Broadway Video Enterprises:
Saturday Night (Remastered)
People lucky enough to have watched the original broadcasts of “Saturday Night Live,” which premiered on Saturday, October 11, 1975, in Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center, insist that you had to be there to fully appreciate the transformative effects of faux newscasts, land sharks, and live, edgy music on the zeitgeist. No doubt they’re right.
But if you weren’t there and wish you had been — or if you were and you’re compelled to go back — a new eight-DVD boxed set, “SNL: The Complete First Season,” which makes available for viewing for the first time since 1975 all 24 episodes in their original 90-minute format, will punch your ticket.
Time-shifting the zeitgeist was precisely what SNL creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels had in mind when he charged his production company, Broadway Video Enterprises, with the task of transporting contemporary audiences back to 1975. That meant including every sketch and music performance, gaffes included, from a year when Michaels admits he and the cast were simply making it up as they went along.
But in fact the collection works as more than a digital way-back machine. Absent actual commercials and bumpers (the commercial parodies, of course, are all included), the set allows for an arguably cleaner experience of run-on classic SNL bits (Samurai Hotel, the Bees, Weekend Update) and of the run-away comedic development of the original Not Ready For Primetime Players (Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, and Gilda Radner).
If chronology is not your preferred order of experience, you can use the set’s comprehensive menus to sample out-of-sequence bits, monologues by guest hosts such as George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, and Rob Reiner, and live musical performances by Simon & Garfunkel, Joe Cocker, ABBA, Patti Smith, and Randy Newman.
Wait and Hurry Up
Given the show’s iconic status and legendary original cast, the obvious question about the collection is what took so long? “We have long wanted to release the first season of ‘Saturday Night Live’ as a complete and full set, but there are many factors that take time to resolve, like getting all of the music clearances,” says Britta von Schoeler, Broadway Video Enterprises’ senior vice president and general manager.
After a 32-year wrangle for music clearances, Broadway’s DVD production team was given only six weeks to get the collection to market in time for the Christmas buying season. Dirk Van Dall, general manager of Broadway Video Digital Media Services explains that he could see only one way to make that happen: “We did the entire process using Macs running Final Cut Pro, Shake, Final Touch, and DVD Studio Pro, all SAN-based.”
Show Lead
In creating the DVD set, Broadway inherited a key production advantage from recent Mac-based changes to the SNL production workflow. Adam Nicely, a technical consultant at SNL, explains how a decision to take the show to HD paved the way for Broadway’s just-in-time DVD development. “This is the second season we’ve been broadcasting in high def,” he says. “Apple was instrumental in helping us get the right equipment to carry over our established SD workflow.”
The equipment included Xserves, HD capture cards, Xsan, and Xserve RAIDs. “When we built out our production SAN to record HD, we also added a pretty massive array of Apple Xserve RAIDs to store our 30-year SD archive, which are all of our shows digitized in 10-bit uncompressed,” he says.
Dash to Disc
Broadway used SNL’s digital archive to jumpstart its DVD production. “To get these shows reformatted and authored for DVD in such a short time frame was difficult, but because we were sitting on this already digitized uncompressed archive we were halfway there,” says Mark Yates, president of Broadway’s Video Services Group.
Broadway further leveraged its workflow advantage by staying tapeless throughout production, moving the high-quality digital footage from SNL’s SAN to its own and back as necessary. The SAN-based exchanges allowed the editors to reformat, mix, and restore without worrying about time-consuming media conversions.
Working digital was also important because of the amount of material being processed — 24 ninety-minute uncompressed shows, not counting ancillary materials, or about 150 terabytes of data. “This massive amount of data could only be stored on a SAN,” says Yates. “You couldn’t have worked locally on any of these machines.”
This SAN-based round robin between SNL and Broadway accelerated every phase of the production workflow. At a primary Final Cut Pro edit station, producers reformatted the footage, removing commercial breaks and cleaning up transitions. Concurrently, other editors used Shake and Final Cut Pro to clean up hits (video or audio dropouts, as well as anomalies caused by old television tape machines) and color correct. Cleaned files were passed through the SAN to other editors who, working in DVD Studio Pro, built the menus and art. Finished DVD Studio projects were passed back to Nicely’s team at SNL for MPEG compression, then back onto Broadway’s SAN for final DLT creation (data tapes required for DVD replication).
Smooth Delivery
Despite the short schedule, Broadway was able to ship their boxed set on time. Mark Yates credits the SAN-based integration. “It was wonderful to know that we could build these rooms quickly and there would not be any issues passing the media back and forth or hours wasted importing, loading, transcoding,” he says. “The team could focus on their task at hand and not media management.”
Given the largely untapped digital archive at hand at SNL and a seamless digital production in place at Broadway, it is unlikely that fans of SNL will wait another 30 years for SNL: Season 2. In fact, Broadway says it hopes to ship that disc this year.
In the meantime, Yates is happy to stand by the team’s results in season one. “We felt a little like historians,” he says. “We were finally getting to preserve this piece of American history, or at least American entertainment history, and we felt entrusted with that and excited to be able to do it. And I think we served it well.”
