HD editing on a Mac adds flair to live sports production
Jul 25, 2006 8:00 AM
Freelancing during a FOX Sports Major League Baseball production, Woven Pixels president Tom Meegan considers how best to edit a segment with Final Cut Pro HD.
Two years ago during the World Series, FOX Sports pioneered the use of a Mac with Final Cut Pro HD and an AJA video card to create HD edits during a high-profile live broadcast.
At the time, Tom Meegan, production freelancer, consultant and president of Woven Pixels, was working the EVS during that production. Meegan became enthused about the possibility of editing HD for live television with such a setup and focused his efforts accordingly.
Today, Meegan frequently works for FOX Sports, CBS, NBC and regional sports networks on the highest profile sporting events, including the World Series and the Summer and Winter Olympics.
HD Technology Update caught up with Meegan last week in Las Vegas at the C4-Sports show and discussed the world of sports, editing, the Mac and high definition.
HD Technology Update: The theme of your presentation at the C4-Sports show in Las Vegas was live HD sports editing with a Mac and Final Cut Pro HD. What tips can you offer to succeed when using them in a live HD environment?
Tom Meegan: If you are going to work in a live environment you have to understand that what you are editing has to be immediately available for air. What that means is you have to anticipate needs, prepare yourself properly so you can meet those needs.
HDTU: Doing that with a personal computer like a Mac for HD with its high data rates seems amazing. It wasn’t that long ago that the effects and transitions you’re using would have required long rendering times.
TM: What’s really interesting about this is the world of live, especially high definition, sports. It’s a world of a lot of proprietary black boxes. And there’s a reason for that. These are very effective, efficient boxes. They do one thing really well.
What characterizes a personal computer is you just load different software on it, and it will do lots of different things, but it may not do them quite as quickly. But with the changes in processing power and the changes in add-ons, such as with the AJA and Black Magic Design boards and the ability to offload some of the processing to those hardware boards, we’ve gotten to the point where personal computers can integrate really well in the highest level live environments to do some editing with very little rendering time.
So you can quickly turn around something that in the past would have required waiting for a very long time on a personal computer. Today, I can take something that I have edited, layer several effects on top and hit render. It will be finished rendering in three to four minutes, and then it can be dumped to the EVS and air within five or 10 minutes of when I actually finished the edit. That’s simply remarkable.
HDTU: Could you give an example of how you have actually used this HD editing in a live sports production setting?
TM: For FOX Sports we do bumpers and teases and re-teases and rollouts — the things you see at the beginning or end of a segment that kind of reintroduces you to what’s happened or introduces you to whatever we’re going to talk about next.
Going into the fourth game of the [American League Championship Series] last year, the pitchers for the Chicago White Sox had been doing very well — particularly the starters. We had discussed that we wanted to make a big deal out of that, especially if the starter for Game 4, Freddy Garcia, had a good game.
At some point in the game, the producer wanted something more than a simple graphic. So, in a very short amount of time — about 30 minutes from start to finish using Final Cut Pro HD and leveraging its strengths against those of the EVS server — I was able to put something together that was very stylized and really showcased the abilities of those first three pitchers and then add some shots of Garcia from the game currently being played.
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