Popular factual television producers, Shine TV chose professional post-production software, Forscene for logging and edit preparation on the second series of “Hunted” for Channel 4. Forscene was used by a team of 18 loggers and eight editorial staff to log, search and review the 17 000 hours of media recorded during the making of the series.
“Hunted” explores whether it’s possible to disappear in a country under constant surveillance. The series debuted in 2015 and features a cast of ordinary Brits attempting to disappear for 28 days and avoid being caught by a team of expert hunters. Producing the second series involved 28 consecutive shoot days with 20 cameras spread across six groups of fugitives, six teams of hunters, Hunter Headquarters and a backstory crew. Knowing that these teams would produce an enormous amount of footage, Shine TV identified logging as a key focus area – and created workflows for each of these groups that relied on Forscene to keep track of every clip recorded.
For the fugitives and the team in Hunter Headquarters, every move and word from multiple recording devices needed to be synced, logged, tracked and searchable. In addition to using multiple cameras to capture all the action, all cast were wired for constant audio recording. Every night the rushes were collected, ingested to both Forscene and Avid storage and used to create a sync map of each team’s day in Avid. These sequences were then sent to the edit team who cut each day into story or activity chunks that were exported as AAF’s and imported to Forscene for verbatim logging. The AAF import to Forscene allowed a seamless rebuild of the Avid sequences, bringing in multiple cameras, track names, audio level adjustments and multicam effects. X-key panels and Forscene keysets were used to speed up logging and ensure consistency in the metadata - essential for later searches. The hunter and backstory teams had simpler workflows, with hunters following a more traditional activity log and the backstory team logging verbatim against single media sources. Each day a total of around 150 AAFs were transferred between Avid and Forscene to feed the team of 18 loggers.
“On the first series our team viewed sequences in Avid while logging in Word,” explains Paul Jones, head of post-production for Princess Post Production. “It was far from ideal - manually entering every timecode slowed data entry down and we couldn’t index or search our logs. On the second series, with Forscene, our loggers had access to multi-layer sync maps in the cloud on commodity level PC’s. We were able to support three times as many loggers and provide the editorial team with a fully searchable set of logs paired with the actual content - and it’s much more cost effective!”
Once the main shoot and logging period was over, the production transitioned to the full craft edit which ran across eight Avid suites – each overseen by an edit producer with full access to Forscene. With so much source media, the ability to search using the logs was imperative during this edit. By using Xkeys and keysets in Forscene to format keywords, names and phrases, the team had created a strong data set and producers could search, read and view content in Forscene very easily alongside the Avid edit.
“Shine TV makes some of the most exciting factual television in the UK,” says Jason Cowan director of business development for Fobidden. “Forscene’s use on the second series of “Hunted” demonstrates how the software enables producers like Shine TV to push the boundaries of great entertainment, creating better content, quicker and more cost effectively than ever before.”
For more information visit www.forscene.com
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About Forbidden Technologies plc
Forbidden delivers high-performance cloud video services for media makers and broadcasters. Its flagship product, Forscene, is the world’s most advanced cloud-based professional video editing software, powering entirely new workflows from creation to delivery. Quoted on the London Stock Exchange, Forbidden partners with high-profile media and technology companies to complement its cloud infrastructure and provide greater value and efficiency to its clients.
More information about Forscene can be found at www.forscene.com
