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Reader SurveyIdol's Choice: DNxHD
Jun 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
This year, American Idol became, among other things, the poster child for Avid's DN×HD codec and its application in broadcast postproduction.
Santa Monica post facility Chainsaw edited and finished American Idol in HD this season, using the DNxHD codec on this Avid Media Composer Adrenaline and Avid DS Nitris configuration.
That happened after producers decided to evolve Idol's production and postproduction pipelines into HD, starting with a conversion of all interviews and field recordings for each episode from Digibeta to Panasonic's Varicam (AJ-HDC27) format. That decision was part of Fox's mandate to move toward 720p (16:9, 720p, 59.94 to be exact) as its standard format for all HD programming. But considering the live performance nature and quick turnarounds required for certain segments, decisions also had to be made about the quickest way to edit and master those segments. Bill DeRonde, president of the Chainsaw editing facility in Santa Monica, Calif., and supervising editor on the show, opted to rely on the Avid DN×HD (10-bit, 220MB) standard to shrink file sizes and speed up render times while mastering each episode to Sony HDCAM-SR tape for broadcast.
DeRonde reports that, for certain segments, Chainsaw “live digitizes” material — taking signals from studio cameras directly into four Avid Media Composer systems and one Avid Media Composer Adrenaline system, built on Avid's Unity MediaNet storage solution. This allows editors to quickly add those sequences to the standard-def offline cut and then accelerate conforming and finishing that cut to the DN×HD format for mastering in an Avid DS Nitris suite.
This season's American Idol finalists.
Photo courtesy of FOX.
“As soon as I lock an act (as part of the offline) on a Monday night, we have to deliver the finished master to Fox by 9 a.m. the next morning,” DeRonde explains. “So as soon as I finish each act, it goes to the DS [Nitris] for the online, adding effects, layers, phone numbers, other graphics — all things that take render time. Then, we master through Sony's SRW-5000 deck to SR-CAM. That represents the master of all taped material. For most episodes, that material then gets combined with live studio [wraparound] elements that are acquired [using portable Sony HDC-1500 studio cameras] and played back from the studio using DVCPROHD decks. This is just about the only way we could master this show in HD and still turn it around in our time frame.”
American Idol is not the first TV show to begin using DN×HD since Avid introduced it late last year — The Benefactor and Late Night with Conan O'Brien have also incorporated DN×HD into their pipelines recently — but it's the most high-profile and extensive incorporation of the codec.
Matt Allard, Avid senior product manager, says the codec offers an alternative to editing uncompressed HD on tight deadlines. “A format-agnostic compression standard designed to improve HD workflows and permit people to produce HD content as quickly as they produce standard-def content is obviously something our customers have challenged us with providing,” he says. “That's why we have now incorporated DN×HD into all our editing products, including our software-based [Avid Xpress Pro HD] system. But we have also made the source code available for download for free by product developers, including QuickTime versions. After all, a format is only as good as its wide accessibility.”
DeRonde, for one, is a believer and expects this DN×HD-based workflow approach to improve and spread.
“Next season, we expect the process to be even faster and more efficient,” he says. “Right now [at press time], the DS [Nitris] does not talk to the Adrenaline in terms of sharing files, but in my discussions with Avid, they tell me they plan to have that capability shortly. When that happens, we will be able to use more Adrenaline stations as loading stations for the DS online.”
