Going Avid...

Little Frog in High Def by Shane Ross

…as in “going native.” Get it? OK, sorry…moving on.

I have a new project starting up in June. This is a revival of a TV series that aired on the Discovery Channel called “A Haunting.” The name is changing slightly to “An American Haunting,” but will pick up where the last series ended, episode number wise. This time it is going to be aired on the new DESTINATION AMERICA network, one of their secondary channels.

This will be an interesting project, as it is being produced by New Dominion Pictures out of Suffolk, Virginia…with interviews done around the country and re-creations being shot on the New Dominion backlot in Suffolk…and post will happen in Los Angeles. Well, not only L.A., two of the three editors will be here. The third is on the east coast, based out of Philly, although he is relocating to Virginia for the production so that one editor is at home base. The assistant editor will also be in Suffolk in the main offices, and will prep the footage for the editors there.

(New Dominion was a very busy production company 10 years ago, with multiple shows happening at the same time. But they had to shutter their doors and sell off just about everything when the re-creation market dried up in favor of cheaper “reality” programming. Thus the need to re-build from the ground up).

It will be shot with the new Canon C300, and we will have two of them going. The camera shoots to MXF in the XDCAM format, and that is only one of the reasons we have decided to use Avid Media Composer, and Symphony, to cut and finish this show. We will use AMA to access the media, then consolidate it to our drives, keeping it in the native format. In many cases, these files will then be grouped as multi-camera clips. We’ve done a few tests, and it seems to work well. And the plan is to finish using the Symphony software, that all of us editors will have anyway. read more...