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

While there was some hesitation to switching from the reliable Avid system, Scaramuzzo says that they could not ignore the opportunities the FCP system presented, adding, "Last-minute demands on schedule and financial issues forced us into finding new ways to accommodate those pressures."

Scrubs' hands-on creator/writer/producer Bill Lawrence (Spin City, Friends) has the engaging attitude that embracing chaos makes a dynamically entertaining show. But embracing chaos is only a good idea if it's combined with diligence and trust in the people you work with. When Burdette walked into his office at the end of last season it was his lucky day. Burdette spoke the three very rare magic phrases that every producer longs to hear: faster, cheaper and better.

"My reaction was a very positive one," says Lawrence. "We're a shooting a comedy single camera, and that's expensive. One of the early selling points of the show was that we were going to shoot it guerrilla style: do a show in five days. We're always under the gun. We're doing a sound mix today for a show that airs tomorrow night. We need to have access to things at the last second. Where we can really fly by the seat of the pants. And this has really streamlined the process."

Faster for Burnette means ultimately having the system on site so he doesn't have to run across town at odd hours of the night. It also has the advantage that once the picture is locked and approved, it can be instantly assembled. "Not much is going to change in the show, so we can re-digitize it at full resolution when it goes off to the network for final approval. Even if there are changes, we can simply digitize those changed clips pretty quickly."

That transition is happening in stages. Starting this season they began assembling the online edit with FCP at DigitalFilm Tree. While still not reaching the goal of editing on location, they still saved 50 percent from last season's online assemble costs and, in the process, noticed some significant quality benefits as well.

"We went into the vault and pulled an episode that was assembled on the Symphony" recalls Burnette. "Then we took a scene from same show pulled the dailies and went to DigitalFilm Tree and assembled it on the Final Cut Pro system." They took both tapes to an LA post house and put them up on the scope. There was a distinct green shift in the output from the Symphony, but the Kona-SD card was dead on.

"The Avid Symphony uses a Meridian board, and it can only handle is an eight-bit signal. What it does is truncate those two bits from a 10-bit Digi Beta signal. That makes the picture slightly green."

As this story went to press, Avid had just announced that its new Mac OS X version of Symphony V.4.7 will offer real-time 10-bit DVE with Ultimatte keying and color correction. Burnette is skeptical and still thinks the Meridian card digitizes an eight-bit signal.

NEXT SEASON

For next season the goals are to get the online system at the hospital and possibly switch the offline editing to Final Cut Everyone agrees there are still problems to work out with Final Cut. They are still limited to exporting only two tracks of audio when the show routinely uses six to eight. Burnette wants more powerful trimming controls. They still have to rebuild effects they create on the Media Composer and can't pre-digitize because Burnette says that "Final Cut links when it matches a clip name to a media file name. This happens even when the timecodes don't match."