Digital Video - January 2008 - (Page 42) FROM NEW YORK ue to support SNL production while working on related shows and specials for NBC — all in addition to handling their own highend client base. Just last year, they embarked on an ambitious restoration project of the original first few seasons of Saturday Night Live. Because the show’s syndication is what kick-started the company, it is fitting that Broadway Video is restoring those first classic SNL seasons to their original luster. Last year’s Saturday Night Live Season One restoration and DVD box set release was one of Broadway Video’s first forays into using Apple hardware and software for a major project. For its Second Season restoration project, they added several new Intel Mac systems equipped with Final Cut Studio 2 and Shake. Broadway makes use of a CommandSoft FiberJet SAN for shared storage with approximately 3 to 4 terabytes (TB) of capacity. DV recently caught up with the team working on this project at their New York City studios, speaking with 23-year Broadway Video veteran producer Mike Bosze, audio engineer Shane Conry and editor Mike Poole. DV: Talk me through how the Broadway Video team started on this project. Mike Bosze: The crew at SNL had been digitizing and archiving much of the older footage into their SAN. We took these files and used them as our main sources. These were the best versions of the shows and seemed to be in pretty good shape. There were still issues mostly due to tape degradation; however, it was a good place to start. In addition to working with these files, we pulled alternate sources from the SNL archive. We worked off of 1” element reels and assorted master and protection copies. Our goal was to make these shows look as close to or even better than the original broadcast versions. Was the condition of the original tapes one of the driving factors in the decision to do the restorations? Bosze: Yes, absolutely! We have more options now than we did in the past. It seemed logical to move toward a file-based archive rather than allow these materials to continue to degrade through time. Tell me about the footage you had to work with. What sort of restoration issues did you run into, and what cleanup was required? Mike Poole: The first five years of SNL have been digitized from 1” tapes and stored uncompressed at 29.97 fps. We did the cutting first; we cut all the episodes using Final Cut Pro 6 at the very beginning of this process in about two weeks. The cutting wasn’t so bad. Bosze: We basically created a pulled-up version of the live show that originally aired. The only things cut were the bumpers, which are traditionally used to get in and out of commercial breaks. After that we did a color correct on every episode and addressed dropouts, shifts and any other video problems. Poole: We used a few different plug-ins in FCP to fix dropouts, and, obviously, we are always trying to find better original sources for things that are really bad. A lot of the original 42 dv january 2008 switcher issues, you just can’t do anything about it. It’s on every source. Bosze: Before we’d tackle a show, we’d sit down and come up with a strategy on how to best handle not only the video hits but sound issues as well. Shane Conry: Depending on the shape of the show, we sometimes had to go back to the un-synced 1/4” audio tape that wasn’t running a time code and make a ton of edits to keep the audio in sync with the show. The musical bits were hard, like every frame or two you’d have to make three cuts because you’d see it out of sync or drifting. So that takes a little more time and care than normal, but the 1/4” sources sounded great. So when at all possible, we took audio from those tapes. I remember one show with Santana, the whole show had time code bleed from the 1”, so, obviously, that was unusable. For a song like that there could be several hundred cuts in three minutes. You zoom out, and it just looks black because there are so many cuts. And it wasn’t just one thing, for some of the 1” tapes we basically had to re-sync the entire show. All the audio sources were mono. We experimented with stereo spatializers, but in the end we thought it would be better to present the shows in dual-mono. It’s not just a show, it’s a historical document — it’s like American history. When we were restoring, it was always a balancing act. How good can we get it, how much noise can we take out without starting to sort of “crappify” it. Bosze: We played around with it; we pushed it. And most of the time we pulled back to keep the audio more authentic. Our www.dv.com PHOTOS BY MATTHEW JEPPSEN LIVE Audio engineer Shane Conry at work on the SNL project. Far right: Pointing to a typical image dropout from the show’s original master tapes. http://www.dv.com
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