Focus on Editing: Jay Ankeney
Laptop Editing at NBC
You’re an editor right at the scene of the action, riding
an adrenaline rush, cutting a breaking story from within a packed
remote truck. The increasingly diminished size of our edit systems
has made this task possible for many years, but always with the
trade-off of either lugging hundreds of pounds of linear equipment
in your nomadic pack, or sacrificing the quality of the result by
choosing a portable disk-based system that uses severely compressed
video.
 Now,
however, NBC News’ Southwest Bureau Editor Alan Gillham, one
of the network’s most traveled news cutter, and Video Engineer
Gerard Butler from NBC News Technical Services, headquartered in
New York, have demonstrated it’s now possible to bring the
full capabilities of a major nonlinear edit system loaded with totally
uncompressed video into the thick of wherever late news is breaking.
Gillham recently cut packages for the Today Show and NBC Nightly
News, on-location in Oklahoma City to chronicle the execution of
bomber Timothy McVeigh, using one of Apple’s new Titanium PowerBook
G4 laptops empowered with Version 2 of Apple’s Final Cut Pro
editing software.
"As a devoted Windows fan, I’ve been waiting for some
of the major editing manufacturers to present us with a satisfactory
software package designed for a portable Wintel platform,"
Gillham said, "but about the best they have come up with can
only handle DV25-quality video. Of course I’d long-used a Mac-based
Avid Media Composer back in the studio, but now I’ve found
that the rugged new Titanium PowerBook G4 is about the best computer
system I have ever worked with."
HAVE PACKS, WILL TRAVEL
When Gillham began with NBC News 11 years ago, he worked with
the field reporters in a cuts-only mode by hooking two Sony BVW-75
Betacam decks together. After trying a few A/B roll systems, they
settled on a Sony BVE-2000 controller driving four BVW-75 VTRs.
"I had to pack it into 14 travel cases," he recalled,
"and ironically we first used the system on a remote assignment
about 7 years ago to cover the original Oklahoma bombing tragedy
itself."
Having to lug around 700 lbs. of editing equipment without an
assistant, Gillham yearned for a lighter load. The resolution of
his situation actually began two years ago when Vice President of
Network News Field Operations Stacy Brady encouraged her editing
team to explore the possibilities of remote laptop editing.
Gillham and Butler first set up a PowerMac G3 laptop with Final
Cut Pro’s earlier Version 1.1 software to cover the Gary Graham
execution in Huntsville, Texas. Of necessity, they were still in
the compressed video realm but at least Gillham was out from under
traveling with a mule train of equipment cases. "The network
producers who were airing our stories didn’t notice our change
to disk-based technology," Gillham said, "but the consumer-level
hardware codec we were using just didn’t give us the quality
of video we wanted for a network story. So I went back to cutting
my packages on tape using the Sony 2000."
Then in January, Apple released the PowerBook G4, and Tech Services
Engineer Gerard Butler started searching for ancillary technology
that could take advantage of the G4’s power – especially
its unique Velocity Engine subprocessor. "This was all part
of the whole initiative that Stacy Brady had been pushing,"
Butler explained, "to find a way of utilizing new technologies
to save NBC money while giving us greater editing capabilities in
the field."
Butler eventually found Magma’s CardBus PCI expansion chassis
into which he installed two 36 GB hard drives, giving editor Gillham
45 minutes of uncompressed storage. He eventually chose the Pinnacle
CinéWave board to handle the digital video, and because the
CinéWave offers serial digital interface I/O, selected a
Sony BVW-55 Betacam deck to input and export video over SDI with
embedded audio in the field. The BVW-55 also gave the system audio
monitoring and a second video screen to view the source footage.
This put the whole package into three carrying cases, totaling about
50 lbs and ready for work anywhere in the world.
 WAVE
OF THE FUTURE
Al Henkel, field producer for the southwest bureau of NBC Network
News based in Dallas, has been involved with every story edited
on their G4 laptop. "I’ve always felt that editing a story
on-site gives us a better product," Henkel said, "because
it makes the editor more of the process. It also lets us incorporate
late-breaking footage without sending it back to the home plant
first. Of course, once the tapes have been digitized into the G4,
the satellite truck can send the raw footage anywhere we want. This
is the wave of the future."
Recently, Gillham spent a week in New York demonstrating uncompressed
video editing on a laptop to everyone from editors and engineers
to the president of NBC News, Neil Shapiro. Apparently, they were
all very impressed. "I’m so pumped about the whole deal
because this G4/FCP 2 combination makes my job so much easier. If
you can put a nonlinear system into someone’s hands and let
them edit on an airplane or in the back of a car while keeping the
video uncompressed, you have solved almost every problem I used
to run into," Gillham said.
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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