on the Avid Media Composer back at Big Red Barn.

This was the first project Big Red Barn had done using either FireWire or Final Cut Pro.

‘FireWire was handy in terms of not needing a lot of infrastructure – just one cable between the deck and computer, as opposed to a hub with BNC cables connecting the system to a deck, audio mixer, etc.,’ says Andrea Klipp, director of post-production at Big Red Barn and co-editor of Ravens with Jeff Bear. ‘What you give up for convenience does come at a bit of a price, though. One disadvantage of connecting via FireWire is that you don’t have control over the audio or video levels digitizing into the system, but unless you need to evaluate footage it’s not a huge concern in offline, since that kind of work is best dealt with in online anyway.’

Klipp’s biggest issue on location was finding enough hard-drive storage. ‘Even though we had 2 x 60GB drives, five minutes of DV-resolution footage at 5:1 ate up 1 GB of storage. Since the shooting ratio of the series was approximately 10:1, with more than one episode cutting at once, we were frequently having to dump footage to make room for more.’

While on location, the editors did encounter a few EDL problems between Final Cut Pro and the Xpress DV. There were discrepancies in the interpretation of dissolves and effects between the systems. Says Klipp: ‘We worked around the problem by creating two sequences in Final Cut Pro, one with dissolves and effects and one with cuts only. Then we created a quick spreadsheet of all transitions from the first EDL and manually added them back into the cuts-only EDL in Xpress DV. It sounds more time-consuming than it was, and it was much more cost-effective than fixing it in online.’

List management presented another challenge. Unlike with the Avid system, time code on Final Cut Pro is easily manipulated after digitizing, which could create potential problems if not caught before the online. ‘The nice thing about having both systems on location is that we could identify and fix any problems before the online took place,’ says Klipp.

As the show progressed and episodes approached the finishing stage, Klipp returned to the Barn to oversee the online process and continue cutting her shows – this time on one of our recently upgraded Avid Media Composer v10.1 Universal Offline systems. Bear continued cutting on Final Cut Pro in Haida Gwaii, e-mailing his locked-cut EDL’s back to Klipp and online editor Jordan Atkinson, who imported them into Media Composer.

‘The realtime v10.1 with Meridien hardware and uncompressed video has been a great tool,’ says Klipp. ‘The system allows us to work with our original footage in 16:9 and complete all our delivery requirements within one box, which has saved a lot of time and money.’

Keeping everything in the Avid format simplified things for Big Red Barn in-house sound mixer Ted Hamilton, who imported the OMF audio files directly from Avid into his ProTools session for the sound prep and final mix. Each show was mastered to Digital Betacam, captioned, then cloned to Betacam SX for network delivery.

Summarizing her experiences in the field using these new DV tools, Klipp says, ‘Final Cut Pro is very intuitive and easy to learn. This makes it a great tool for a producer who wants to quickly see what they have while on location. From an editor’s perspective, on the other hand, it doesn’t have the same level of media management and detailed menus an Avid user is accustomed to. And in contrast to the Avid’s individual user profiles, which allow an editor to set up the system as they choose, multiple users on one Final Cut Pro system can be messy.’

A major downside for Final Cut Pro is that an editor who doesn’t have a solid background in EDL management can easily create a complicated scenario for the online post house to clean up.

Klipp cites the LCD screen as the only downside to the Avid Xpress DV laptop – it was a bit hard on the eyes after a long day of editing. ‘We could have added an external monitor, but the point was to keep things to a minimum. Other than any related FireWire issues, the box is solid and comes with all the usual Avid MCXpress features, offering familiarity for Avid users. And because it’s part of the Avid family, we’ve found integration between our boxes seamless.’

With the influx into the market of less expensive, easier-to-use editing software, we expect to see this scenario cropping up more and more. The best advice we can offer? Make sure you consult with your finishing post facility before deciding on which software to use, and maintain clear communication during production. Everything is do-able if the bugs can be worked out in advance.

-www.brbmg.com