BURLINGTON, Mass.—Avid is congratulating customers that worked on programming that received awards or were nominated for awards at the recent 74th Annual Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards. 

Those programs included Outstanding Drama and Comedy series winners “Succession” and “Ted Lasso”.

Highlighting the trend of remote collaboration for his editing work using Avid Media Composer from New Zealand with producer Peter Jackson, Jabez Olssen took home the award for Outstanding Picture Editing for A Nonfiction Program for “The Beatles: Get Back”. 

“Our user creative community counted on Media Composer to help them deliver yet another year of totally captivating entertainment, from feels-good to nail-biting moments and series,” said Jeff Rosica, CEO and president, Avid. “Across Avid’s team, we’re thrilled to see our customers winning big and taking Emmy recognition for pushing the boundaries of storytelling in television and film.”

Avid noted that virtually all the nominees as well as the winners of this year’s Outstanding Drama and Comedy Series awards relied on Media Composer editing software to deliver productions like “Barry”, “Succession”, “Stranger Things”, “Better Call Saul”, “Euphoria”, “Squid Game”, “Only Murders in the Building”, “Hacks”, “Ted Lasso”, and “Ozark”, among many others. 

HBO’s returning hit show, “Barry”, took home the Emmy for Outstanding Single Camera Picture Editing for a Comedy Series, while also notching two other awards among its 14 Emmy nominations. Cutting on Avid Media Composer, Ali Greer, received her Emmy for “Starting Now”, the show’s riveting season three finale.

TOKYO—For-A was one of many companies recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for the 68th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards, specifically for it FT-One camera. The ultra-high-speed 4K camera was recognized for “Live Production Technology Beyond HD to Achieve Non-Interpolated Video for Instant Replay.”

Designed for live sports production, the FT-One is capable of capturing footage at up to 900 fps. The FT-One has been used at a number of high-profile sporting events and broadcasting projects, according to For-A’s announcement.

“We are very pleased and honored to receive this distinguished and prestigious award for our technology and engineering efforts on the FT-ONE camera,” said Katsuaki Kiyohara, president of FOR-A. “This would not have been possible without the commitment, dedication, and tireless efforts of our dynamic engineering team at FOR-A.”

For-A, along with all other recipients, will receive the award during the Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards ceremony at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas on Jan. 7, 2017.

NEW YORK—A group of companies already know they are going to go home winners as the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences have announced the recipients of the 68th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards.

One of the winners includes Tony Werner, president of technology and product for Comcast Cable, who will receive NATAS’ Lifetime Achievement Award. Werner joined Comcast in 2006 and has overseen developments like DOCSIS 3.0 and the X1 platform. Prior to joining Comcast he was senior vice president and chief technology officer at Liberty Global. He also currently serves as president and chairman of the Board of Directors of the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers Foundation.
Here are the other winners for the 2016 Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards:
Live Production Technology Beyond HD to Achieve Non-Interpolated Video for Instant Replay:

• Evertz
• EVS
• For-A

Concept of Opto-Electric Transduction:

• Telcon (Alcatel Lucent-Submarine Networks)
• Society of Telegraph Engineers (Institute of Engineering and Technology)
• Siemens

Development and Standardization of Media Object Server (MOS) Protocol:

• Media Object Server (MOS) Group

System for Executing Targeted Household Advertising on Linear Television:

• Invidi Technologies
• Visible World

Pioneering Invention and Deployment of Fiber Optic Cable:

• Corning
• Bell Labs/Western Electric (OFS)

Pioneering Technology to Automate the Digital On-Line Assembly of Broadcast Content:

• IBM Corporation
• Laser Pacific/SCAA (Technicolor)

The ceremony recognizing all winners will take place on Jan. 7, 2017 in Las Vegas during CES 2017.

LOS ANGELES—The award honors an individual or organizational achievement in the television arts and sciences that is so exceptional and universal in nature, it goes beyond the scope of annual Emmy Awards recognition.

” ‘American Idol,’ wasn’t just a hit show. With its successful integration of social media, dominance of the pop-culture conversation and legions of imitators, it changed television in a profound way,” said Governors Award Selection Committee Chair Michael Levine. “You could meaningfully divide the history of television into ‘before ‘American Idol,’ and ‘after ‘American Idol.’”

