Post Magazine

32 Post • October 2008 www.postmagazine.com cautious about "blowing out the whites" and possibly losing detail in, for instance, a shot including the sky or white clothing. Coscia and crew, who work in LA, star t their day with a hard drive with dailies on it from the shoot in New York. "It's a really fast turnaround — there's no lab, you don't have to wait three hours for the film to go through the soup." In "telesync," New York's PostWorks transfers circle takes from the HDCAM SR 4:2:2 masters and sync audio, which was recorded to DVD RAM. "We also have a guide track on the camera master SR as well," Coscia says. That's tele- sync — there is no telecine. Three to five hours of inexpen- sive telesync yields two to three hours of dailies. The DP is asked to do a mini- mal color correct in camera. "We have a DIT [digital imaging technician], Barr y Minnerly, on set looking at the feed on an HD monitor and really seeing the raw picture that is laying to tape. You can see what you're getting right away." Circle takes from the HDCAM SR camera master are recorded onto a new HDCAM 4:2:2 dailies master along with the audio from the DVD RAM. The new HDCAM travels out to LA and is used in the final assembly. "The way we get dailies is PostWorks creates the HDCAM and at the same time they make a 16x9 DVCAM for editorial. The DVCAM arrives overnight in LA the next day." PostWorks also creates digitized Avid files "that they pipe over the Internet to Fotokem in LA," Coscia says. "We're posting at a Fotokem sister fa- cility called Keep Me Posted. At 7:00 in the morning they pull it down off the ser ver, dump it to a hard drive and all of our dailies are ready to go at 8:00 in the morning. They also make a DVD that we can dub and distribute to the network and studio and our executives out here." The dailies acquired over the Internet are compressed at 14:1 but "they look great. We've been told by the net- work and the studio that our cuts look fantastic — it's pretty and beautiful" long before the show is finished for air. Gossip Girl employs three editors, working on different episodes in a rotation, with the aid of two assistants. Edi- tors Timothy Good, Rachel Goodlett and Harr y Jierjian cut their episodes in 16x9 SD on Adrenaline. Coscia also works closely with co-pro- ducer Jonathan Brody. Coscia and his post super- visor,Terri Murphy, oversee on- line. "Once a show is locked, we send a bin out of our Avid over to Keep Me Posted.We assemble the show on a Symphony, which takes an Avid list and brings it up so we're ac- tually assembling in a nonlinear world — in a high def Avid. There's no loss. Once we get the timeline and the show how it should be, and smooth out any speed effects or transi- tions or opticals, we play it back out from the Symphony to an HDCAM SR." As with other series, SR's 12 channels facilitate the "number of audio configurations" that the network re- quires — all on one tape. Another benefit, once you online in HD, is "there's no dirt fix." For Gossip Girl, the Symphony "is perfect," Coscia says. "We don't have that many crazy transition effects, but the opticals that we do [in offline] all come right across. You don't have to do a separate session and recreate all these opticals. Everything can be manipulated in the timeline and, once you have the final product, you play it out to tape." What with the success of his offline operation, Coscia foresees a time when offline work may be done in high def and the visit to the post facil- ity might be only for color correction. The assembled episode, now back on SR, undergoes from 12 to 16 hours of color timing "and tweaking and really giving the show its fine-tuned look," Coscia says. The work is done at Keep Me Posted on a da Vinci 2K by Tom Overton.That could include smoothing outdoor shots where sunlight is waning and making the colors pop, including those blacks and the whites. P S Y C H Psych, soon to enter its third season on USA Networks, is a comedy/drama featur- ing a young police "consultant" whose acute powers of observation seemingly put him on a psychic plane when investigating serious crimes. Co-producer Geoff Garrett says the show is shot on Super 16mm with audio going to DVD RAM. Psych footage under- goes Spirit telecine at Technicolor in Vancou- ver where sound is synced with picture onto an HDCAM SR 23.98 master. Technicolor also downconver ts the digital sound and picture to DVCAM for editorial. "Along with that we get a standard Flex file," Garrett says. "We're using Final Cut Pros and the file is a database of all the picture, sound and scene-and-take-number information which is loaded into the offline system and tracked by the assistant. When we go to online the show, the online editor and sound depar t- ment have all the proper timecodes to ref- erence back to the original material for when we go [back] up to HD and do our Shot on film, Psych onlines on Apple Final Cut Pro HD. HOW MUCH STORAGE DO YOU NEED? Easy as Point and Click. Aberdeen Stirling servers deliver unparalleled expandability and performance for all video storage tasks ranging from real-time streaming media to post-production con- tent backup. Scale up your capacity by daisy-chaining Aberdeen JBOD expansion boxes to reach lofty capacities well above 400TB. 888-272-7139 www.aberdeeninc.com/po006 ABERDEEN Storage servers from 8TB to 50TB starting at $4,995 16TB Expansion JBOD boxes starting at $6,995 50TB NAS debuting at HD World NYC Booth #1030

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