Like This. Producer Jerry Kupfer offers segment feedback.

As important to Hack as controlling costs was controlling content with Xsan, which allowed the editors to work concurrently from the same set of media files on shared centralized storage. “The thing that really interested us was that Xsan made every room the same room,” he says. “When editors came in, if somebody was at their station, they could sit down at any open station and pull their project or any other off the Xsan. Aside from the pens and pencils on the desk, every station was the same. This really helped us.”

Also, and very much in the spirit of Sundance, Hack simply enjoyed the challenge of trying something new. “I’m a bleeding edge sort of guy,” says Hack, who was shooting HD as early as 1989. “I liked that Xsan hadn’t been out for very long, and the idea of doing a science project felt great.”

“The thing that really interested us was that Xsan made every room the same room. When editors came in, if somebody was at their station, they could sit down at any open station and pull their project or any other off the Xsan. Aside from the pens and pencils on the desk, every station was the same.”

Final Cut Pro Delivers

Hack was even more certain that Final Cut Pro HD would deliver as a primary editing tool. “Final Cut is not some new off-the-shelf piece of software,” he says. “People have been editing with it for more than 5 years.” Besides using it to drive all of the segment and online editing, Hack and his team used Final Cut Pro extensively for motion graphics and effects in interstitials and bumpers.

Running Tape

In the course of the show, time, not technology, created the biggest workflow problems. Hack was surprised by the volume of footage shot by the crews. “The biggest deviation from plan was in realizing how much stuff we were going to digitize and how long it was going to take,” he says. “So in the beginning, we were bottlenecked for maybe a day and a half because we did tons and tons of shooting up front.”

Behind the Scenes. Xsan, Xserve and Xserve RAID anchored the show’s digital workflow.

Time constrained the backend workflow as well. Several times, Hack literally ran a tape across Main Street to his satellite truck for uplink: “I didn’t want to do that, I wanted to actually string a coax cable across the street and just basically broadcast it from my facility right into the truck, but Park City wouldn’t let me.”

Wrap

Cutting through hours of tape against tight daily deadlines, Hack’s crew produced each show on time with extremely high production quality. And Hack was completely satisfied with the facility deployment.

“In this kind of situation — a news gathering situation — where there are a lot of levels of approval and running around, Xsan and Final Cut allowed us to see and work on everything at once,” he says. “Our guys were able to deliver on those systems. It was seamless. They sat down, they worked, we got pieces, we put them on the air. In that sense, it was really easy, an unparalleled success.”

Hack believes that the workflow and Xsan configuration used by the channel at Sundance would work well for other broadcasters. And he’s certain he’ll be using it again.

“If I had to do another show like this,” he says, “I would do this in a heartbeat.”