Ellen Show Post Workflow

Interesting article about how The Ellen show went from AVID to FCP, then back to AVID. For those of you who have worked in this type of workflow, does AVID have it better with UNITY, etc.?

Dan

For those interested, here's the article:

[www.studiodaily.com]

And yes, having worked on an Avid Unity...the shared project workflow on Avid is MUCH easier than it is with FCP. Especially in a high pressure situation like delivering a daily show. I have worked on several FCP shared projects too, and if you know what you are doing, and you know where the pitfalls might lie and you do things right...then it will work.

But I find that the shared project workflows are MUCH easier on the Avid. Mark Raudonis will give me a stern look for saying that, but that is my opinion, and I'm sticking with it!

There are just other things that FCP does better. Again...right tool for the right job. Shared workflows for FCP work...but it all depends on what your specific workflow is.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
[itunes.apple.com]

It's a very good article, no question. But for anybody who hasn't taken the time to read it yet, this is pretty much the whole thing in a nutshell:

Quote

?When I was cutting on the [Final Cut] system and didn?t have to share, I had no problems with it,? says Burnett. ?The moment we tried to treat it like a Unity, it didn?t work the way I was used to.?

Media Composer and FCP are two very different tools, and I think people often lose sight of that. At the core, they do the same basic task, but they do it in such radically different ways, in a lot of situations you really need either one or the other, depending on your environment and workflow.

Thanks Shane, forgot the link, duh!

I have never produced this type of show, but for other work flows I have produced with, yes, FCP is better at certain things and AVID is definitely better at certain things like high volume shared workflow via Unity.

I may be going into post on a tv series at the end of the year, it will be a tough decision on which tool to use, FCP or AVID. I am a big fan of FCP, heck I helped Mike start this group, but I do know that for some situations, using AVID will let me sleep better.

Same with production, I love P2 and own two P2 cameras but it is possible I may shoot this series on HDV for the simple reason of not having to dump P2 cards during frantic shooting days rolling 3 and 4 cameras.

I wish more people in our business were a bit more tool agnostic. All of the gear on the market is so good now, there is little reason to become an unthinking brand loyalist. I was going through a huge box of tapes, working on my reel yesterday and I realized that most of the stuff I have produced before 2005 has been edited on AVID, even though i am a big FCP fan.

D

Quote

All of the gear on the market is so good now, there is little reason to become an unthinking brand loyalist.

Well said.

The other side of that coin, though, is that tendency for brand loyalists to believe their product's poop doesn't stink. I happen to prefer Final Cut, for a lot of reasons foremost being that I know it much better. I've got thousands of hours in front of Final Cut, and so little stick-time on Avid that it effectively rounds down to zero. But I can rattle off a list of things I hate about Final Cut that's as long as my arm without even stopping to think about it.

Of course, the other other side of that coin (I chose my metaphor poorly) is this notion that just because something is imperfect, it sucks. There are a zillion things I wish Final Cut did differently, but y'know what? I feel pretty confident that I know how to work around all of 'em. Well, maybe not all of 'em. Without third-party add-ons, Final Cut is just not suited for the kind of collaborative editing workflow the aforementioned article talks about. But point is, neither Final Cut nor Media Composer is perfect, and neither of them is garbage. They're both just tools, and ain't it cool that we can use whichever one works better for a given job.

Reading this article I get the feeling its more about the editors not wanting to give up the workflow they're accustomed to than it is about any shortcomings of using FCP in a collaborative way. It also seems they had some hardware compatibility problems and planning problems and all combined made them more comfortable with what they know, Avid. It also seems like the kind of marketing pieces for Avid that I've seen lately that look like news stories, could be wrong about that but Avid seems to be doing a stronger marketing push lately.
I've been working on a series for the last five years, the first year it was done on Avid with Unity and the last four years we've used fCP and Xsan. As lead editor I was tasked with developing a workflow that would allow different editors to work on various parts of the same show at the same time and then during finishing having various graphics and audio elements added to the master build and audio post in what sometimes seemed like a haphazard fashion. We've gone from a tape based SD offline-online scenario to a ProRes all online scenario to an HD tapeless offline-online scenario. During this time we went from a tape based archive system to a nearline random access one. Occasionally there's been a bit of head scratching to refine the workflow but in general its been a pretty painless experience. In the process we've become more productive and even took on some addtional shows with no trainwrecks or added stress to the system. Our system has only slightly changed over the years, a couple of new computers, software updates and some added storage to the Xsan but we couldn't be happier.

