Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1437291
75 W I N T E R Q 4 I S S U E T E C H was in a really solid place, but Jeymes and I just needed to get into a room together," he said. At De Lane Lea, it was back to a typical in-house Avid workflow but Sosnovsky kept their local RAIDS at home up to date in case anyone fell ill. This way, they could continue working remotely. Samuel, who was both director and composer on "The Harder They Fall," did most of his composing at home rather than in a studio due to COVID restrictions. Eagles said, "Jeymes was demoing songs but he wasn't exactly scoring to picture. There's a bank robbery scene and everything is synced to the music. That sort of happened in post. The early demo was just the beat that was made up of gunshots. With just a bit of tweaking to the picture, I could get most of the gunshots in the beat to sync up with what was happening on-screen." M a n a g i n g m e d i a a s s e t s — w h a t 's coming from where and from whom, and who needs what to be up to date — was essential to keeping "The Harder They Fall" from falling apart. Sosnovsky decided that having one person handle all the media was the best solution under the circumstances. He said, "I could design a better system with drop folders for a future project, but we were jumping into it without having experienced remote editing before, so we designed our approach on the fly. Fortu- nately, I had two strict rules: don't throw anything away, and don't overwrite any folders. Archiving everything saved us a few times." Editor Autumn Dea – who edited di- rector Cooper Raiff 's 2020 SXSW Grand Jury Award-winning narrative feature "Sh*thouse" — is currently remote editing an upcoming documentary film for director Doug Pray. She's also dealing with a huge amount of media but using a different approach. When Dea joined the film last August, there was already 350 hours of footage captured. And now, a whole year later, there's even more. She said, "The on-boarding process and setting up for edit- ing remotely took a beat, but we're working with Cricket Lane (an off-line editorial and finishing company) in Santa Monica, which offers a lot of tech support. Using TeamViewer (remote desktop software), their tech person was able to connect to my computer and set up my system." D e a e x p l a i n e d C r i c k e t L a n e ' s "sandbox" approach to remote editing as using StorageDNA's data management services platform, DNAfabric, to connect her, the assistant editor, and the director (who are all working remotely) via shared S3 cloud storage. RAW production footage is copied from a hard drive to Cricket Lane's nearline storage. The assistant editor adds this data to the project's Avid NEXIS, which is synced to the S3 cloud. Dea and director Pray also have individual Avid systems on their computers connected to the NEXIS via the S3 cloud. The assistant editor can access Dea's and Pray's drives remotely to organize their project files from the root level. Dea said, "We each have our own Avid project on our own drives, but the sandbox allows us to share bins with each other. We drop bins and sequences from our individual project file into the sandbox and it'll show up in everyone else's project file." Assets are automatically synced using proprietary software that can be licensed through StorageDNA. According to Cricket L ane, it's similar to sync services like Goodsync and Chronosync but has some Av- id-specific workflows and clever solutions for bi-directional sync. Dea explained, "If I add something to my project, it will also be copied in the background to everyone's drives. And their assets are copied to mine." When Dea is ready for the director to review a sequence, she drops it into the sandbox and he plays it back on his Avid. "Then we usually talk about it on the phone or via Zoom," Dea said. D e a c o n c l u d e d , " I t 's b e e n a p re t t y effective workflow, all things considered. Having the sandbox is definitely a step up from emailing bins, but it doesn't compare to being able to work in the same project file, like you can do in the traditional Avid work- flow. It's been a great solution for working remotely, though." ■ Jennifer Walden covers post-production technology for CineMontage and other publications. Autumn Dea remote editing set-up.