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Off the Line

Jan 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Trevor Boyer

How a P2-based nonlinear workflow set one shooter/editor free.

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A typical working day for Kevin Tierney involves standing around on a boat and watching guys fish. Of course, he's watching extremely closely — via the viewfinder of a Panasonic AG-HPX500, ready to press record if the professional angler he's watching gets a bite. (The 5-second prerecord cache on the camcorder certainly comes in handy.)

Later, he'll go back to his hotel room and perform mundane, but crucial, asset-management duties involving a P2 Store, PC card slots, external hard drives, and checkboxes on Excel spreadsheets. For someone whose career in professional video started more than two decades ago, these minor rote obligations pale in comparison to the logistical challenges of yesteryear.

Early bites

Tierney had always wanted to be both an editor and a cameraman. During his first days in professional video, in the '80s at Media Productions in Pompano Beach, Fla., that ambition was rarely realized. Editors worked with millions of dollars worth of specialized gear, so they were kept inside the facility in order to maximize their billing potential.

“They didn't want you to go out and play in the field for the day,” Tierney says. So in 1985, he founded his own company, KTI Video, based in Hollywood, Fla. The business was based around an Ikegami ITC-730 camcorder and a 1/4in. tape deck, and it allowed him to both shoot and edit video.

Early on, Tierney's jobs involved “anything and everything,” as he describes it — mainly local commercial work and corporate jobs. Ryder Transportation became a big corporate client of KTI Video, flying Tierney and partners around the country to produce sales, training, and corporate identity video for internal use.

Even after he had founded KTI, Tierney still worked inhouse at Media Productions as a freelance editor. In the late '80s, an angler named Mark Sosin approached Tierney about helping him self-produce a TV show for ESPN. The proposal sounded like a natural career move for Tierney. “I wouldn't live in Florida if I didn't like to dive and fish and play in the ocean,” he says.

A couple of years later, this idea came to fruition. Tierney helped Sosin put together a tape-based editing facility in Sosin's house in Boca Raton, Fla. The suite was based around a Sony edit controller, an Echolab switcher, an Abekas A51 DVE, and three Sony decks — BVW-60, BVW-65, and BVW-75 — for A/B-roll editing.

Always somewhat into computers — he had taken to Macs early on — Tierney soon realized he could put together his own nonlinear editing system. In 1994, he purchased a Media 100 system (which he ran on his Macintosh Quadra 840AV), putting him at the very forefront of the desktop-editing revolution. “That was my dream system,” he says. “With tape-based editing, ‘change' was always an unwelcome word from a client.”

Since then, Tierney has produced other fishing shows, and he has moved on to Apple Final Cut Pro editing. KTI still provides production and post-production services for a wide variety of projects, including corporate videos and local commercials (especially those that involve underwater shooting). But during this decade, Tierney has had one main client: professional angler George Poveromo, host of George Poveromo's World of Saltwater Fishing — which kicked off its eighth season on ESPN2 last month.

Client requirements

Rarely is any piece of gear purchased solely because of its technological merits. There are almost always other considerations — such as price, compatibility with a facility's other components, and client demands. As the outlet for its primary client's work, ESPN has had a heavy influence over the types of cameras KTI Video has purchased, as well as the way Tierney outputs Poveromo's show from his NLE.

Tierney says that his choice to switch to Final Cut Pro with an AJA Io box in 2003 was serendipitous; ESPN would soon issue a dictate that all submitted programs needed four channels of audio laid to the tape. With the Media 100 system, Tierney would have had to perform multiple passes in order to lay out the extra two channels of audio. The Io box supported output of four channels of audio.

A recent technological edict from ESPN caught Tierney just as he was trying to decide on an HD camcorder to replace his Sony DSR-500. In the months leading up to NAB last year, Tierney and other producers had been asking the network for guidance as they were attempting to upgrade their cameras to meet ESPN's HD standards. Just before NAB, on a conference call between ESPN and various packagers of outdoor programs, the network announced the requirement that shows be shot with two HD cameras with 2/3in. chips. “When they snap their fingers, you have to move,” Tierney says.

KTI Video was looking to purchase two cameras, and naturally, Tierney wanted to keep costs down. He had been looking at Sony XDCAM HD models — he liked the affordability of the nonlinear disc media and the fact that they accept high-quality lenses — but these were suddenly out of the running because of their 1/2in. chips. The Panasonic AJ-HDX900, a 2/3in. camera that records to P2 media, was next on the list, but it cost a bit more than Tierney wanted to spend (it's listed at $26,500).

Fortunately, before NAB 2007, Panasonic announced the AG-HPX500, a 2/3in. model that also shoots to P2 cards but that costs significantly less, starting at $14,000 list. This meant that KTI could purchase two HPX500s as soon as they became available in May, and they'd need to rent HDX900s only for the first two episodes of the current season of Saltwater Fishing.

KTI actually does shoot some small-format HD footage for every episode of Saltwater Fishing — usually an HDV clip from a Sony HVR-Z1U or HVR-A1U sealed in underwater housing. These cut together with the DVCPRO HD material quite well, according to Tierney, who says that for these shots, even the single-CMOS A1U generally produces sufficient images. “Underwater, you've got fish, and you've got blue,” he says, adding that ESPN understands that a certain percentage of clips — especially underwater and other hard-to-achieve shots — will be shot with smaller camcorders. (Tierney says that using Final Cut Studio 2, he can drop clips of both types into the timeline and experience no lag in performance, rendering only upon final output.)

The bulk of the show is shot on shoulder-mounted, 2/3in. HPX500 cameras. “I really didn't have much time to play with these cameras before getting thrown into the fire with a trip out to the Bahamas with it,” Tierney says. Luckily, the camera provided what KTI needed overall — particularly, after some necessary logistical planning and discipline, the solid-state recording workflow.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.