Has anyone looked into EditShare for FCP shared storage? They have a method of project sharing and it works quite good.

CHL

Chi-Ho Lee
Film & Television Editor
Apple Certified Final Cut Pro Instructor

I have been trying to use Editshare for a long time. but everyplace I go with FCP and shared storage has gotten some OTHER solution.

One of these days.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
[itunes.apple.com]

Bunim Murray cranks out those reality shows with FCP and Xsan like nobody's business. I think you guys are right, the editors didn't want to give up their Avid workflow.

You can share projects with Final Cut Server. What about that?

Kevin Monahan
Social Support Lead, DV Products
Adobe
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro Community Blog
Follow Me on Twitter!

Sorry Kevin...that isn't the same thing. You cannot have the same project open by two people with FCP. Period...even with FC Server. Avid allows this, but creates ownership of the BINS. It can do this because all the bins are separate files in an Avid project folder on the server. The workaround for FCP is to have separate project files that you use locally, but backup on the server when you want someone else to have access to what you are doing.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
[itunes.apple.com]

Yeah, Kevin, what Shane said. I've heard people before talking about Final Cut Server like it's in some way ? favorably or unfavorably ? comparable to Unity. It's not, not at all. It's not a shared-storage or collaboration solution at all. It's media asset management.

Until this summer, I worked for a facility that had, and relied heavily upon, a Final Cut Server system. In fact, I installed and set up that system for them. They used it for storing a very large number of shots that got incorporated over and over again into different Final Cut projects. It was great because FCS lets you annotate every shot in the system in pretty much any way you could imagine, search the database of shots really quickly, then just drag-and-drop shots into your FCP bin directly. (Actually you have to drag-and-drop the shots twice, because the first time it asks you whether you want to cache the shot locally, then you have to drop it a second time once it's been cached, but whatever, that's tolerable.)

If you have a huge library of media assets ? shots, stills, graphics, audio, whatever ? and you reuse those assets over and over again, FCS is a great solution. It's not really for collaboration or project-sharing, though.

I've been thinking more about this you guys. I think you guys have a good point. I wish that FCS had a more robust way of sharing media and projects. I don't think that Server is quite the right tool for the task. I never got much experience with Unity, but I can see its simplicity and power.

Kevin Monahan
Social Support Lead, DV Products
Adobe
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro Community Blog
Follow Me on Twitter!

Unity is, in my experience, pretty unique in the industry. I don't think either Final Cut or Smoke has a great system for giving multiple edit seats access to the same media drive or projects. There are some third-party solutions for Final Cut, and Xsan does part of it, and Autodesk has Wire, but in my admittedly limited experience there's really not much out there that does exactly what Unity does.

Of course, let's be honest. The market for Unity is just a fraction of the total market for editing systems. Not everybody who needs to cut needs to do it in the kind of way that Unity allows.

Over the years, there've been some experiments with dedicated assistant stations. I remember Discreet's Backdraft pretty fondly ? this was before Autodesk came along, I think. It was basically just the I/O module from Smoke, abstracted out into its own software package. The idea was that you had a Backdraft system on the same Wire network as your Smokes, and that was where you did all your tape I/O and your setting up of the Smoke equivalent of bins and stuff. It never took off, not least 'cause it cost a significant fraction of what a full Smoke seat cost.

Our company runs both Avids with Unity and FCP on Xsan. Many of our projects are shared in both FCP and Avid. I have to agree with Shane, and I say this as a very experienced FCP editor, that Unity is a superb system. Unlike the somewhat finicky Xsan, our Unity has been rock solid for many years, hardly ever required outside technical service and is easy to set up and maintain.

We've spent much more time and money keeping the Xsan running. Maintaining an Xsan requires a lot of networking expertise and is not to be taken on casually. It can be a real headache.

That said, it's perfectly possible to share FCP projects on Xsan among multiple editors. We do it, and many other folks do it with much more complex projects than we handle. But it requires strict file naming and workflow rules that everyone follows precisely. That can get tough under deadline pressure. The Avid-Unity combination handles all that organization for you.

And yes, you can use FCP with Unity's, but of course not with the Unity project-sharing system. It's just a big pool of storage, like Xsan, as far as FCP is concerned. And when it's time for us to upgrade our systems, I'll be looking seriously at buying a Unity with lots of storage that both our Avid and FCP systems will use. Avid has become a much more accessible company, more willing to help its customers than ever. Apple, I'm afraid, at least as far as professional products are concerned, is more like the Avid of the 90s... self-satisfied, remote, with a "take what we give you" attitude. But that's another rant.

