Television series editors say that storage space problems have set the craft back a decade, but the quality is ultimately worth the hassle.

‘In some ways, HD editing has set us back 10 years,’ says Deborah Osborne, post-production manager for Joe Media Group in Calgary.

The reason is that today’s nonlinear editing systems generally do not have enough storage capacity to work with long-form HD programming. The problem is reminiscent of NLEs 10 years ago that didn’t have enough disk space to handle NTSC programs.

The result is that many post producers must compress HD footage substantially so that it can be manipulated by their offline editing stations and networks, Osborne says. Only after the final cut has been locked can they make an HD version from tape in an online suite. It’s just like 1998 all over again.

Faced with this problem, Omni Film Productions of Vancouver is shooting CTV’s Robson Arms in HD, then digitizing footage at SD resolution into its Avid systems.

‘We do this because our editing suite would get bogged down by the huge data transfer requirements of HD,’ says Brian Hamilton, Robson Arms’ producer/co-executive producer.

‘We also don’t have the storage capacity to hold all the HD footage at full resolution on disk,’ Hamilton explains. ‘So we put together the show in SD offline post first, then make a final online version using the original HD master tapes.’

Toronto’s Barna-Alper Productions and Defiant Entertainment use a similar approach for editing Global’s HD sitcom ‘da Kink in My Hair.

‘We have to dub the HD footage to SD Beta, then ingest that video into our Avid NLE to put the show together,’ says ‘da Kink editor Kerry Davies. ‘At a 15:1s compression rate, this makes it possible for our system to edit it without running out of disk space, or suffering data overloads.’

Of course, having to down-convert from HD to SD, and then go back up from SD to HD, adds steps. ‘This in itself is not a bad thing, given the quality of video you can produce in HD,’ says Joe Media’s Osborne. ‘But it does add extra time to the process, and you have to plan for that extra time when laying out your workflow.’

Omni’s Hamilton has concerns about having to down-convert HD footage. ‘The potential challenge with editing in this manner is that you can miss out on details in SD that only show up when you make the HD version in an online edit suite,’ he says.

Adds Osborne: ‘When editing in SD, you must ensure that your editors are using wide-screen monitors. They have to see everything that is going to be seen in HD when they are selecting shots and making cuts.’

Both say the sheer quality of HD programming does justify the editing headaches.

Yet for feature film directors such as Amal’s Richie Mehta, the HD editing process is far superior to what they are accustomed to doing in film.

‘Poor Man’s Productions shot Amal in HD using a Panasonic [AJ-HDX900], then dubbed the footage over immediately onto a series of high-capacity external disk drives that we brought to India,’ Mehta explains. Stuart McIntyre was the film’s editor.

‘This worked extremely well, because we were able to capture the hustle and bustle of urban Indian life with a minimal crew; sometimes it was just the DOP and me,’ explains Mehta. ‘Not only did HD allow us to see our dailies fast, but back at the post house, we found it easy to edit the movie using Final Cut Pro. Thanks to the footage being on external hard drives, we had no problems plugging it into our editing system and working with it. We never had any storage issues at all.’

Meanwhile, French-language sports specialty RDS is using an Avid Symphony Nitris to finish HD content, and is extremely happy with the results.

‘Most of our actual HD content comes from outside providers in the form of live sporting events,’ explains Daniel Bienvenue, RDS’ director of engineering and operations.

‘What HD content we produce in-house is for commercials and bumpers, so our NLE system can handle it,’ Bienvenue continues, noting he also likes finishing in HD because ‘you can add multiple layers on top of the original image without losing detail or clarity. As well, you don’t have to try to improve the video as you do with SD video, because HD video is already very high quality.’

Even at those production houses where SD down-conversion is unavoidable, producers aren’t unhappy about working in HD in general. The extra picture quality the technology delivers, and the resulting enhancement of the content appears to make all the extra hassle worthwhile.

‘Except for the down- and up-conversion that editing HD requires, we’ve been able to use the same workflow for Robson Arms that we did with SD in our first season,’ says Hamilton. ‘This has made it easier for us to upgrade to this new format.’

Nonetheless, producers would like to see NLE technology catch up to the demands of long-form HD program editing as soon as possible. Until that happens, they will have to cope with the kinds of conversion problems that they thought had been banished years ago, with the advent of affordable multi-gigabyte hard drives.