BRIMINGHAM, ENGLAND— Maverick TV is an independent television producer and part of production giant all3media, the U.K.’s largest independent television, film and digital production and distribution company. Maverick TV often shoots on location to capture the lives of the people in the shows in ways that are impossible to shoot in a studio.
To remain competitive in today’s environment, we are always looking for tools to make our work go easier and faster. One of these tools, we’ve discovered is Forscene from Forbidden Technologies. It’s a cloud-based production platform that allows users to securely store, review, log, edit and export their content. We’ve long been using Forscene on productions in a variety of ways.
PARING DOWN MOUNTAINS OF FOOTAGE
Currently I’m shooting an observational documentary and in order to be as unobtrusive as possible, I’m serving as a one-man crew. To capture the right moments to help tell the story, I shoot an enormous amount of footage. I’ve been shooting since last fall and have accumulated several hundreds of hours of content. Ultimately this material must be cut down into four one-hour programs. Imagine being the editor who has to view all of those unedited rushes to unearth just a few gems!
Paul Kittel Fortunately, Forscene is there to help me in reducing what would otherwise be an overwhelming amount of footage.
To avoid bogging down the post-production team with video that will never be used, I rely on Forscene to let me prune the footage as I go along and create rough cuts for easier editing further down the line.
I use a Sony camera along with a wireless adapter to transmit content directly to Forscene immediately after shooting with no need to digitize it first.
In the evening, when I get home or to my hotel room I merely log in to Forscene to view the footage that’s been stored and whittle this down to the most useful bits. It’s not uncommon for me to reduce 20 hours of footage to perhaps 30 minutes of rushes.
ROUGH CUTS DONE IN THE FIELD
However, I don’t stop there. After weeding out the footage into a block edit, I use Forscene to refine it even further, creating a rough cut before handing it off to the editor back at the office. This rough-cut editing reduces the amount of work done later in the edit suite, which saves time and money.
Forscene allows me to do much of the prep work before the footage ever gets to the editing team. Before Forscene, I’d have had to wait until I could get back to the edit suite before even starting to wade through the rushes, let alone do rough cutting.
Now, with Wi-Fi in my hotel room or my home office, I can start editing as soon as I log in. Forscene’s offline editing capability eliminates the lag time and inefficiencies that often come with remote production, allowing you to start the edit session with a lot more confidence, knowing that you’ve already honed the shoot down to manageable rushes. Those are really big benefits for this project or for any production with high volumes of footage; especially those that require quick turnaround.
Paul Kittel is a freelance producer and camera Operator. He may be contacted atp.kittel@mavericktv.co.uk.
For additional information about Forscene, visit Forbidden Technologies atwww.forbidden.co.uk.
