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July 2015

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www.postmagazine.com 21 POST JULY 2015 P without using suite time" to prepare for the offline. Larger projects also spend time logging footage "so it all becomes searchable, and they're able to construct the story from easy-to-find nuggets," Cave explains. Then they assume the workflow shared by smaller projects us- ing Forscene: viewing footage and sync pulling so "they're in a better place to run with things when they start the offline." With 24/7 operations, Envy Post pro- cesses dailies/media around the clock. "We have a Forscene server connected to each [Avid] ISIS," Cave says. "As soon as the server sees anything on ISIS, it automatically uploads it to the Forscene cloud; then clients can log onto Forscene with their desktop Web browsers or an iPad app and see footage appear in real- time. They see an interface that looks just like an editing package." In addition, Envy Post's Avid suites feature client PCs that are used to access Forscene; sequences with locators are passed from Forscene to the Avid as an instant re-link. "The editor might say, 'I really need a shot of X here,' and the producer can tell him, 'You keep going, let me find it,'" says Cave. "Most clients use Forscene in their offices and again in the edit room." Cave calls Forscene's access via the cloud "a licensing model we like. We've ramped up to about 90 concurrent users, quite a few of them remote," he says, "and it's not an IT headache as all of the infrastructure is on the cloud: We could have five users or a thousand." When Forscene was launched in 2004, it was designed for low-bandwidth use, which Cave says remains a big ben- efit. "You only need 1.5 Mb/s to run it," he points out. "Broadband speeds outside London and abroad still may not be as good as you think, so it's not realistic to run a system that needs 4-5 Mb/s, espe- cially if eight people in your office need to use it." A large reality show shooting on Sony XDCAM in the wilds of the US with a UK production company and crew uses Envy Post for its end-to-end post, starting with dailies. "They send proxies every night to an FTP, and we upload them to Forscene — delivering rushes by plane too fre- quently would be too expensive and too slow," says Cave. "They have a team of loggers who go through the rushes the next day; they get to see what shots they missed, what they need to capture. We start sync pulling in London so when the high-res footage comes in, everything links up. We get the original Sony Pro Discs every two weeks by courier." A major UK studio-based entertain- ment show also taps Envy Post for all of its post needs. This series takes advan- tage of Forscene's multi-camera feature to offer thumbnails with the same time code, like a miniaturized view of the control room monitor wall. "We ingest their content daily and they start seeing proxies every evening," says Cave. "The ability to see 18 cameras at once on a cloud-based system is pretty nifty." Clients enjoy using Forscene remotely because "it saves them time and money — it can cut offline time and make the pro- duction more efficient," he notes. "Once you make all the footage searchable you spend less time in editorial looking for footage and more time being productive." TRAILBLAZER STUDIOS Raleigh, NC's Trailblazer Studios (www. trailblazerstudios.com) is a reality show content creator and a full-ser- vice post, music and sound facility. The company produces Salvage Dawgs for DIY Network and the new Southern Uncovered with the Lee Bros. cultural cooking series starring Matt and Ted Lee for Ovation. It also does post and finish- ing for other series, specials, documenta- ries, commercials and films. Fighting tighter deadlines, smaller budgets and space issues, Trailblazer has refined the art of remote offline editing with a coterie of approximately 18 free- lance editors in New York, Connecticut, California, Colorado, Louisiana and North Carolina. "For us, it's about being located in an atypical market and being able to create content that's shown worldwide," says Scott Roy, executive producer and director of post at Trailblazer. "We're proud of our workflow, but it wasn't so much a matter of pioneering as it was a necessity. We basically ran out of space here. We needed an editor for a show and knew someone we trusted who could work from home. Then three more shows went into production at the same time, and the light bulb went off: Could we get other editors to work remotely?" The company has been trailblazing remote collaboration since 2006. "We've revamped the processes and smoothed out the wrinkles, and now the rest of the industry recognizes the value of remote collaboration, too," says Roy. Show content captured on file-based media is transferred to hard drives in the field, backed up and then delivered to Trailblazer, where it is ingested and stored on Avis ISIS. Trailblazer AEs then organize the media into Avid projects with music, B-roll and graphic bins; they also synch and group footage. The Avid projects and media are then transferred to external drives to ship out to waiting editors. Editors receive show outlines, act breakdowns and transcripts from producers, and begin cutting the show. When a locked cut is posted, edi- tors send final bins back to Trailblazer to perform online color correction, mixing Trailblazer's Scott Roy: The studio has editors in New York and LA work- ing on Ovation's Southern Uncovered with the Lee Bros. WORKING REMOTELY/COLLABORATIVELY

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