Symphony, Believe It or Not

Michael Goldman

Mar 1, 2001 12:00 PM

In some shops, Avid's Symphony technology has almost completely replaced traditional online bays for producing final, ready-to-air Digi-Beta masters. Case-in-point: TBS' weekly, 45-minute show Ripley's Believe It or Not, now in its second season.

The show is finished at Matchframe Video, Burbank, by senior editor Terence Curren, a longtime traditional online editor who has enthusiastically embraced Symphony. According to Curren, each Ripley's episode features an average of 2,000 2D and text effects. He says that with Symphony, it takes just two and a half days to finish a show, while in a traditional online bay, he would need a week and a half.

“In truth, we couldn't produce the show the same way if we were using an online bay,” he explains. “Creatively, this would be a far different show. That's because, by working in the Avid environment in an uncompressed video format, we can use the same EDL as the offline editors and quickly digitize their elements and use them exactly as the offline editor intended, rather than trying to replicate them on other machines. That means the producers can essentially design the entire show in the offline process, without having to stifle creativity, and then quickly march it through the online process.”

Curren offers an example from an early episode in season two, in which offline editor Paul Morango created a three-minute segment about a so-called “cyborg man” who had a digital chip in his arm. “He used Media Composer's title tool to create over 1,000 effects out of graphic elements in very cool ways, things like showing binary code flickering in the guy's eyes,” explains Curren. “When I onlined it, it took a couple hours. I didn't have to start from scratch. We could never have done that many effects in three minutes in the past. I even perform final color-correction work in Symphony. These are big changes for our industry.”

Matchframe currently sports four Symphony seats, all networked within the Avid Unity storage environment.