Simon Fuller created the singing competition, which ran from June 11, 2002 to April 7, 2016 on Fox, and served as its executive producer for all 15 seasons.

For an eight consecutive years, “American Idol,” ranked No. 1 in U.S. television ratings and played to a worldwide audience of 460 million across 53 countries. Its innovations in audience participation through text-based and mobile voting led to nearly a billion votes cast throughout its run.

Produced by FremantleMedia North America and 19 Entertainment, the groundbreaking series received 59 Emmy nominations and won eight Emmys. Additionally, “American Idol‘s” talented discoveries have won 13 Grammys, two Golden Globes and an Academy Award, among numerous other accolades.

The show also had a profound impact on the music industry, launching the careers of superstars Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Hudson, Adam Lambert and Chris Daughtry, among many others. “Idol”contestants have sold more than 60 million albums, resulting in more than 80 Platinum records and 95 Gold records. Its participants have generated more than 450 Billboard No. 1 hits and sold more than 260 million digital downloads.

Previous recipients of the Governors Award, which debuted in 1978, include William S. Paley, Hallmark Cards, Inc., “Masterpiece Theater,” “Comic Relief,” the ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC networks for “America: A Tribute To Heroes,” the “It Gets Better” Project and last year’s honoree, A+E Networks.

NEW YORK—How difficult is it to mix audio for a major network sports event?

“Sit in front of your television,” said Phil Adler, a longtime broadcast mixer whose credits include five Olympics and a pair of Super Bowls. “Turn on your favorite show, then turn on a couple of radios and dial in two different talk radio stations; make sure to put them off to the left and right, or behind you, then bring both up in volume close to the TV show you’re watching. Oh, and turn on your laptop and start working on it at the same time! Now listen to what the director, standing on your right, has to say while the producer talking in your ear is making comments. Easy!”

TV Technology recently spoke with a panel of highly experienced sports audio broadcast engineers about the challenges they face and the developing trends in the industry. Joining Adler were Fred Aldous, senior mixer and audio consultant for Fox Sports, the recipient of 23 Emmy Awards and a recent inductee into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame; four-time Emmy-winner Dana Kirkpatrick; and Paul Zerang, audio engineer for the Chicago Blackhawks NHL team.

TV Technology:What kind of sports events are you working on these days?

Aldous: I currently mix the “A” NFL game for Fox Sports with Joe Buck and Troy Aikman. As of late I have gotten involved with education. I consult with CRAS, an audio recording school in Arizona; I helped build the audio curriculum that is being taught today. Up until this past spring I mixed NASCAR on Fox for the past 15 years.

Phil AdlerAdler: I’ve been mixing live television sports events since 1988, for CBS, Fox and other networks. This will be my 21st year working with the NFL. I mix boxing for Showtime, have done five Olympics, and two Super Bowls. I work for CBS on one of their Sunday afternoon NFL games; they take about six months of my time. I also handle college basketball. I was a rock ’n roll mixer for 10 years before I got into sports audio.

Kirkpatrick: I freelance and work a variety of sports events, golf, mostly at ABC, and college football, plus figure skating, two Super Bowls, and the “Wide World of Sports.” I worked on golf for Fox this summer, and for the last four or five years had done a lot of work in London mixing gymnastics and ski events for the Olympics. This July I mixed the tennis Hall of Fame event in Newport, R.I.

TVT:What are the main issues confronting audio engineers who have to present both surround and stereo mixes in real time?

Kirkpatrick: The problem currently is that nobody has come up with the definitive way to do Surround Sound. All we’re told is that they want to broadcast in Surround Sound; we end up figuring out for ourselves how to get it done! Television trucks have to have a stereo program throughout. Monitoring in the truck is in stereo, since that’s still what the majority of people are listening to. Some audio mixers create a downmix by taking a 5.1 mix and running it through a Dolby DP563, and route that all around. I just create a stereo mix using a Calrec console by taking the output of the six groups and sending them to a stereo buss to create a pure stereo mix. Do these two approaches yield a different sound? That’s the rub, nobody really knows.

