Scrubs: at the bleeding edge of editing: the current season of this hit NBC show is being offlined on a Media Composer and onlined on final cut pro with a Kona-SD card - Edit This!

Post, Feb, 2003 by Daniel Restuccio

BURBANK -- Scott Burnette, an assistant editor on the NBC sitcom Scrubs, has been on a mission to find the perfect streamlined, cost-effective editing system. About two years ago while at NAB he saw Apple Final Cut Pro and an assortment of uncompressed video cards -- Aurora Video Systems' IgniterRT, Digital Voodoo's Dl and Pinnacle Systems' CineWave -- so he knew that broadcast quality was possible on a desktop system.

Today Scrubs -- a program he online edited through its first season in an Avid Symphony room at Level 3 Post -- is being cut at DigitalFilm Tree in Burbank on an AJA Kona SD-enhanced Final Cut Pro system. By next season, budget willing, the producers plan to bring that online system on site and perhaps, according to post production supervisor Nicholas Scaramuzzo, even switch to HD, That would give Scrubs the ability to go from first shot to final cut (no pun intended) right on location.

Scrubs, almost entirely produced in an abandoned hospital, shoots single-camera Super 16mm on an Aaton XTR Prod PL in 4:3 and is protected for 16:9. Cinematographer John Inwood shoots all the shows. "We have a five-day-per-episode shoot schedule. We do a lot of Steadicam work and get one day a week for two-camera shoots." Inwood lenses about 18,000 feet of film per episode.

Dailies are transferred to Digi Beta at Level 3 Post (www.level3post.com) on a Cintel C-Reality. "The C-Reality and 16mm is a great combination," says Level 3 colorist Larry Field." You get really great resolution and an apparent gain in depth. It's as good as some of the transfers from 35mm."

OFFLINED ON AVID

LA's New Edit Inc. (www.newedit.com) provides three Avid Media Composer 9000s V.7.2 and DFX audio plug-ins for the on-location offline edit rooms. Editors John Michel (Spin City, Madigan Men) and Rick Blue (In Search of Kundun) each get one. The third system is used by Burnette to digitize the Beta SP dailies. The networked Avid Media Share system has enough storage to work on two to three shows at a time.

"[In the first season] with the Symphony I would take a video-only copy of the sequence in a bin to Level 3," describes Burnette. One of the tape ops would digitize it overnight. With Symphony you can decompose a sequence and then re-digitize it at full resolution. I would come in the next day and do the Symphony online assembly." The big advantage to using the Symphony, he says, is that it is a virtually seamless translation of a project, including effects, from the Media Composer.

ONLINE IN FCP WITH KONA

With such a slick, integrated pipeline, doing offline with the Media Composer and online with the Symphony, why the switch to onlining with the Final Cut Pro?

"Part of what got me thinking about this is that our show often pushes deadlines," sighs Burnette. "This morning we locked picture at 4:30am, literally. We finished an online at noon today. The show airs next Thursday and we still have to mix audio and do color correction Monday and Tuesday We'll make it, but it'll be tight"

Burnette started thinking it would be great to have online capacity on location. He reasoned that all he does for the assemble edit is take an uncompressed signal and, well, assemble it. "I'm not doing anything to it. Color correction isn't an issue because that happens after the assembly."

There is also the cost. A new Symphony V.4.7 system can cost up to $90,000. Renting the Symphony at Level 3 costs between $1,500 and $2,000 per show. Multiply that by 23 episodes and that's roughly $46,000. You can own a Final Cut Pro system for around $20,000.

Burnette met Rainy Katrib founder/CEO of DigitalFilm Tree (www.digitalfilmtree.com) at NAB 2002 and discussed a Final Cut Pro online system. "Scott was on this research adventure at NAB. He has this amazing book, this three-ring binder that has hundreds of pages of articles and research."

This season, DigitalFilm Tree editor Edwin Mehrabyan online assembled the first 13 episodes of Scrubs at their facility "We assembled the first six on dual [processor] Mac G4 800s with the Kona-SD card and Medea RTR drives," explains Katrib. "We've used several different G4s and configure a system on the spot when we're ready to assemble. Now we've upped the G4s to 1.25 and switched to full hard-core Rorke Data Galaxy 60 JBOD RAID arrays.

After Burnette took a Final Cut Pro course at DigitalFilm Tree, he was convinced the FCP system would work He talked the idea over with the Scrubs editors and post supervisor. He also talked to Katrib about price. Everyone was intrigued by the idea of having the system on-site at the abandoned hospital.

"My first reaction is that I would love to see it go forward and be as self-contained as possible," says editor Michel. "Everything done on the show is done [at the hospital]. We even had an ADR booth built here."

"Scott had done a lot of background work" says Blue. "I told him I thought it might be an interesting way to make this." Blue has been so impressed with the system he has been working on Final Cut Pro installed on his G4 at home. "They say you can't jam on Final Cut, but when Avid first came out you couldn't jam on it"