BBC:
Full on Final Cut
Tight deadlines, stringent budgets, limited resources? No problem. Apple technology provides the backbone of a powerful, cost-effective workflow used by the BBC to produce the topical series, Full on Food.
What drives a broadcaster to implement a radical new concept in programme production? One of the most obvious answers is cost, but in this case, there was far more to it than that. All organisations, whether public or private, need to function efficiently to meet the demands of media-hungry audiences; procedures must be streamlined without hampering productivity, resources and skills must be flexible and transferable without compromising creativity.
To meet these demands, the BBC is currently implementing its Digital Production Strategy which will enable tapeless production based on commodity technology by 2010. As part of the process, BBC Factual & Learning has been conducting a number of trials on the concept of a “Creative Desktop” over the last five years.
The BBC’s essential vision of the future of broadcasting, along with the aforementioned cost savings and tight deadlines, is what motivated BBC Factual & Learning to pilot the Creative Desktop in the second series of Full on Food. As part of this pilot, it turned to Apple technology; specifically the potent combination of Final Cut Pro, Power Mac G5 and Xsan.
“The central media store meant the directors could go to any machine and pick up their project — they weren’t tied to a specific machine.”
According to Gary Hunter, executive producer of the series: “The second series of Full on Food was commissioned with a reduced budget. I did not want to lose any of the ambition of the series, especially as regards travelling the world to bring back great food stories. Nor did I want to cut back radically on the studio elements. I therefore looked at other ways of keeping the money on the screen — in particular, alternative methods of shooting and editing”.
Once the shooting was complete, the concept of the multi-skilled ‘predator’ — part producer, part editor — was married with that of a purpose-built production unit known as the ‘lab’ in which the show’s location-based films could be offlined (which, in practice, meant edited) and onlined (cosmetic finishing, colour-grading, FX, playing out to tape, producing audio files for the sound dub and so on). The unit was comprised of two rooms — one editing room and another online/ingesting room.
“The second series of Full on Food has worked very well”, says executive producer Gary Hunter. “Final Cut Pro was pretty much fault-free”.
John O’Donovan, senior production technologist at BBC Factual & Learning, says: “We had a digital technician working across the project. He was able to manage media, deal with the entire ingest process, and make sure files were stored in the right places and that everything was correctly digitised. His role was invaluable”.
“Centralisation of the ingest process was significant as it really facilitated the management of the workflow”, adds O’Donovon. “Plus, the amount of storage we had allowed the directors to keep the entire programme rushes online throughout the production so they could access anything at any stage. The central media store meant directors could go to any machine and pick up their project — they weren’t tied to a specific machine”.
“I didn’t want to lose any of the ambition of the series”, explains executive producer Gary Hunter. “Nor did I want to cut back radically on the studio elements. I therefore looked at alternative methods of shooting and editing”.
Apple’s Xsan storage area netorking solution was at the heart of the workflow. The team used two Xserve G5s and two 5.6TB Xserve RAIDs, providing a combined total of over 11TB of storage, plus a Qlogic Fibre Switch and two Asante Ethernet Switches. The Xsan allowed the centrally-stored media to be shared across a number of workstations: one Power Mac G5 running Final Cut Pro for ingest, three Power Mac G5s running Final Cut Pro with 23-inch Apple Cinema Displays for offlining, and one finishing workstation — a Power Mac G5 running FCP HD, with a 30-inch Cinema HD Display and a broadcast monitor.
In addition, a 17-inch PowerBook running Final Cut Pro was used to give the directors a mobile editing option. O’Donovan says: “The PowerBook was a very popular addition to the setup. The directors found it particularly useful for picking up sync-pulls, editing material on the laptop and then synchronising changes back to the central media store”. And Hunter confirms: “The PowerBook facility was significant as it gave the directors the ability to work at home or even on the train, and this was important when long hours were being worked”.
The Xsan file system also contributed hugely to the efficiency quotient by allowing different members of the Full on Food team to access and work on programming material simultaneously; the same media files could be employed in several different projects at the same time.
“The directors particularly liked the sync-pull facility and, overall, the system’s flexibility”
During the pilot, Apple worked with the BBC to stage a number of FCP and Xsan certification classes designed to deepen staff member’s knowledge of Apple technology in general. Additionally, to further soften the heady learning curve, predators were supported throughout the Full on Food process by an Apple Certified Trainer.
As far as their use of Final Cut Pro in particular was concerned, O’Donovan says: “We worked with version 4.5 of Final Cut Pro HD, as version 5 was not yet available. The directors particularly liked the sync-pull facility and, overall, the system’s flexibility — the fact that they could set it up to work in a particular way to suit them”.
The success of this pilot has also had more far-reaching consequences. Following the trials within Factual & Learning over the past five years, the BBC has decided to launch a Creative Desktop based on both Apple and Avid platforms, which will be accessible to all production units within the organisation. The Creative Desktop is the first step in its Digital Production Strategy and will enable better preparation prior to post production.
BBC Post Production, meanwhile, has purchased a new six-client Xsan setup with the aim of ramping up its support offering to production units within the BBC that are using Apple technology.
O’Donovan says: “We are very happy with what we were able to achieve during the pilot”. While Hunter adds: “On screen, the second series of Full on Food has worked very well. Final Cut Pro was pretty much fault-free, and the directors turned in mostly excellent films from such far-flung locations as Vietnam, India, Tennessee and Ethiopia, none of which would have been possible using traditional methods of shooting”.
