The Importance of the “Sort by Date” command

An overview on the evolution of post-production environments

Over the years, with the advent of hard disk-based post-production tools, the average distance covered by a conventional tape has fallen dramatically. Only a few years ago a tape would move from edit to graphics to sound and back to edit again.

The material would be stored onto the master tape and producers could walk down the facilities corridors knowing that the original copy of their masterpiece would be safely tucked underneath their armpit.

Now that all the resources are shared on hard disk raids, and that different facilities can access these raids, new problems are rising.

On one hand, we are entering a magic world where the time wasted shuttling through tapes is zero. On the other, we are trapped in an inferno whereby multiple versions of the same product are spread all over the network.

Let’s face it, the chances of simultaneous edits of a single project in edit, graphics and sound considerably reduces costs, and we all know that money, in post-production, is a key issue.

For example, take a look at the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the filming and production of which took place at the same time. Accomplishing such a huge task would have been impossible had it not been for the possibility of sharing the footage across multiple platforms at the same time. For the first time ever, a film director could preview CG effects and do composite movie tests while he was shooting the second episode, making it a turning point in the movie industry.

I know that the amount of post-production data in the Lord of the Rings was enormous, but we can downscale the scenario to a conventional TV company.

As an example, let’s look at the production of a generic promo for a TV program. The producer logs the source tapes and creates an EDL for the video editor. While the editor loads the material into the editing system, the producer goes to the graphics department and asks his graphics designer to come up with ideas for some text effects.

As the graphics designer sips his coffee thinking of the options, the producer goes to the sound department and explains his concept to the sound engineer and leaves 2/3 CD from which to grab some music.

At this point three different facilities are operating at the same time and on the same project with no visual references. So far so good.


What do we have 24 hours later?

The video editor has cut a 45-second promo and has saved the rendered file labeled “promo1.0” on the shared drives. The graphics designers have imported the file in their compositing system and have started rendering a couple of text effects. Now what should the graphic designer do? Save the rendered effects previously composed on the footage and call it, say “promo 1.1”, or save the file with the alpha key so that the editor can composite the effect into his system?

Just remember that today’s video editing systems are much more powerful than in the past. Some system features such as color correction, keying and tracking are really competing with traditional Graphics systems such as After effects or Smoke.

Now back to our promotion. The sound department has produced the 1-minute “promo music1”, requested by the producer basing it on the “promo1.0” low -res video from the shared drives. As it is being sent across the network, the producer pops into the room and with a smile announces: “Bad news guys, we don’t have the rights to use some of the footage so I have to re-cut the promo from 45 seconds to 30. Oh and by the way, the beats per minute in music should increase to fill that gap…

What we have now is the video version “promo1.1” and audio version “promo music 2” and possibly a “promo 1.2 “file from graphics.

After 2/3 days of work the number of files increases exponentially and just like that, we will find our shared drives and the local machines storage packed with multiple versions of the same projects.

At this point there is a computer command that has become as essential as the “copy paste” function and that is the “sort by date” function.

It is exactly like spotting the last thing on a conventional tape, but is much quicker… Regardless of the label or the file type format, the “sort by date” is the only tool that can show the most recent files produced and indicate which ones can be deleted.

Unfortunately not all the technology allows simultaneous editing on the same physical file, so for the time being we will be forced to copy files from and onto the shared storage.

The above “promo 1.0” is of course an example and all producers can overcome these file-conflict issues. At the same time drive-based file management is essential for big post-production facilities or multi channel TV stations.