Adam Sèbire: The Other Woman

In 2008, two of Australia’s music icons – James Morrison and Deni Hines – joined forces in an Australian tour (The Other Woman) that paid tribute to some of the greatest jazz, blues and soul legends, including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone. The tour was bound to be a hit – and it was – so James commissioned fellow musician turned video producer Adam Sèbire to produce a companion DVD to the tour’s CD.

Tight budget, toght deadlines
Faced with a relatively modest budget, Adam equipped three camera operators with Sony XDCAM PMW-EX1 cameras and set them to work to capture every nuance of the tour’s Wollongong gig. For himself, the equipment on site was a MacBook Pro running Final Cut Studio (FCS).

A key advantage of using the Sony camera in conjunction with the MacBook Pro and Final Cut Studio solution is that the cameras utilise dual ExpressCard/34-compatible SxS PRO memory cards, each capable of recording up to 70 minutes of HD footage. Importantly, the 17-inch MacBook Pro features an ExpressCard/34 slot, which proved crucial during the video capture process. Adam explains: “As soon as a camera operator filled one card, the card was rushed over to me and the content ingested straight into Final Cut Studio.

“What made it all feasible is the fact that Final Cut can ingest the footage and convert it at up to more than five times real time,” Adam continues. “This meant that the operators were able to shoot continuous footage without a break and provide me with a massive amount of footage that I could use to create the final video. Essentially, it’s making maximum use of available resources.”

Even during the flight
With the content captured and edited, there was still the requirement to author the DVD. The problem, though, was that Adam had only two days before he was due to fly out to Germany to attend to a project that would last several months. In preparation for what was to be a clear demonstration of the freedom now afforded video production professionals by Final Cut Studio, Adam devoted those two days to fine tuning the content and rendering it for MPEG2 DVD format. Finally, via a VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection, he ensured that the project’s content on his own MacBook Pro was an exact duplicate of that on James’.

While most passengers took the chance to relax on the trip from Sydney to Munich, Adam took full advantage of the opportunity to create the DVD’s interface. Using DVD Studio Pro on his MacBook Pro, he authored and tested the entire project. Long before the plane set down at Munich Airport, the interface and menus had been created, along with transitional segue effects between menus and content/assets.

“One of the main advantages of DVD Studio, actually the entire suite of Final Cut Studio applications,
for that matter, is the ability to develop projects without the added complexity of having to use a programming or scripting language,” Adam says. “For this particular project, it meant I was able to achieve during the course of the flight, what might otherwise have taken days.”

Once landed and settled into his hotel room, Adam then shared the DVD Studio Pro files with James via iDisk – Apple’s cloud storage offered through MobileMe – and established a Screen Sharing session with James’ computer in Australia. “I had already ensured that the content on my MacBook Pro was exactly the same as was on James’,” he explains,
“so once the DVD Studio Pro files were downloaded to that computer, I was able to prepare the project and get it ready for creating the master.”

Yet like virtually any project and regardless of the attention to detail, Adam found himself confronted with the need to effect additional changes, both to the content and interface. Again, using the Mac OS X Screen Sharing, he would make the changes directly on James’ computer, often doing so while sitting in
a Munich Internet café. “Once it was all given the approval by James, I simply asked James’ manager David to leave a dual-layered DVD in the recording studio’s Mac Pro drive overnight,” he relates. “I then set up another Screen Sharing session to format for replication and to archive the HD video master to Apple’s ProRes 422 codec in case they decide to release in High Definition one day. That’s the sort
of flexibility you can only get with Apple and Final Cut Studio.”