Editing for reality: making the mundane exciting - Industry Overview

Post, Jan, 2003 by Christine Bunish

For Michael Aranyshev, one of the editors of Russia's Lost Hero II, the biggest creative challenge of the reality TV show is where you draw the line between the reality and the show.

"When you present your work to the audience, in the first few seconds you have to establish the tone and make a silent agreement about the measure of authenticity of the stuff you show," he says. "How instant or deliberate is your camera work? Do you uncover the crew presence and, if yes, how soon and in what fashion? It gets even more difficult in a sequel where all the participants watched last year's show and come prepared to act for the camera. Being non-actors they almost invariably ham. It takes a lot of direction on the set to snap them out of it."

Made under license from Survivor, the big-budget Last Hero II is the latest installment in the Russian reality franchise. Gleb Shagoon, director of Moscow's First Field Studio, part of the VID TV group which handled all the CG for Last Hero I, invited Aranyshev to help First Field editor/technical director Andrey Nazarov edit the sequel, which was shot on three islands off the Malaysian coast. Thirteen one-hour episodes were lensed primarily on Sony IMX,

The plan forLast Hero II was to "pick the best tool for the job," says Aranyshev. Council and Contest sequences, shot with up to 14 cameras, were slated to be cut by two editors on Discreet's Edit in order to take advantage of the multicamera capabilities of the system. Two more editors were assigned to cut everyday-life segments, shot with a pair of IMX and DV cameras, on Avid Xpress. These editors took 24-hour shifts on location.

Although Nazarov and Aranyshev were supposed to handle final color grading and finishing, they too were sent to Malaysia, taking four complete Pinnacle CineWave systems -- two for editing, two for logging and back up -- to Pulau Besar Island where the editors and crew resided. CineWave, which works in offline and online modes, is a comprehensive uncompressed editing solution. It includes Apple's Final Cut Pro (FCP) and a full version of Pinnacle's Commotion Pro, and runs on the Power Mac G4.

All of the editors on the show questioned the wisdom "of trying to produce finished product on location," Aranyshev says. "We felt it would be much smarter to cut together rough assemblies of each sequence to see how-they came together and whether a few additional shots would help a story or even save a particular scene. You don't go back for additional shooting months later for a reality TV show."

At press time, the episodes are being recut and finished by Nazarov in the VID TV office on a single CineWave with new rough cuts from Avid Xpress -- and sometimes "with no rough cut at all," Nazarov reports. "Despite the overkill of taking all these systems on location, the idea of offlining on Avid and onlining on CineWave has been a smart one endeed," Aranyshev says.

Nazarov isn't getting much time to sleep with a five-day turnaround per episode, however. The typical schedule calls for clean cutting an episode in three days, tightening it the next, then performing color correction and audio post on the Friday before going to air on Saturday. "Producer Sergei Kushnerev, director Sergei Airapetov and I do the whole show on a dual-gig G4 with 3 TB of Medea RTRX," says Nazarov. "We're only on episode nine, and it's much more like a feature than a TV show!"

He says "Final Cut Pro was chosen for its all-in-one solution for editing, compositing, effects and color correction, plus its speed." Effects for the TV show are done with FCP and Commotion -- we don't have time for anything else," Nazarov explains. More extensive effects may be created for the show's release on DVD.

"The visual approach taken for Lost Hero II was to give it some adventure-movie glamour, Romancing the Stone-style" says Aranyshev. "It required cameramen to go for That particular look, Andrey and me to play with CineWave image controls [there are quite a few ad hoc day-for-night shots made with FCP's three-way color corrector] and directors on set to steer the action toward some pre-planned collisions."

WELCOME TO SURVIVOR AUSTRALIA, MATE

Survivor also has a franchise Down Under. Australian Survivor featured 13 one-hour episodes shot at an isolated location on the South Australian coast. It aired from February to May 2002. "We began editing on location virtually as soon as we started shooting," recalls Stephen Peters, executive producer at Nine Network in Sydney. "The shoot went for six weeks, then we packed everything back into a more permanent facility" at the network."

On location, four Matrox DigiSuite LEs running Incite Multimedia Corporation's (IMC) Incite Editor were connected to an IBM server with 2.7 TB of storage and used for the editing process. Two or three digitizing stations were also connected to the server. Up to 14 more machines were hooked up to the same server for logging.

"A big selling point for Incite was its powerful logging," notes Ian Andes, the show's technical editing consultant. "I don't think the show could have been done without it."