It’s all about networking at the Sundance Film Festival. This year, more than 40,000 filmmakers, celebrities, executives, filmgoers and volunteers crowded into Park City, Utah (pop. 7,000), looking to connect with a breakout movie, a distribution deal or an excellent party in citywide venues centered on historical Main Street.

But one of the most productive festival hook-ups was consummated just above the Main Street crowds, on the third floor of a deceptively retro-looking building, where the Sundance Channel cut together “Festival Dailies,” its nightly half-hour festival news show, in a state-of-the-art postproduction facility powered by Power Mac G5 computers, Production Suite (Final Cut Pro HD, Motion, DVD Studio Pro) and Xsan.

The 11-seat editorial facility — spec’d in a few meetings in early January and built out in only 4 1/2 days (instead of the weeks typically required for similar setups) — was working faultlessly by January 24, when the first show aired.

“The look of the show is a quantum leap ahead of where these daily shows were the last time we did them. A big part of that is due to our collaboration with Apple.”

And the results, says Larry Aidem, president and CEO of Sundance Channel, were better than ever. “The look of the show is a quantum leap ahead of where these daily shows were the last time we did them,” he says. “A big part of that is due to our collaboration with Apple.”

Short Ramp

Sundance Channel producer Phil Hack, who decided to implement a workflow anchored by Final Cut Pro and Xsan, was also responsible for managing the results. “Of the producers, Robert Katz, Jerry Kupfer and myself, it sort of fell to me to be technically in charge of all this stuff,” he says.

The challenges, technical and logistical, were formidable. Besides taking feeds from a special broadcast studio set up across Main Street, where comedian/actor Jay Mohr, the series host, and actor Alan Cumming were interviewing filmmakers and celebrities, Hack’s team would also be editing footage from as many as six roaming crews, in multiple formats and aspect ratios, depending on the kind of segment being shot.

“Up front we decided to diffentiate different pieces in the show,” he says. “We wanted the filmmaker profiles to be in 16:9/24p, festival stuff in 4:3/24p, studio stuff in 16:9/30p, for a whole lot of reasons, chiefly aesthetic.”

But tougher to deal with than multiple formats was the show’s strictly delimited timeframe. “It was a really hard event to tackle to get the facility up and running so quickly, to crank out these programs day after day and to do it without any practice,” says Hack. “Usually, for a TV show like this, you’ll ramp up and have a show or two ready. For us it was, let’s get out there, the show’s got to be ready in two days.”

Cutting Logic

Although producing one of the channel’s most visible shows using new technology was daunting, Hack had front-line experience, and bottom-line logic, on his side.

Having covered the festival in 2000 on rented equipment, he was ready to try a different solution. “The last time I covered the festival, we rented piles of equipment, which was fairly expensive,” he remembers. “This time we talked to Apple. It’s a money thing, a big money thing. For the cost of renting equipment you could come pretty close to owning the systems we used at Sundance.”

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