Daily Dallying
“Scrubs” is shot on Super-16 and edited in native DV. Digital Film Tree provides editors the dailies as QuickTime files on a FireWire hard drive, along with archived copies on DVD. This means that anyone who needs to view the dailies can do so on a computer or DVD player.

“They love it,” says Blue. “The cinematographer gets to see directly off of the dailies, so the quality of what he’s looking at — for content, for lighting — is so much better than what he used to see on the videotapes because he gets to see it right off the source.”

Each of the editing rooms is set up with Xserve RAID drives. The dailies are loaded into an assistant’s workstation and then copied to the editor working on that episode. If they want to work outside the office, the editors copy the project and the dailies onto a portable LaCie FireWire drive.

Inside the office, editors use gigabit Ethernet to transfer dailies. For transferring files from the PowerBooks, they use an AirPort network and iChat. “I just take my project folder, shoot it over on iChat to my laptop,” says Blue.

Even the job of the music composer, Jan Stevens, is a bit easier now that the editors are using Final Cut Pro. “Instead of all these tapes we used to give him with all these special specifications, he gets a QuickTime movie on DVD as soon as we lock our cut,” explains Blue. “The picture goes up on his composing software [Logic Platinum], and he’s able to go right to work.”

When finished with the edit, they create a QuickTime movie of the cut, using iDVD to burn it on a DVD for review with the executive producer. After that, it’s off to the post house for color correction and opticals, and the show gets delivered to the network as a Digi-Beta tape.

Making House Calls
Time saved is money saved, but there’s another tangible benefit provided by the new editing system: the flexibility to work wherever, whenever. This is especially important in Los Angeles, considering the rats’ nests of traffic that stay snarled for hours. It’s clearly a lot saner to work from home than to sit on the 405 during commute time. “You can stay home and cut an extra scene or two and fly into work in 20 minutes instead of 45,” observes Blue.

“The freedom to untether yourself from the office and bring your work with you is wonderful, because it keeps you fresher,” Blue says. “And you can make your own hours when you’re not in with a director and a producer.”

In fact, Michel spends a week each month with his family on the East Coast without missing a beat, traveling with his 17-inch PowerBook and a portable FireWire hard drive. “Final Cut pro enabled me to become a lot more mobile so I could be editing outside the [office at the] hospital,” says Michel. “I get home and see my family and work from here, and then get back and finish up shows.”

A Pretty Good Surfboard
All the hard work to make “Scrubs” a quality show is paying off, with the show in the Top 10 now for two seasons in a row and still gaining new viewers. Clearly, the combination of smart writing, a great cast and creative editing is resonating with audiences, which means that “Scrubs” shuld be around for a long time.

Which is why eliminating some of the drudgery and creating a little balance is so important in the pressure-cooker known as Hollywood. Because it’s a fact of life — once the editors finish an episode, there’s another one right behind it. For 22 weeks. “It’s a wave that just keeps coming until April. But you surf the wave, and I think we’ve got a pretty good surfboard here,” laughs Blue.

“We push deadlines to the nth, nth, nth degree,” he says. “It would be difficult to do without this type of technology. We beat the crap out of our editing system, and so far it’s holding up nicely. We’re still discovering all the things it can do. And it’s fun. John and I come in a couple times a week and say, ‘Hey, did you know you can do this?’ It’s like the first day of school.”