An insight into Voom's HD production/postproduction

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Sean Mota

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http://www.accom.com/products/tvtech_nov04.pdf

by Jimm PopowytschDirector of Engineering11 Penn TV/Rainbow MediaNEW YORKEleven Penn TV is the production/ postproduction arm of Rainbow Media andprovides post-production for Voom’sHD satellite service.

The facility has 32 non-linear standard-definition edit suites, three Avid Unity servers, seven nonlinear high-def-inition online suites, one HD linear suite,three studios and a sprinkling of Final CutPro and Avid Xpress workstations.

A little more than a year ago, my division was tasked to create an HD post facility to handle content creation for the Voom HD channels. This made us take a hard look at the resources we needed to accommodate these channels. After discussions with the producers and heads of each channel, we came to the conclusion that we needed offline editing, nonlinear online edit-ng and a full-blown linear online room. ALL REAL-TIME Linear editing is all real time—no waiting—and in many instances is the moste efficient way to get the job done. Once the decision was made to have a linear online room, it was up to me to find the best fit. Looking at what was available and who would run the room became a big concern for our linear editing system. Since good linear editors are harder and harder to find, I needed an edit system that was easy to operate and would be familiar to an old-time online editor. We decided to use the Accom Axial 3000 for its excellent feature set.

What makes it work for us is that Accom has spec files for HD cameras as well as our Snell & Wilcox 1012 switcher. It was good to see this room come alive just like any SD room I’d built in the past. Another great thing about the 3000 is the familiarity the engineering staff has with the box. Working at other facilities, we knew that the Accom 3000 was reliable and would give us the greatest flexibility. Since we installed our Axial 3000, we edit up to 16 hours a day in our online room with virtually no downtime due to equipment failure. Rave and Anamania are themost frequent users of the room; Rave is editing classic Montreux Jazz festivals in HD and Animania has been using the room to reformat all its programs. The amount of use our linear HD room gets has amazed many of the staff here. With everyone so focused on the nonlinear environment, it’s good to seethat there is a place for linear techniques in an HD world.
 
Sean...this is cool. We need to see more stuff like this to appreciate what VOOM really does. As a production person, maybe I am more interested than most.
 
ditto!

But, again, I'm in this business so I find reading what others are doing very interesting. I still do linear editing here too but mostly it's for doing simple commercial inserts to betacam air dubs, setting up commercial air dubs with slates etc. For this, I would never be without a good linear edit suite. We use it every day.
My basic editors are 3 work stations running Vegas 5.0 and some other software for effects.
 

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