Leopard Films Workflow

Leopard was shooting three different productions in a time scale of 6 months, which meant planning the work flow and how it was going to run was key for production to run smoothly down the line. There were a lot of meetings discussing the work flow to establish if it was best to edit in native resolution or 15:1 My idea was to go for DNXHD36 as it gives a HD picture while taking up less space than native. The agreed work flow was to go from Native resolution to 15: 1 resolution then upon completion of the show. The final sequence would get relinked via AMA to replace the 15:1 media to Native resolution then transcode the final sequence to DNX 185 to be ready for online. This does two things: • Saves a lot of space on the Edit share (storage space) • Runs the media more smoothly on the Avid machines • Faster exports for viewings Just to note briefly Leopard is running 9 edit suites with an Edit share and a new archiving media solution called the Matrix Store to store the native rushes on to.

Leopard Films conversion to HD and Workflow

I have accepted the offer from Leopard Films; Leopard is perhaps most famous for Cash in the Attic , but it does other variety of shows and has made dramas too.
I am now overlooking the postproduction and managing the edit assistants. In my first few weeks I have set up various seminars and presentations to talk to the production teams about HD, Tapeless Workflow best practices. The team and I have set up various checkpoints and milestones to track the progress of our conversion to HD and Tapeless.
That means managing, consolidating and Offsite storing many tapes and digi-betas and when I say many I mean 15 thousand to be precise
We are running on Avid Media Composer 5 now. I am still working on what kit is best to buy with the budget given to Edit in HD more updates on that soon.

Senior Edit Assistant / MCR supervisor

Good news I have been promoted to Senior Edit assistant / MCR supervisor

Now my responsibilities DOUBLED! Which is good – I love it actually. Now my work ranges from managing the media ingestors to playing out the shows to be delivered to the broadcasters.

When the edit has been assembled and approved for a play out, the patch deck gets set up to go from the Avid that is playing out the finished edit passing through the Legaliser to make sure the show is with in the legal range for broadcast then goes out to be played on Sony VTR HD Deck and Digi-beta decks

check the picture above for the setup

Optomen

The workload is immense and it is long hours of ingesting, media management and play outs, Footage was shot on Sony cams and saved on SD Cards. On a good day I would be getting anything between 20 – 50 cards to be ingested within 48 hours so they can get wiped and go back out again on a shoot.

SD cards got ingested and managed via Avid Interplay then projects were setup on Avid media composer which was passed on to the editors to edit at online HD resolution.

I am loving how busy work is - learning a lot on the job and expectations are high also its worth mentioning that any mistake means loss of footage ... no pressure!