Michael Heldman
Spot Welders

Yeah our Xsan has been both amazing and a nightmare at times. The permissions issues seem to keep popping up, regardless of how many times we fix it. We've had to have our tech guys come out many times to address issues(we use the guys from 318, who've always been great).

Our workflow is totally collaborative as our editors are always sharing files back and forth but it all comes down to the editors remembering to keep things in the right place and the right state. Which ironically is how FCS works as well, checking projects in to your local machine and then back to the SAN. We don't have the daily turn around of Ellen but we seem to make it through without any major problems. When i did work in a daily turnaround situation, it was still FCP but thankfully it was mostly short-form and we could rely on exports, not pulling from each others projects...

Shane Ross Wrote:
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> Avid allows this, but creates ownership of the BINS. It can do this because all the bins are separate files in an Avid project folder on the server.


As I understand it, this is essentially what EditShare (and vStor's TotalShare) do ie each FCP bin is created as a separate FCP project ... at least thats what it sounded like when it was explained to me by the EditShare boys at the London SuperMeet. Of course, I had been in the pub for a while immediately preceding this explanation so my concentration level may not have been at its best.

i've never used it,
but i cant see how it can change the way FCP operates.

what they advertise seems to be a way of LOCKING open projects,
plus a way of SEEING which projects are open and locked.

i suspect it's up to the editors and their assistants to create a "Cloud" of FCP projects that approximates the AVID cluster of databases contained in one AVID project.

the Editshare interface then allows you to see and use that cloud somewhat like an avid project.

as i say, i haven't used it,
and am only guessing based on what they say on their website.


nick

Yeah, it seems like it treats FCP projects like Media Composer treats bins. Not inherently a bad idea, but ? meh. Seems kinda workaroundy to me.

Hi everyone,

I'm the Product Manager for EditShare. I saw your conversation and since there was some confusion, I thought it would be helpful to clarify how EditShare handles project sharing with FCP, and why.

Jeff Harrell and others in this post are correct that we handle FCP project files much like we handle bins in Media Composer. We take advantage of the fact that in FCP, you can open more than one project file at once, so an overall FCP Shared Project is made up of multiple FCP project files, just like an Avid project is made up of multiple bins. It's not a workaround. It's another way of thinking. It allows totally fluid and instant sharing, with no danger of editors making mistakes. You're not relying on editors to remember which projects are off limits to open. It's SAFE and EFFECTIVE even when not used as directed!

In order to help you manage and keep track of the shared project structure, we provide you with a Project Browser which allows you to see all of the fcp project files that make up an overall FCP shared project, organized into folders that show who owns each project file. You can run the small project browser window alongside FCP and browse and open project files directly from it.

What was mentioned about project locking is not quite correct. It's not a "cloud" of bins, rather a highly organized structure. EditShare's project sharing (for both Avid and FCP) is user-based. So all users have access to all projects, but if you try to open up a project that isn't yours, it warns you that it is read-only, and then prevents you from saving that project. Of course you can always grab clips, bins, sequences, etc, from another user's project and then drag them into a project that you do own. Thus, you get very quick, easy collaboration without the risk of accidentally deleting someone else's work.

Dividing up the "Project" into multiple FCP project files also has another benefit. Because FCP loads EVERY clip in a project into RAM when it opens it up, opening large project files can be slow in FCP, even with local storage. By dividing up the overall project into multiple project files, you just have to open the pieces that you need to complete whatever part of the edit you're working on.

There are also a whole other set of collaboration workflow enhancements such as group bins, which allow you to prepare bins of common elements and put it in a centralized location that everyone can access. Once you have prepared a project file of material-- sound effects, rushes, etc, and dragged it into group bins, it becomes read-only to everyone-- this no chance of someone accidentally overwriting the project accidentally.

I hope this helps to clarify EditShare's approach to collaboration with FCP. If I can answer any more questions or clarify anything, don't hesitate to post or contact me.

