Speakeasy - Using a digital video workflow with XDCAM

Magnus Wake one of our Directors and Head of Post-Production discusses the merits of a digital workflow:

"When you are looking after post-production for any production company, youd have thought the most important element would be the edit suites but actually it starts before then. It starts at the acquisition stage when youre getting your footage. So the two things we look at is the quality of the footage, make sure its high enough quality, and actually whether or not weve got an archive process for that material.
In the past, youd shoot something on tape, the tape was seen as broadcast quality, and it would go into your edit suites and be mastered and youd have the tape behind at the end of the process and youd also have the master tape of the new program. So everything was very straight forward.
Nowadays, with digital acquisition, youre shooting onto memory sticks, which then go into an edit suite and get copied off onto a hard disk. And then that memory stick will go back out and get re-used. And so youve got a real concern about the archive stage.
When it comes to quality, were only now just at the stage where you can shoot HD quality on memory sticks and on DVD-like disks, if you like, XDCAM. So were now shooting the way we want to shoot, but weve still got this issue with archive. Because we dont bin anything you never know when a clients going to turn round and say You know that shot you got for me a year and a half ago? Were going to need to use that now. So we now, make sure that we archive all that material.
Everything that comes in has a process, weve got a way of moving it from the edit suite, into a tape, back up drive, which keeps it all digital theres not going to be any degradation in quality and then we put that into storage as well. So now weve got all the components we need, as in the past, you didnt.
The reason that we shoot digitally comes down to quality, and speed. Edits can be processed faster, editors can work quicker with the digital media. And lastly its an all digital workflow its a very flexible workflow. So we can capture and record electronically, we then go into the digital domain in the edit suite as well.
And at the end of that we are publishing online, to YouTube, or any one of another hundred ways of different digital methods of publishing and I just works all together it works really well together."

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Corporate Video
• Online video delivery