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Offline HD

Aug 14, 2007 12:00 PM, By Craig Erpelding

West Post Digital develops hi-def workflow to meet client demands.

Nearly a decade old, West Post Digital, Santa Monica, Calif., has been providing high def finishing since 2001 for channels like Discovery HD Theater and has amassed a list of clients including Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County (now called Newport Harbor: The Real Orange County) and Run’s House, among other projects for Fuel, FX, and Ground Zero. From a single D2 bay in limited space to a custom-designed 20,000-square-foot facility that can handle nearly every aspect of editorial, visual effects, and production, West Post has recently had to once again modify their capabilities and methodologies due to the trends in client needs for today's HD projects.

Given the proliferation of Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, and other lower-cost, HD-capable editing and visual effects systems, some clients are choosing to do more of their post work in-house and look to traditional post facilities for services in areas that are either too technically complicated or expensive for them to do themselves. This includes I/O of media from HD source tapes such as D5 and HDCAM to a digital file on FireWire hard drives and vice versa. In addition, some companies are seeing more demand for up and down conversion and cross conversion to and from the many HD formats currently in use.

In response to this growing demand, West Post Digital has taken a few key steps. First they have beefed up resources in the area of format conversion—recently adding a Sony SRW-5500 HDCAM VTR to its offerings and making sure the company has all the current compression codecs available to handle client demand. In addition, the facility has even installed special shelving and cable harnesses to handle the multitude of client hard drives that now occupy its machine room.

But, during the course of this evolution, West Post CEO Todd Brown and President Kenny Fields found themselves establishing an HD postproduction workflow that they believe is under-utilized and can provide high-end results for budget-conscious clients.

"About two years ago a colleague had the idea [for the new workflow] and tested it with us for a low budget feature he was involved with," Fields says. "The goal was to be able to set up a workflow that would maintain the 23.98 time code in the offline for faster onlines. Being able to work off of FireWire drives meant clients could offline their work on laptops if they chose to. A pretty cool idea—working with HD on your laptop."

This innovative workflow allows for clients who have acquired on HDCAM or D5 at 23.98 or 59.94 (or any format and frame rate that has the DVC Pro HD codec available for digitizing), to bypass costly down-converts to SD tapes, which they must then digitize into their editing systems, allowing them to stay in native HD using the DVC Pro HD codec. Fields explains the workflow (using HDCAM 1080p 23.98 material as an example), noting the facility uses a HDW-F500 VTR as the source deck and feed its Final Cut Pro HD system (v5.1.2) through an AJA Kona 2 or Kona 3 I/O card. Selecting the easy setup for 1080p 23.98 DVC Pro HD, they capture to either their own drives or directly to a client's FireWire drive. Those drives are then taken by the client to do their offline work via FireWire on their own Final Cut Pro system. Brown and Fields have found this solution to be very economical and efficient for the client.

"Right off the bat, you save time, because instead of down converting all of your source footage to an SD format and then digitizing—with this process you are digitizing directly to drives and you are ready to go," Fields says. "But, I would say where the most time is saved is in the final assembly. You will have a more accurate list that has remained native 23.98 for the entire process, not a list that has been converted from SD. This means that material captured in the auto assembly (up-rez) should fall into place frame accurately. That saves a lot of manual work bumping shots one or two frames, which is typical when working from lists that have been converted. As well, you save time because all of your graphics should fall into place since you will be off-lining 16:9 native instead of 4:3 with a letterbox. Depending on how many graphics you have, this can save a lot of time because you will not have to manually tweak the position of each graphic. Since you can work directly from the offline project file [since it is at 23.98] you will not have to recreate all of your effects and transitions as you would have to if you were working from an EDL translated from 29.97 to 23.98."

According to West Post that additional timesavings can even be had using its HD workflow via an extremely efficient, yet, non-endorsed method.

"You [could] save [a large amount of] time if you decide that the images you used in your offline look so good that you are going to use them as your final picture," Fields says. "Though this is not typically the case, and there are often technical requirements which could make this impossible, we have had clients take this approach and in that case the entire up-rez process is eliminated. We do not recommend this process, however it has helped a few of our clients stay within their budget."

Beyond the ability to do the offline in HD, this process also allows West Post and its clients to avoid surprises that often occur in finishing with frame rate issues, graphics framing issues, and other potential problems given the direct translation between its offline and the online.

"We have seen too many times that people intending to finish 1080p 23.98 have off-lined SD 29.97 and do not realize that for online they will need to work from an EDL," Fields says. "This means any graphics, and transitions other than dissolves, will need to be manually rebuilt. We also get people that decide to offline drop frame or make down converts that are drop frame and this makes the online almost impossible at 23.98 frame rate."

One more benefit to this workflow is it allows West Post to still employ some of its traditional finishing techniques, such as using its Da Vinci Systems 2K for color correction and Avid DS Nitris for titling.

"The all-in-one solutions are fine for some applications," Brown says. "But, the majority of our clients want [us to provide] the ability to use the high end tools designed for specific tasks—and our workflow allows for this to happen very easily."

© 2009 Penton Media, Inc.