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Filed under: Post Production •Production •

Large Scale Final Cut Pro Installations, Part II

PVC: So what are the important things you need to teach new editors when about your workflow when they first start editing for you?

DB: When somebody comes in the door we give them a style guide for whatever series they’re working on at that time and that style guide is generated by the producer of the series. The producer can creatively communicate what this series is about and what they’re looking for. Technically, my lead assistant editor sits with the new person for approximately an hour on their first day and takes them through our post bible. The post bible is a ridiculously large document taking them through, ‘This is how you record VO. This is how you name different clips. This is how you label your A-roll. This is how you label your B-roll. And this is how you find your media on the SAN and this is how to read your script. This is what the timecode refers to.’ We also have them sit with a lead editor on that series so the editor can talk to them peer to peer about what the show is and what the producers are looking for and then they watch numerous sample episodes to get on the same page. New editors usually come in and they cut half a show. So they don’t cut four acts of a four act show, they cut two. It gives them an opportunity to get their feet wet. It gives us an opportunity to make sure they’re on the right page before we totally jump in with both feet. So it’s a bit of a training process but if you end up having these strict rules for new people who come in to the building, the editors appreciate it so much. “Oh you guys are so organized and I know where everything is and I can find it.” It’s down to the tapes being in their bay and labeled and the shelf is labeled with the episode name and number. And every show has a folder with all the stuff in it. It has the pitch that went to the network. It has the field producer’s reports. It has the transcripts and the logs and everything. So as an editor sitting in the room, they can work 100% autonomously and not worry about when the producer is going to deliver something. They have everything at their fingertips and they can just move forward.

PVC: What are some typical errors that occur in this workflow?

DB: A lot of people will forget to set their Capture Scratch. So you don’t know where the files are being written to. People will send it to Final Cut Pro documents. People will send it to their internal hard drive or inside some random folder. They don’t understand the system. If an editor was working in that bay during the day and they recorded voice over, then person coming in after them also needs to record voice over for their episode, they may forget to change the clip name, so voice over for their episode will not be labeled correctly. It will be labeled so that it looks like it’s attached to the show the day editor was cutting, which could be a completely different series.  So it’s little detailed things like that where we ask our editors to not only be editors and be producers, but be assistant editors at the same time to some degree where they’re double checking their work and going slowly. We’d rather have it done slowly and done right than to do it wrong and have to do it twice. So, it’s things like that that aren’t catastrophic, they’re just like “If you’d just checked when you opened the VO Record Tool to rename the clip, we wouldn’t have to be tracking this down.”

PVC: Do you have tips for people managing media for FCP?

ST: Number one to the success of the process is having a unique clip name.

The second one is understanding media management enough so that when you media manage a project you know where you need to “Cry Uncle” and to know what you solution is - how to get back out of that. For example we know there are certain issues about clips that have speed changes on them. So we know if we media manage a project, we’re going to have to contend with that. We always need to make sure that we have to manage the process and if there are certain clips that we have to back to the original off-line and move those manually, cut those clips over to make sure those shots are where they need to be for the final finish.

PVC: How do you back up the project data?

DB: Once a show has gone through the on-line process and the audio process we archive the project data and send them out of the building. The media we don’t worry about. If we ever need to re-create it in the future we can. And for our ProTools sessions, we back up the project with the media and archive all those and send them out of the building. Each night the editors back up their projects locally, so it’s saved both to the SAN and locally to the editor’s machine.

ST: Most of our stuff is manually managed. We have a very tightly built internal process of how clips are handled, how they’re digitized, where they’re stored, how they’re tracked. We do all of our media tracking - what we do is again through an internal custom-built FileMakerPro database - so we do have software that will poll our SAN and it’ll make a list of all of the shows that are on each drive so we know where media is stored, so when it comes time to deliver a show, we give a little pad to make sure that there are no notes that are going to come in and then at that time the media is removed from the SAN and we move forward.

PVC: It sounds like you guys have Final Cut media management down to an art.


ST: We are very happy with Final Cut Pro. It’s allowed us to do things that when we were an Avid shop that we weren’t able to accomplish. Avid is a fabulous tool and it does magnificent things, it’s just that at the time we made the switch over Final Cut really opened up the creative doors for us to do things that we weren’t able to do with just an Avid at the time. And it’s really expanded our capabilities and made Pie Town the success that it is.

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Great article.
I am a new member on this site.  Where is or how do I get Part 1?

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  01/16  at  11:37 AM

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Great read. However, I never read the first part of this series, ran a search for it and everything. Anybody care to tell me where they hid “Large Scale Final Cut Pro Installations, Part I” so I can read that too?

Posted by Easy Street  on  02/14  at  05:30 PM

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