Live From Abbey Road: Recording History
At its heart, the integrated solutions within Final Cut Studio deliver consistency at every level of the production and post-production process. “It’s the simplicity of integration between all the processes”, Mottram continues. “There’s nothing that has to be done off-site: apart from the audio, there’s nothing we can’t do in Final Cut. I’m here working with sixteen channels of uncompressed HD simultaneously in multicam. I’ve done everything from features to commercials on Final Cut, and this is probably the hardest I’ve worked the software. It’s rock solid. We’re pushing out the shows and we don’t even have to leave these two rooms. That’s pretty incredible”.
Optically networked Mac Pros provide all the power they need.
Video is ingested into Final Cut and the software delivers a complete end-to-end solution for every process, from editing to colour correction, graphics creation and export into different formats. It’s a significant transformation in traditional video production workflows. “When I started in this business, a show would pass through 20 people before the viewer saw it”, says Mottram. ’Now, what I’m building in my timeline — every cut, every graphic position I make — is what the viewer sees. That’s immensely satisfying as an editor, because when we had an offline/online process, you couldn’t be confident that the edit you made in the offline would stay intact throughout the whole production process. These tools give me confidence that when we’re watching the first cuts here, it’s what the audience will see as well and that’s incredible”.
Mottram’s impressed by other Final Cut features, calling RT Extreme “invaluable”. He observed: “The ability to use Photoshop-style transparencies in real-time on HD on top of things is incredible”.
That the content and production tools are integrated offers another critical advantage. Filming and editing both take time, but every deadline-focused broadcast project must also factor in just how long it takes to render the final results. The Abbey Road team’s pretty pleased, Mottram observes: “I remember watching a commercial I was working on being rendered on a system that cost half a million pounds, and the time it took was similar to what we’re getting now, using Apple’s kit. The time per shot’s quicker than what I experienced on that turnkey system, just a few years ago”.
While most of the team were already using the Mac, some were new to the platform, but that posed little challenge. Mottram explains: “Our colourist, Peter Lynch, had only started to dabble in Final Touch (an older version of Color), but now he flies through it. It’s because Color is laid out for a colourist, just like Final Cut’s laid out for an editor — anyone who works professionally in these fields should be able to make the switch very quickly. Also, there’s something about Apple products that makes it easy to teach someone how to use software, particularly if they’re familiar with the Mac — you can overcome the technical hurdles quickly”.
Mills reflects, “We were using Final Touch last series, then it became Color. It’s been fantastic, everything has gone in, and come out the other end as it should”. Once a show’s complete, there’s an added advantage: it can be output to multiple formats using tools included in the Final Cut Studio box. “Today, for example, we made a two-minute promo clip. I went into the Xsan, grabbed a few clips, stuck them on the timeline, whacked in a logo on a transparent layer, pulled it together and it was done. There’s a HD version, a QuickTime version and an iPod version. I remember a few years ago, if you needed to send a small version in QuickTime, it would take an age to encode in some cleaning application and be unwatchable. We don’t have to think about it now — if we need to send something, we can get it done almost immediately”.
The Abbey Road team began using Apple’s Xsan software for the second series, which is currently being recorded. Now, they wouldn’t be without it. “I couldn’t do without Xsan“, says Mottram. “During season one, the team were transferring footage on FireWire drives, which reduced our productivity”, he says. “I’ve got a young son and I need to get home. I want to work an eight-hour day. Last season, I was working 16-hour days. Xsan has halved that. That’s what Xsan has given us”.
Director Annabel Jankel likes it too. She can summon any asset whenever she needs to review it, examine it and mark it up and, because the asset is stored on the server, her updated asset is immediately available to the entire team.
For a production that’s focused on presenting world-class artists at their best, there’s another advantage to using Apple’s tools for video — the cost. That editing, post-production and colour correction are all included within the equipment means budget can be spent elsewhere. “People using other suites who haven’t yet made the switch just don’t believe this system’s capable of work like this”, Mottram says. “I wouldn’t fly the flag unless there was a flag to fly. It’s the concept behind all this. Operations that used to require hundreds of thousands of pounds of equipment are now available within a piece of kit that costs a few hundred. This is independent television production out-performing the big boys”.