--------------
Jeff Herzog
Product Manager
Editshare Inc.

jherzog@editshare.com
skype: jeffreysherzog
AOL IM: jeffreyherzog@gmail.com

119 Braintree Street
Suite 705
Boston, MA 02134 USA
617-782-0479 x116
www.editshare.com

Hi Jeff, thanks for posting! I worked briefly with the EditShare last year. It was a fairly simple workflow, but unfortunately it was too brief a spell for me to remember too much about it. Do you happen to have any tutorials on setting up projects with the editshare or something about the basic operation procedures to prep up any users who are about to embark on the editshare for the first time?

For your post, what I am curious about, is that when you run multiple project files, you need to import the clips/pictures/music into that same project and pop that into your timeline, or you won't be able to "reveal master clip" back to the source media in the project. Of course, FCP hasn't yet developed a "smart/watch folder", which will automatically add any new media into the browser in the project files. This is one of the issues which makes working with shared media a little tricky. Are there any workarounds for this?



www.strypesinpost.com

strypes Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>Do you
> happen to have any tutorials on setting up
> projects with the editshare or something about the
> basic operation procedures to prep up any users
> who are about to embark on the editshare for the
> first time?

Its something we very much want to do-- little instructional/demo videos on how you create media spaces, use editshare connect, etc. But no, sadly, at this point, we don't yet have them. Like I said, its a great idea and we definitely plan to create them at some point. In the meantime, we have two manuals-- the Editors Guide and the Administrator's Guide-- and I'd be happy to send you the pdf of either one if you'd like. It is probably only a 10 or 20 page read (with screenshots) on basic FCP or Avid workflows, creating projects, etc. Also, if you are coming onto a job where they are already using editshare, you probably won't be asked to do the administrative management stuff like adding new projects and creating new users (although its not hard at all). From an editor's perspective, simply using existing shared media spaces and project spaces is very intuitive. I'm also happy to answer specific questions if you have them.

>
> For your post, what I am curious about, is that
> when you run multiple project files, you need to
> import the clips/pictures/music into that same
> project and pop that into your timeline, or you
> won't be able to "reveal master clip" back to the
> source media in the project. Of course, FCP hasn't
> yet developed a "smart/watch folder", which will
> automatically add any new media into the browser
> in the project files. This is one of the issues
> which makes working with shared media a little
> tricky. Are there any workarounds for this?

Hmmm...I'm not sure, but I think what you're asking is:

If you edit a clip from another user's project directly into a sequence in a project you own, what happens? Can you go into your timeline and "reveal master clip" and have it find the clip, even though it doesn't exist in your project file?

I did some testing, and it appears that Apple has improved this feature as of FCP 7. To test, I opened two projects and edited a clip from one project into a timeline in the other. I then tried the "reveal master clip" command. It came up with a dialog box: "This clip's master clip is not present. Would you like to make a new master clip?" I clicked yes, and it made a new master clip in my project.

So, if this is what you're asking, it seems to work (and would work the same way with EditShare shared FCP projects). If I misunderstood, please explain in more detail.

Not exactly. That feature to create a new master clip has been around in FCP for as long as I can remember. I think I lumped two questions into one. Apologies on that. What I'm trying to get is...

Scenario 1:
Assuming you are working on a drama series, some workstations are cutting episodes, and another guy comes in to cut the series trailer on another workdesk... So he looks through the edits of the series, copies the clips he wants into a timeline... He's done for the day, the producer takes a look at it, and tells him that he prefers to go on the wide shot instead of the close up at 01:30 in the edit.

If the trailer sequence is in the same project file as the episode, he'd go to the clip, reveal master clip (shift f), and you get the master bin with clips from that same scene. But in this case, it doesn't work that way, so he'll have to dig out that project file, find the sequence, find the clip, reveal master clip, find the wide shot and insert that into his edit. This has been an FCP limitation for a while. The only workaround to it is to "reveal in finder", and hopefully the media management/naming conventions allow the editor to find the clip easily from the finder.

Scenario 2 (watch folders):
A bunch of guys are editing a docu/reality program that is being shot. There's a folder for stills that they can use. More stills will be added to the folder by the assistant producer on a daily or weekly basis, or even at random, but when you're working with a few guys, and someone adds a bunch of pictures into the folder, you may not know about it, and it doesn't go into the FCP projects either. So an editor who has been working on another part of the project for a while, comes back to the still sequence that he was trying to cut 2 weeks ago, suddenly realizes that he has a bunch of pictures, some new and some not, lying in the same folder on the drive.


Wow. I'm looking at the GUI, and it really looks cool. I worked off an older version of Editshare, and it looked like a windows version- grey with checkboxes- and we had to mount the volumes to start work..

