talkbackTHAMES: TV on time and on budget

The trend in modern television production is for greater programming at lower costs. Companies are faced with stark and difficult choices; do they turn down commissions or reduce the number of episodes per series? Or should they forfeit the quality of their productions by reducing staff numbers and opting for inferior technologies?

Fortunately, talkbackTHAMES and Executive Producer Mark Bos prefer to do things differently. Thanks to a post-production set-up that's entirely based around Final Cut Studio, the team is uncompromising about both the number of programmes they can generate and the quality of their output. It's a win-win scenario.

Mark Bos, Executive Producer

talkbackTHAMES is responsible for such primetime ITV hits as The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent. The company’s largest regional office is based in Amersham and makes hugely popular shows like Grand Designs, Property Ladder, How Clean is Your House? and Escape to the Country, and their output is immense.

With Escape to the Country, for example, the Apple post-production set-up (introduced three years ago by Bos) is typically used to create 80 episodes per series – a total of 140 hours of broadcast television that includes 80 one-hour episodes, plus 80 45-minute cut-downs.

Bos is candid about the reasons he bought the company’s post operation in-house and introduced Final Cut Studio: he wanted to reduce their costs. But he’s adamant that’s not the only reason. “It was also about creativity and flexibility – about which technology best suited a creative workflow”, says Bos. “We couldn’t deliver Escape to the Country any other way than the way we currently work”.

To describe the programme schedule as congested is an understatement. talkbackTHAMES sends three crews out on the road for nine months of solid filming. All the rushes are returned to Amersham where five edit suites undertake assembly, login, ingest, digitisation and quality control, plus five creative suites that undertake offline and online. For all 10 suites, there’s no such thing as downtime.

“We do about 90% of the work in-house”, explains Bos. “That includes full offline, full online, voice-overs, colour grading and graphics. The only thing we currently hive out is the audio for track lay and the dub. Everything else – the graphics and everything – is done within Final Cut Studio”.

The company has two ingest stations where the assembly process begins, which are operated by assistant editors Charlotte Cameron Vidler and Laura Blanshard. “When the rushes arrive, Charlotte and Laura can start working with them within minutes”, comments Bos. “They use Final Cut Studio to log everything and put it in the relevant bins – so, for example, there might be four takes of something but take two was the best one so they don’t even bother with the other three. It’s very much a creative stage in the process and it really helps the editors, given the sheer volume of material we’re working with”.

Blanshard says, “Everything is very carefully broken down into labelled files, as well as sync narratives and GVs”. Bos adds, “It obviously saves the editors and producers on viewing time and is much more cost-effective”.

Once the material has been sorted at ingest, it’s accessed via a network comprised of two Apple Xserves, a 7TB Apple Xserve RAID card and multiple Axus RAIDs, by ‘QC’ or quality control. “QC is the hub of the operation”, explains Bos. “Everything comes in here and this is also the last stop before the programmes go out to the BBC”. Assistant editor, Neal Davies, who works in the QC suite, is also responsible for sending audio down the line to the Birmingham-based dubbing mixer, and quality checking it on its return.

Next door to Davies, Jamie Louden is responsible for both offline and online editing. Louden is a real fan of Final Cut Studio, saying, “I learnt on an Avid, but when I came in here and started with FCP, I never looked back. Now it’s Final Cut all the way”.

He particularly likes the program’s intuitiveness: “As with all Apple products, I like the way it’s easy to make it do what I’m thinking. If I want to extend and edit, I just drag it and it extends. There is a consistency in shortcuts and actions throughout all the Studio applications that make switching and learning new programs extremely easy. It makes my learning curve that much more straightforward and I can focus on actually being creative and not getting bogged down”.

He adds, “From an overall systems view, I can’t fault the management and customisation aspects of the program. Turning all the stations we have into a render cluster couldn’t be easier, so when we need to, we can convert large amounts of data in a short amount of time. Apple Compressor has met all our needs so far; I’ve tried other products, but I always go back to it for sheer ease of use”.

Joel Corby is another offline/online editor who also has responsibility for grading and voiceovers. He says, “Given that we’ve got such a tight turnaround, Final Cut Studio is perfect for us, because speed-wise it’s great. The grading tool is very powerful and I use it for the majority of the show. I love Final Cut Pro – I’d dread going back to an Avid and not be able to just drag out a clip on the timeline”.

Because of the production and post-production schedule, the workflow at talkbackTHAMES is like a well-oiled machine, with very little scope for disruption. As a result, Apple’s innate reliability is another winning feature. Bos says, “Reliability is a massively key issue. If we get a breakdown in the system, it has a huge ripple effect. When you’re working on a small series of, say, six shows, you can absorb that, but when you’re working on a massive series like this where so many people are relying on you, there are serious consequences. Which is why we’re so pleased Apple is so robust”.

Corby adds, “It’s very reliable, especially versus PC-based systems. It just doesn’t go down”.

talkbackTHAMES has managed to deliver the required reductions in cost, without making any sacrifces in quality. “That’s the key thing about our Apple set-up, really”, says Bos. “It allows us to better control our costs. We no longer have to send the producer off to London on the train to sit in an edit suite in Soho. Now we can do all that right here at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time”.

“In fact, it’s difficult to think of a way in which Final Cut Studio hasn’t worked for us!”