The Kindest Cut. Scrubs editors Rick Blue (L) and John Michel (R) clown with cast members Zach Braff, Judy Reyes and Donald Faison.

In the NBC comedy series “Scrubs,” a wacky trio of young doctors try to cope with chaos while working together as hospital residents. Behind the scenes, life is no less hectic for the show’s creators, who produce 22 jam-packed episodes a season.

At best, TV production is an elaborate game of “Beat the Clock,” only with costly penalties when the clock wins. So last summer, between seasons two and three, the “Scrubs” producers and editors set out to relieve some of the headaches of creating so much in so short a time. As one key prescription, “Scrubs” became the first network TV series to be edited entirely using Final Cut Pro.

“Final Cut Pro came into the picture because of a need to buy more time,” says producer Randall Winston. “Typically, when things back up, they back up. Your air dates don’t change, so we’re stuck trying to find ways to get the same amount of work done in a shorter period.”

A Little Movie Every Five Days
It’s a tough task, because “Scrubs” is quite the ambitious show. Unlike a sitcom shot with multiple cameras in front of a live studio audience, “Scrubs” is filmed on location in an abandoned hospital using a single camera. “This is like making a little movie every five shooting days,” says editor John Michel, who created the editing style for the show when he and executive producer Bill Lawrence developed the pilot. “Doing a single-camera show is a lot more work,” Michel says. “We do a lot of setups. And,” he adds, “it moves very quickly.”

“There’s a push to do as many different interesting things we can,” says co-executive producer Eric Weinberg, including, he says, devices such as quick cuts, crazy special effects, speeded-up action, voice-overs and pops to fantasies and flashbacks. To put all this together, of course, requires weeks of dedicated doctoring by the editors, who dissect the footage and turn it into fast-moving 20.5-minute episodes.

The show has no laugh track, so pacing is critical, with editors using music and other devices to punch up jokes. “We create the rhythm and the pace,” says Michel. “The show is finessed so much in post, this is why it takes so long to do each episode.” Adds “Scrubs” creator and executive producer Bill Lawrence, “I’ve never worked on a TV show before where so much can be changed in editing. With the new system, we add jokes, heighten moments, create effects from scratch. It’s like an extra rewrite.”

From Online to Offline
The transition to working with Final Cut Pro started with Ramy Katrib, whose company, Digital Film Tree, used the application to online 22 “Scrubs” episodes last season.

“It was the first Top 10 network show to online on Final Cut Pro,” says Katrib. It worked out so well that the editors and producers decided to look at it a little more closely.

“Since we changed our online, we worked backwards and asked, ‘OK, well, how do we have consistency from our offline?’” says Winston. “And we discovered through that process that there were all these advantages to being on Final Cut Pro as an offline system. The bonus was that everything’s consistent through offline to online. We have a better work picture, and it’s just been very encouraging so far.”

Winston also observed that Final Cut Pro helped relieve some of the pressures and expenses of working with big post-production houses. Editor Rick Blue explains, “When we’re done with our cut, we go back to the highest quality original material, reassemble it, and color-correct it, and a computer list is generated that reflects exactly everything we did.”

In the past, the editors worked with a post-production facility to do all of this. “In television land, those are very expensive rooms to book — up to $700 an hour for certain things,” says Blue. To make matters worse, if you need to cancel a room because you’re running a little late, it’s too bad. You still have to pay for it.

But using Final Cut Pro, the editors found they could assemble the show as they went along, digitizing after the director’s cut, and then just tracking any changes. This way, they could start assembling the show on their own, working with the post-production facility primarily for color correction and the opticals.

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