Sure, drop me the manuals, I'm interested to learn more about it.

G@strypesinpost.com

When I step into a facility with a different workflow or some new technology that I'm not familiar with, I would like to know a bit more about it so I don't bungle up and cause the place to explode in a giant ball of flames, if you get what i'm talking about.



www.strypesinpost.com

> Scenario 1:
> Assuming you are working on a drama series, some
> workstations are cutting episodes, and another guy
> comes in to cut the series trailer on another
> workdesk... So he looks through the edits of the
> series, copies the clips he wants into a
> timeline... He's done for the day, the producer
> takes a look at it, and tells him that he prefers
> to go on the wide shot instead of the close up at
> 01:30 in the edit.
>
> If the trailer sequence is in the same project
> file as the episode, he'd go to the clip, reveal
> master clip (shift f), and you get the master bin
> with clips from that same scene. But in this case,
> it doesn't work that way, so he'll have to dig out
> that project file, find the sequence, find the
> clip, reveal master clip, find the wide shot and
> insert that into his edit. This has been an FCP
> limitation for a while. The only workaround to it
> is to "reveal in finder", and hopefully the media
> management/naming conventions allow the editor to
> find the clip easily from the finder.

Yeah, actually right after I posted my reply, a friend of mine pointed this out to me. I see the limitation, and the trouble is, FCP doesn't have any ability to match back across projects, since it has no notion of the clip's use in other projects. Its possible that in the future we could track that ourselves through xml, but its not something we currently do.

Though it doesn't do exactly what you're saying, I will also mention that we have a new product called Flow, which is an ingest server, proxy browser, and clip management tool designed to help you easily find your footage. It might have been this interface that you saw on our website. You can preview and log clips in Flow and drag and drop them into FCP. Flow would definitely help on workflow's like the one you're describing.

>
> Scenario 2 (watch folders):
> A bunch of guys are editing a docu/reality program
> that is being shot. There's a folder for stills
> that they can use. More stills will be added to
> the folder by the assistant producer on a daily or
> weekly basis, or even at random, but when you're
> working with a few guys, and someone adds a bunch
> of pictures into the folder, you may not know
> about it, and it doesn't go into the FCP projects
> either. So an editor who has been working on
> another part of the project for a while, comes
> back to the still sequence that he was trying to
> cut 2 weeks ago, suddenly realizes that he has a
> bunch of pictures, some new and some not, lying in
> the same folder on the drive.

Hmmm--yes I see your point here too. We do support watch folders for playout or encoding servers-- where from FCP, you'll put new clips in a particular folder, which will then cause an external device to be triggered to do its thing. But, that's not what you're talking about. If it were me, I would probably encourage the AE's to sort photos into finder folders by date added. That way you'd at least know there was something new if a new folder appeared. But I agree it would be nicer if they just appeared in FCP. The AE's could alternatively be responsible for adding new photos to additional bins in a centralized fcp project file each time they added a new batch. I agree with you, though, about a watch folder being useful. More and more things are happening now with XML and I wouldn't be surprised to see solutions to problems like these coming out in the marketplace based on XML.

> Sure, drop me the manuals, I'm interested to learn
> more about it.
Will do.

Quote
Do you happen to have any tutorials on setting up projects with the editshare or something about the basic operation procedures to prep up any users who are about to embark on the editshare for the first time?

This would be huge Jeff. As it stands right now there is a significant portion of the audience you are courting a bit intimidated by EditShare. Tutorials will go along way to making them feel "safe."

Michael Horton
-------------------

>I would probably encourage the AE's to sort photos into finder folders by date added.

I actually do my music downloads that way. But it did get painful... By ep 13, I was working on a scene and the director said "okay, let's get some sinister music", and I'd look at the bins and they're all labelled "090811"... A notification on the media management system would be very effective.



www.strypesinpost.com

>Tutorials will go along way to making them feel "safe."

We're going to have to bribe him with cookies, Mike. I'll try to find a girl scout.

Meanwhile, if the manuals are free for distribution, I could put them on the wiki... and ahem.. my blog...

Yea, I was looking at flow. Looks very very nifty. And powerful too.



www.strypesinpost.com

Well, I guess I wasn't as smashed as I'd thought then ... although I definitely was by the time I left. I blame the cider.

strypes Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> >Tutorials will go along way to making them feel
> "safe."
>
> We're going to have to bribe him with cookies,
> Mike. I'll try to find a girl scout.

I like cookies...