Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1100392
www.postmagazine.com 28 POST MAR/APR 2019 SESAME STREET er, because Premiere uses those adaptive tracks for audio. We have 16 channels of audio that they record on the floor. Premiere's adaptive tracks have been a godsend." Once in post, each episode makes its rounds. After the first pass with the editor, the director has a pass, and then there's a "Muppet captain" who "does his review of the cut to make sure the muppets' heads all look correct, and that they're not looking off camera," says James. "The epi- sode then goes to the producers so they can take a pass. Once the producers lock it, then it goes to the mix house, to our media director, sound effects director, vocals, and so on." James says that in all, it takes around nine months to produce and edit an entire season of Sesame Street. EDITING "Sesame is a magazine format," explains Salazar who, along with one other full-time staff editor, an assistant and one permanent freelancer, cuts the show. "We start cutting as soon as we're done shooting. But all the individual segments — some animation or CGI — there's a long time before an episode is locked in and mastered. So at the same time that we're shooting the up- coming episodes for the next year and starting to cut them, we're assembling the current year's segments into full, 30-minute episodes and add- ing transitions, getting them to time, reviewing them with producers and so on. We're all work- ing on two seasons at once, plus digital projects that come down the pike as well as other things. There's so much always going on simultaneously." According to Salazar, editing Sesame is a very collaborative job, explaining that during shooting, he or someone from the editing side is typically onset. "One thing that's really helped is to have someone onset digitizing the footage as its being shot and stringing out a rough assembly," he says. "That way, if things don't cut together or if they miss something, like a puppeteer's head, I can point it out right there. It also helps to have the editor there because when we leave that day, we have a strong rough cut rather than having to piece footage together from square one. Also, a lot of times things get changed on the floor as they're shooting, for logistical reasons, and if we weren't onset, we'd have no idea what happened. If we're looking at the script, we'd be like, 'Wait, this doesn't match up.' It's very collaborative." When not at Kaufman, which is just a few weeks out of the year during production, the editors are in the New York City offices near Lincoln Center. On the technical side, Salazar says shooting is in Sony S-Log, ProRes HQ. "We couldn't find a good LUT that looked good, so our colorist created a custom LUT, so when we run all the footage through Resolve, it will spit out proxy files, 1080 versions of ProRes LT, and then we'll edit off of those, but then the colorist will receive the flattened S-Log for 4K versions and color that." With regard to shooting in UHD, Salazar also points out that, for anyone who's watched Sesame Street, half of the segments that appear in an ep- isode are older, from pervious seasons. "If you're constantly using footage from a few years ago, it becomes increasingly obvious that you're mixing old technology with new technology," he explains. "One of the things that I've pushed for is for us to be as future proof as possible, so that when someone wants to use a segment from this year, five years from now, it doesn't look dated. Now, there's more demand for 4K or HDR, so it became really important for Sesame to transition to UHD. Keegan-Michael Key Bill Nye The Science Guy Bert and Ernie Celebrities oen stop in to help with storytelling, like Chance The Rapper.