Revving the News Engine

The assignment was pretty standard - create two stories and a b-roll reel in four hours while on location.
by Sean O'Grady

No problemo! After all, TV news crews do this all the time. They roll up their live trucks, swiftly grab their b-roll and soundbites and then the photog ingests and cuts while the reporter writes, voices and applies his or her beautiful makeup. If all goes well, they dial in their live shot, feed their footage and make their deadline.

But what happens when you don't have a Live Truck.....must continuously shoot an entire four hour event....and still need to make a made-for-TV-news deadline?

Well, that's part of the reason why we call ourselves a "Creative" agency.

In order to successfully create our three stories, stay within budget and meet our broadcast deadline the Firstline team keyed in upon two areas to help our clients save time and dollars: Ingest & Distribution.

Ingest:
The TV News model mentioned above benefits from speed. The process is streamlined. The team shows up, shoots basic b-roll, conducts one or two on-camera interviews and then they're out. All-in they've shot a maximum of about 30 minutes of footage.

Not so with continuous coverage. Four hours of HD footage and interviews, even at 720/60p, translates into well over 100 GBs of footage. In short, it's an ingest nightmare. An editing team could easily lose hours in the AVCHD conversion process alone.

To combat this issue our teamed opted to use ATOMOS Samurai digital recorders. These puppies saved the day. The Samurais encode directly into Apple ProRes, meaning no AVCHD conversion or ingesting. What would have taken hours turned into a 5 - 10 minute drag and drop process from the Samurai cards directly into external hard drives and then ultimately to our two field Final Cut Pro 7 edit stations.

The Samurai is an outstanding field production tool. You can learn more about it here.

Distribution:
No Live Truck means no satellite feed. To overcome this our team opted to use HighTail.com for delivery to news stations and a mobile hotspot for upload. Wireless Internet is no substitute for a solid T1 land line, but we found we could obtain a 17 MB upload speed when we placed the hotspot outside without any overhead obstructions.

The Samurai drives saved us time. HighTail spared us costs and the end results was two stories and a b-roll created on time and on location.

Not bad for a day in the park.

You can learn more about Firstline Creative and our News Engine teams by visiting our website: www.firstlinemedia.com