ESPN demands an upmix in circle sound. This fall in my studio I can—at the punch of a button—compare true stereo from stems with a Prologic-encoded stereo downmix; I’ll let you know what I find. Some mixers simply turn off the rears and that’s their “stereo” mix—the left and right speakers mix with the center. NBC is big on 3.0 upmixing. We use the left and right sides and keep the center channel discrete. No final standard is in place at this time.

Adler: Regarding mono to stereo, stereo to 5.1, and analog to digital, there are a number of painful transitions for live sports going on. Some things that work great in fi lm translate to television, but other things don’t. 3D, for example, can be very effective in fi lm, but it doesn’t work for sports. It’s been tried in football, without much success. Same thing applies to audio. In fi lm, a director is thinking about multichannel sound from the beginning, and has time in the post process to get things right. In the fast-paced world of live sports we don’t have that luxury. If you want surround audio, all you can do is slap on an algorithm.

Here’s what we face in live sports: Going from mono all the way up to 5.1, the challenge is to get as immersive as possible for the viewer while keeping the announcers and commentators clear and dominant. It’s a bigger challenge than ever now because of 5.1. With mono there’s not much the end user can do to muck up the sound. Some of these $300 receivers can do an automatic level adjust, but if you’ve got a small center speaker and larger left and right speakers, and an overcranked sub-woofer, the sound can be hideous! Viewers then call up the network and start bitching that they can’t hear the announcer; we have conference calls every week about this. There’s a 6 dB of separation between center channel [announcers] and everything else, but the way things are set up in a home the distinction can be lost.

How do I make the audio sound good? I do my homework, listen to a downmix, with commercials, listen at home, on a small desktop system in my office; it’s like listening to a record mix on a cassette and taking it into your car.

Fred AldousAldous: I do one mix; it is a 5.1 mix. The left/right downmix is created from the 5.1 stems. I have learned over the years by primarily listening to the downmix [of which most of the viewing audience does] what my 5.1 mix is doing. By having to listen to a director, producer, associate director, my comms panel and the mix, it becomes quite overwhelming to add a 5.1 mix to that; by listening to the left/right mix it helps eliminate some hearing fatigue.

TVT:Do different sports require different mixing techniques?

Aldous: Yes. I do two different types of mixes depending on the sport. For NFL I mix from a fan’s perspective sitting in the stadium, what I call the “observers mix;” I build a 360-degree sound bed of crowd (all Fox shows are in 5.1), in an effort to create the image of the fan sitting in the stadium. I do, though, take them to the field for the quarterback cadence, line hits and sideline camera angles. The field of play never leaves looking forward so all of my field effects are from that perspective.

For NASCAR I did what I called the “POV” or point of view perspective, taking the viewer to the cameras around the track. We [the audio team of submitters and A2’s] took the viewer trackside to the camera position and let the sound come through the room [front left to rear right]. Since most tracks are round or oval and the cars go counter-clockwise, the cars usually enter the frame from the left and leave the frame camera right. This creates a great effect.

Adler: Golf (which I don’t do much of) is very different from other sports. There will be a mixer who handles the microphones out on the golf course. He or she premixes and feeds them into the main mixer. The audio mix goes back and forth between what’s live and what’s been prerecorded. For example, the announcer will say, “Let’s go back to the 16th hole.” A submixer is sending the prerecorded audio back to the truck. The same thing goes for auto racing— sometimes there’s even a third guy who mixes in-car audio only.

Dana KirkpatrickKirkpatrick: I’ve experimented in gymnastics and figure skating; rather than using one or two upmixers, I’ve used four or five, so that I can mix crowd microphones, for example, and keep them separate from music. I create effects for each phantom center independently. What typically happens is that a gymnast will finish a routine and head off an apparatus, at which point the image collapses, because you’re crossfading from the microphones covering the station to the microphone on the handheld camera that’s following the athlete. The Audio-Technica BP4029 is able to maintain a 5.1 image while cross-fading from five or six crowd microphones to one handheld camera. Not many mixers are using this technique, but I find it to be very helpful in maintaining the surround image.

