Focus on Editing: Jay Ankeney
This Is Rocket Science
 Alan
Surgi does his editing by the rocket’s red glare at Vandenberg
Air Force Base, where he serves as an audiovisualist for Lockheed
Martin, using a United Media On-Line Express nonlinear edit system
to cut together an ongoing series of projects documenting the
day-to-day activity of all the Lockheed Martin technical operations.
Although this can include creating a visual record
of everything from moving spacecraft payloads overland from facility
to facility, using the company’s Space Cargo Transportation
System and through the air on giant C-5 transport planes, one
of the most exciting challenges he is assigned is to create videos
highlighting from beginning to end the launch cycle of rockets
boosting payloads into orbit.
Located on California’s picturesque central
coast, the military facility started as Camp Cooke in 1941 to
train Army recruits for World War II combat but was transformed
into the nation’s first space and ballistic missile operations
base in 1957, when it was re-christened Vandenberg Air Force Base.
 NO
SECRETS
Alan is not able to reveal too many specifics about
the projects he works on, because you need security authorization
just to get into his edit bay. But he has no secrets about why
he chose United Media’s On-Line Express as the NLE he needed
to advance his video productions into the digital era.
"The biggest reason I’m glad to have
the On-Line Express system is its multi-camera editing capability,"
Alan tells us. "Using its FireWire input option, it’s
very easy to digitize shots from our Sony DVR-1000 playback deck
into a bin in the On-Line Express. Once I sync them up on the
timeline, using either a visual reference, clapper slate or timecode,
I can then can make cuts or dissolves between up to four isolated
sources by either clicking on the mouse or punching the keys numbered
1 through 4 on the keyboard. This feature gives me a whole new
level of postproduction capability."
One of the most interesting projects Alan is currently
working on covers NASA’s transportation of the Chandra X-Ray
telescope (named in honor of the late Indian-American Nobel laureate,
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar) from TRW’s West Coast manufacturing
site to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch. "This
mini-documentary will show future customers the capability of
the Space Cargo Transportation System," Alan explains.
"The DV material is transferred to the hard
drive connected to our On-Line Express and put into an AVI file
using 2.5:1 or 3:1 compression ratios. It lends our productions
a very professional look."
NEW TERRITORY
A recent innovation Alan Surgi has tackled is distributing
projects on CD-Rs, burned directly from his On-Line Express. "This
gets me into applications such as After Effects and Media Cleaner
Pro, which is kind of new territory for me," he tells us.
"But it lets our end users easily access a visual record
of what Lockheed Martin Technical Operations is doing at Vandenberg.
It’s just one more example of the flexibility the On-Line
Express system gives us."
The current Version 2.7 real-time editing software
for On-Line Express is a major advance for United Media, but several
of its features pay tribute to the company’s legacy of building
tape-based linear edit systems.
"United Media introduced our first system,
called the Commander, back in 1976," explains Rob Ricci,
vice president of Sales at United Media, "and we started
making nonlinear editors just 5 years ago. Our experience with
tape editing is reflected in our current products and this has
proved appealing to many longtime editors. For example, there
are far fewer pull-down menus in our On-Line Express than on many
other digital systems. Since we were one of the first editing
companies that began writing NLE software when real-time capabilities
started to become available, we have always provided the kind
of interactive feedback that editors rely upon to enhance their
creativity.
"We also make an optional jog/shuttle module
available with an accurate frame-stepper, since many editors don’t
like to be dependent on mouse control – especially when digitizing
their source material," he says.
Another nifty trick On-Line Express offers is the
Auto Storyboard feature, which allows users to simply click on
a succession of clips in the desired order to drop them onto the
timeline. The system can even be set to automatically insert pre-set
transitions or effects such as dissolves or fades between the
clips. That way, once the material has been digitized into the
system, the user can output a photo montage-style rough-cut assembly
of a project in about the time it takes to describe it. Users
can also work on multiple timelines simultaneously and share the
bin material between them.
On-Line Express provides four video tracks (soon
to be unlimited), 4in/4out balanced/unbalanced audio tracks with
visible VU meters and the waveform displayed on the timeline,
and supports 16:9 editing. Its 2D DVE effects and transitions
on each video stream are all real time as is its luma- and chroma-keying,
so no rendering delays the editing process.
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MATROX DIGISUITE
Running on Windows NT and powered by On-Line Express
editing software, the family of On-Line Express real-time digital
editors are all based on Matrox DigiSuite digital video boards.
At the Vandenberg Air Force Base, Alan Surgi uses the model incorporating
the uncompressed Matrox DigiSuite board, but there are also versions
using the 1.3:1 compressed video (510 kB/frame) Matrox DigiSuite
LE card and other On-Line Express systems using the DigiSuite
DTV board, which empowers DVCPRO25 and DVCPRO50 editing in its
native format. It can also use the stripped-down Matrox DigiSuite
LX card, just announced at IBC in Amsterdam, that is limited to
DVCPRO25 applications.
Both the DigiSuite DTV and LX offerings can directly
render out MPEG-2 files for DVD authoring. The system supports
dual-monitor editing displays along with an NTSC picture monitor,
thanks to Matrox DigiDesktop or G400 VGA boards. As you would
expect, it also supports many third-party plug-ins, including
Inscriber, Boris FX, Hollywood FX, Ultimatte, Film FX, SpiceMaster
and Sound Forge.
OFF-THE-SHELF EQUIPMENT
"We’ve designed our software to work
on standard off-the-shelf equipment, although we do recommend
the Medea hard drives," Rob tells us. "The On-Line Express
software by itself is available for $2,995, or as a turnkey system
directly from us complete with computer, two 19-inch VGA monitors,
DigiSuite video boards and 120 GB of Medea storage for around
$19,000."
From the original Commander to the current On-Line
Express, United Media has made a competitive name for itself by
offering innovative edit systems to several generations of editors.
Now that it supports multicamera editing, On-Line Express can
bring impressively sophisticated postproduction capabilities to
a much wider community of editors.
Jay Ankeney is a free-lance editor and postproduction
consultant based in Los Angeles. Write him at 220 39th St. (upper),
Manhattan Beach, CA 90266.
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