Audio Media - September 2008 - (Page 54) Hollyoaks goes Hd > As part of these sweeping changes, Jamie Hall decided that there was too much tape involved in Lime’s production process. He asked various Lime staff, including the-then Director of Technology Graham Deaves, Installation Projects Manager Andy Murray, and Head of Sound Dub Chris Lovgreen, to bring Lime Pictures as close to tapeless operation as possible, in addition to managing the other equipment and workflow changes. As the work proceeded, Graham Deaves retired (although he continued to contribute to the design of the HD system as a consultant), and the team was joined by Chris Davey, who became Lime’s Head of Post-production in February 2008. Not all of the workflows were revamped. Thanks to the foresight of the now-retired Graham Deaves, who foresaw the rise of serverbased production systems years ago, Lime have had a central video production SAN since 2001, and ingest video shot on site for Hollyoaks directly from their cameras onto their server (location material, by contrast, has always been ingested from HDCAM tape). From here, the company’s dubbing engineers could extract the audio as OMF files to begin the work of track-laying. Nobody wanted to change this part of the operation – as Chris Davey comments, “There’s no point bringing in new processes if they’re going to make things harder to handle.” But Chris Lovgreen admits, “Previously, we were just drowning in tapes; every shelf was covered.” Andy Murray agrees, “Every Hollyoaks episode used up about 40 or 50 DigiBetas,” while Lovgreen begins ticking just the master copies off on his fingers: “Master, Filmic Master, TX copy, an Omnibus master, Omnibus TX copy ”, “ and a clone of each of those for safety!” cuts in Murray. “And the audio dubbing editors had to be given edited episodes on tape before they could start work” recalls Chris Davey. affordable solution than a comparable set of Avid editing systems.” The choice of Final Cut Pro over Avid and Lightworks had an immediate knock-on effect on the choice of Lime’s new audio dubbing systems. Chris Lovgreen had established Pyramix as his preferred DAW choice since early on in the upgrade, when the only aim had been to replace the audio production chain. “I began talking about Pyramix to Paul Mortimer at eMerging, Merging Technologies’ UK office, over two years ago”, he recalls. “Of course, we looked at all the other systems as well, and we had Pro Tools and SADiE in here for a while. But pretty quickly, the consensus was that Pyramix was the way to go. Paul introduced me to former AudioFile users who had upgraded to Pyramix at post houses in Soho, and they were able to describe to me the changeover from one system to another. I fell in love with it, really – it integrates fantastically well into the post-production process, and it’s very customisable. If you’re used to working with an AudioFile, it’s easy to set up macros and shortcuts to emulate functions that you’re used to. We liked that, as it helped us smooth the transition a bit.” “Pyramix was the best fit for what we were trying to do,” agrees Andy Murray. “Pro Tools is probably on a par with it, but that’s geared towards working with an Avid video system. So once we’d decided to go for Final Cut Pro, we were free to choose Pyramix.” The choice of Merging’s VCube HD and Ramses followed logically, as Chris Lovgreen continues. “It’s all about integrating well with As part of the upgrade to the video systems at Lime, the company’s old Lightworks video editing systems were replaced, after much debate, with Apple Mac systems running Final Cut Pro. This, and the introduction of a much larger production SAN, with integrated audio dubbing and associated video playback systems from Merging Technologies (Pyramix DAWs, VCube HD video players, and Ramses control surfaces) put paid to the use of tape during the audio dubbing process for good. Jamie Hall: “There were a lot of reasons to switch to Final Cut Pro. It was becoming harder and harder to find good freelance Lightworks operators. We were having to choose operators based on their ability to use the kit, rather than on their talent – whereas every kid coming out of university, the editing talent of tomorrow, works on Final Cut Pro. Hollyoaks has also become a much more effects-rich, graphics-heavy production, with a lot of dream sequences, and it seemed to me that Final Cut Pro was better suited to those tasks. It even integrates better with our new media division, Conker, who reformat all of our Hollyoaks content for web and mobile phone playback; they’re all Final Cut Pro users too. And finally, of course, it was a much more Ente r Apple And M erging > 54 audio media september 2008 http://www.berlinerusa.com http://www.berlinerusa.com
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