Gymnastics is one of my favorite sports to work on. Mixing audio for gymnastics is a game of managing the ambience levels so they’ll match when you go from a huge arena with a screaming crowd to a closeup of the gymnast walking off a piece of equipment. In football, the crowd noise is a constant, more or less, but to get the fine detail of a gymnast walking off an apparatus you have to close everything and only open the audio on the handheld camera, and that camera microphone has to have the same basic characteristics as the crowd mix or else the image will collapse. I handle that by using the stereo microphone on the Audio-Technica handheld and upmixing it and the crowd microphones separately. That way, I have control, and when I crossfade to the handheld camera microphone it’s matched in its characteristics with the crowd mics.

The same principle applies to figure skating. You’ll have a loud arena and the next moment you want to go to a coach and figure skater on the boards before the routine. To hear them you have to open up the handheld microphone and close down everything else, but you still need to maintain the wide image. I’ll EQ the handheld microphone so that I can crossfade and have the EQ and width sound very similar to my crowd microphone. This is what I’ve been doing for the past five years.

TVT:What tools do you rely on?

Paul ZerangZerang: I used Shure’s Axient Wireless System during the [NHL] Winter Classic and Stanley Cup Final for the Chicago Blackhawks, with the NHL’s great frequency coordination and Axient support. With these systems, we experienced full stadium coverage with no RF dropouts, even with all of the world’s media wireless crowding.

With Axient, the interference detection and avoidance is flawless, and its show link is also a very valuable tool. With its real-time remote control of the transmitter, the audio engineer can change frequencies from up in the booth instantly and monitor the battery level, gain control and RF muting.

The battery system is an advanced lithium-ion rechargeable battery that lasts much longer than anything I have ever used. Getting four hours in dual mode is pretty solid, as well as the charging stations if you want flawless wireless.

Kirkpatrick: I rely a lot on the A-T BP4029; I use it in the start house for ski racing, figure skating, gymnastics, and football. All of the Audio-Technica stereo microphones have the same characteristics, so it’s easy to blend between large diaphragm microphones and those on their handheld cameras.

I’m also a big fan of Calrec consoles. We use the extra headroom these boards have. I don’t even compress any more. With golf for example, there are certain things, like a driver hitting a ball, where you want every bit of level. I love everything about Calrec; the sound of their boards is excellent, they’ve got routing all figured out; the manufacturer is very easy to work with; and their software is constantly getting updated. The Artemis and Apollo are the two boards I work mostly with.

Adler: I use a lot of Audio-Technics stuff, depending on the sport. In football we use four to six parabolic wireless microphones that roam the sidelines, and microphones to pick up the crowd. Football is a bit more limited; I have used A-T stereo microphones for crowds. I have a variety of their stereo microphones. I use them for ring overheads in boxing, for example. Most of the time I’m mixing on a Calrec console.

LOS ANGELES—Brian Merken, A.C.E., received the Emmy statuette on Sept. 12 for “Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing For A Comedy Series” for the episode “Two Days of the Condor” for HBO’s hit “Silicon Valley.” He recalled it as the payoff for the greatest gamble he ever took.

“Don’t tell my daughter,” Merken laughed, “but I quit college halfway through. I left Santa Monica City College just as I was beginning their film school track when I landed a production assistant gig. My film school turned out to be all the editors and production people I would meet on the job.”

Merken actually got the editing bug from a fourth grade teacher whose husband, Herbert Neil Travis, won an Oscar for cutting “Dances with Wolves.” A neighbor down the street, Barry Gold, who was editing “Pacific Blue” for the USA Network, introduced Merken to the Avid Media composer during off hours, got him on board as a production assistant, and helped him get into the Editors’ Guild.

Merken’s first assistant editor’s spot was on “Malcolm in the Middle,” working under Steve Welch. “A lot of my own editing style was learned from Steve,” he said. “He was one of the fastest guys on the Avid I’ve ever seen. It was very fortunate that I was able to work continuously for the first 12 years of my career moving from ‘Pacific Blue’ to ‘Malcolm.’”

(L TO R): Kumail Nanjiani, Zach Woods, TJ Miller and Thomas Middleditch in the “Silicon Valley” episode “Two Days of the Condor”GOING SOLO
Merken got his first solo editor’s credit on the short-lived “In the Motherhood,” and went on to work on a few other primetime footnotes, but it’s the geek-hip HBO comedy “Silicon Valley” that has given him the chance to really let his editing chops shine.

