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MillimeterFile-Based Collaboration on “Community”
Apr 28, 2011 12:15 PM, By Jon Silberg
"The audience doesn't expect the norm from ‘Community,’" says Gary Hatfield, the show's director of photography. "One episode is about a paintball war, and then we're dealing with a character who might really be about to commit suicide. The world of ‘Community’ is a crazy, surreal place."
“Community's” creator, Dan Harmon, and executive producers, including brothers Joe and Anthony Russo, have developed a shooting style that encourages directors to shoot multiple takes, allowing the actors to experiment and leaving room for some molding and shaping of the tone during the editing phase.
"Since they're not spending money on tape or, thank God, film, there's very little inclination to cut," says editor Peter Ellis. "That creates a situation where directors can ask for more takes easily."
Ellis, who trades off editing duties with Steven Sprung, ACE, and Lisa Lassek, takes the enormous amount of material — about 50 hours per episode on average, and sometimes much more — and shapes it into a 26-minute episode.
"The business of watching all the footage is a week's work," the editor says. "The tradition in comedies is to have a two-editor rotation, but very early on in season one, we realized we'd need a third."
Hatfield shoots with ARRI D-21 cameras; the data comes out of the HD-SDI spigot and is recorded in XDCAM 4:2:2 format to Sony XDCAM decks loaded with Sony Professional XDCAM optical discs. Hatfield explains that the production loves the look he can get with the ARRI imager, and they use the XDCAM workflow because its compression uses less data and is therefore more conducive to the series' in-house post workflow than some of the less-compressed formats people normally associate with the camera.
This season, “Community” has also made use of the Sony PMW-EX3. The first time that 1/2in-chip camera was brought in was for an episode when Abed (Danny Pudi) was making a student film about Pierce (Chevy Chase). The camera, which also records in the XDCAM codec to Sony optical discs, provided a look so close in many ways to the show's standard style that the cameras have returned on subsequent episodes, working alongside the D-21s as a third camera if an ARRI is being used for second unit photography.
Hatfield elaborates, "If we use a little diffusion to make it look less 'video-y,' the images can look very close to the D-21 in certain circumstances."
Ellis and the other editors ingest the XDCAM material from the optical discs at full resolution into Avid Media Composer 4.0.5 running on quad-core Intel Xeon machines equipped with 8GB RAM. Timecode generated by the sound department allows the editors to group clips together to watch scenes from all angles. The media is never compressed, Ellis explains, "but we actually view it in a lower resolution. I think that with all this material, we're really at the outer edge of what the computer can handle."
Ellis explains that an average episode takes between five and six weeks, from the time material comes into the editorial department until final delivery: two weeks for a first cut and then three or four weeks of fine-tuning based on director, producer and studio notes.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
