A workflow that combines technologies from Sony and Avid is being used to advantage in production of the new Fox series, “Million Dollar Money Drop.” The show is shot with 17 Sony HDC-1500 HD studio cameras and recorded onto 18 Sony XDCAM PDW-F1600 decks. A special six-deck ingest station was constructed around six Avid Media Composer Version 5 systems to handle the complex editing requirements.
“There were huge amounts of material coming in quickly that had to be multicam/synced in standard-def for an efficient workflow,” said Bill DeRonde, editor and co-owner of Chainsaw, the high-end Hollywood post-house that is editing the show. “The post teams were literally working 24/7 to ingest the footage in real time, when we realized there was a much faster and far more efficient post workflow solution available.”
The Media Composers are operated in a shared Unity storage system, with content linked to low res proxy video and audio using Sony’s File Access Mode (FAM).
“This is the first time this workflow--using AMA/Media Composer /FAM proxy video and full-res audio from dual-layer discs--will be seen on prime-time television,” DeRonde said. “We were worried that we'd have to delay edit sessions waiting on ingest because traditional real-time digitizing had a hard time physically getting that much material into the computer on time. But Media Composer allowed us to fully leverage Sony XDCAM's file-based workflow and make a nearly impossible timeline completely manageable.”
“Million Dollar Money Drop” is recorded at Culver Studios in Los Angeles.