Merken gave us a glimpse of his work schedule on the “Two Days of the Condor” episode that won him the golden statuette. It was written and directed by Alec Berg.

“I like to watch all the dailies myself,” Merken began, “but it is handy for troubleshooting that my excellent assistant, Brian Bautista, logs everything into the Avid’s ScriptSync (aka Scriptor) function. We have three to four days to complete our editor’s cut, then another three or four to work with the director. Fortunately, during the whole last season of ‘Silicon Valley’ directors Alec Berg and Mike Judge were our show runners so they were in town and always busy on the set. Once an episode wrapped, we’d hit the ground running to lock the final version.”

As Merken described it, the plot was more linear than most of the shows, so “everything had to work as one. That meant I didn’t have the usual B plot that I could cut to when I needed to re-orient the structure.”

Essentially, the “Condor” episode’s storyline has to do with a bunch of young and eager code writers living in a startup incubator of a crash pad run by entrepreneur Erlich Bachman (T. J. Miller). One of them, Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) who works at a large Internet company called Hooli, developed a rad app named Pied Piper that contains a killer data compression algorithm. Hooli wants it, and has taken Hendricks before binding arbitration claiming he wrote Pied Piper using their equipment.

At first the judge seems to rule against Hendricks and the upstart coders, so Hendricks covertly texts his compadres to delete Pied Piper from their servers to keep it out of Hooli’s greedy mitts. But then the judge unexpectedly reverses himself on a technicality, and Hendricks has to scramble to save his software.

(What does all this have to do with a Condor? You’ll have to watch the episode on iTunes to find out.)

Matt McCoy (L), and Thomas Middleditch from the “Silicon Valley” episode “Two Days of the Condor”ONE CALAMITY AFTER ANOTHER
It’s that scramble to prevent the erasure of Pied Piper that builds the climax of the episode. Right after Hendricks hears the judge’s reversal, he knows he has to stop his friends from wiping Pied Piper from the servers, and what follows could be called “throwback” comedy. Just as the Steampunk movement mocks modern technology with a centuries-old aesthetic, the writing, editing and acting in this sequence brings Mack Sennett-style film construction into the digital age.

First Hendricks’ cellphone battery dies. Out of contact, he races for his car. But he drops his car keys and accidently kicks them down a sewer drain. No problem— he grabs the phone in a nearby coffee boutique only to remember that the number of the incubator pad exists only on speed dial on his dead phone. Then he dashes onto a city bus, grabs the driver’s cellphone and emails an urgent “Don’t Delete” message— but its unrecognized sender address promptly gets the message dumped into a spam folder.

Still, all is not lost because the goofballs back at the house have decided to have one last beer before deleting Pied Piper. But it’s a wheat beer, which of course necessitates finding a lemon before they can properly consume it. The problem is the lemon has to be cut from their neighbor’s tree. And then… you get the point. One calamity after another delays sending the “Don’t Delete” message while its intended recipients stumble over themselves until just as Hendricks gets to the front door, they hit the “Erase” button.

Fortunately for them, and the future of the series, the software deletion routine they had written fails and Pied Piper is preserved. But the accelerating energy of the intercut travails between Hendricks desperately trying to prevent the deletion and his buddies being incapable of actually pulling it off produces an energy epitomizing the dynamism of high bandwidth editing.

“The only segment we moved around in the edit bay is the second time the guys go outside to pick a lemon from their neighbor’s tree,” Merken said. “We needed one more jump to extend the checkerboard between Hendricks trying to get home and his friends dallying over sending their beloved Pied Piper into ‘cyber eternity,’ so we worked the sequence into having them go for a second lemon to improve the comedic timing.”

As is often the case, a lot of Merken’s editing comes from instincts gained from years sitting at an edit console. But I noticed a continuity in his cutaways where each time he spliced in a reaction shot, the person was seen to be responding directly to the character addressing him.

“I like to keep the flow of energy circling around the room,” Merken said. “I’m sure I learned a lot of this from the editor who was my most appreciated mentor, Steve Welch.”

It looks like that gamble to drop out of school paid off pretty well for Merken. Just don’t tell his daughter.

Jay Ankeney is a freelance editor and post-production consultant based in Los Angeles. Write him atJayAnkeney@mac.com.