Case Study
Tour de France
Apple-based editing of the 2007 Tour
Every July for the last three years a short corridor tucked away on the third floor of Soho broadcast facility Molinare becomes a temporary bike rack. Not for any old bikes you understand, but for the expensive lightweight racing kind, favoured by the enthusiastic production team of Sunset + Vine which provides ITV’s comprehensive coverage of the Tour de France.
The 2007 Tour was especially significant as the ‘Grand Depart’ took place in London and, with more than two million turning out to watch the Prologue and Stage One, UK interest in the race was at an all-time high. The producers had a 15-strong team based at Molinare for the recording, editing and playout of the Tour stages with a further crew on the road as part of the 4,500 strong entourage which accompanies the Tour on its three-week, 3,500 km odyssey.
Two years ago, producer and Tour veteran James Venner (15 Tours) and freelance editor Peter Wiggins (11 Tours) appreciated that fast-turnaround sports were the last bastion of tape-based editing; they wanted to add extra editing capacity whilst staying within the existing budget and started looking for a suitable non-linear solution. The problem was that traditional NLE solutions weren’t up to the required task of instantly viewing and editing incoming feeds. The recording of the file had to be stopped for it to become available to the edit suites. As some of the mountain stages are over eight hours long, waiting until the end of the day’s race wasn’t an option.
While pondering this issue the pair, both committed Final Cut Pro fans, discovered PictureReady! software from Gallery, a Mac OSX application that had been introduced primarily as a means of allowing sound editors to get on with their job without having to wait for a whole film to be captured. In fact, the application proved equally valuable for video editors as the traditional digitising process can be circumvented and material accessed immediately. Wiggins explains. “The software ‘fools’ FCP into thinking that it’s working with a closed QuickTime file. This means you can begin working with material only seconds after it arrives and while the recording is still taking place. Even now, people don’t believe that until I sit them down and show them.”
Working with Molinare who would provide the UK base for the project and Apple Solutions Experts root6, the team devised a combination of Final Cut Pro systems working on an Apple Xsan network with nine clients – a completely groundbreaking solution in 2005.
Fast forward two years and the bikes are back. Ten days into the Tour and all’s going well with TV ratings well up on previous years. ITV will broadcast 55 hours of coverage, with a one hour highlights show every evening and live coverage at the weekends as well. The broadcaster’s website itv.com will feature daily video highlights, a video diary from UK cyclist Geraint Thomas and a daily ‘behind the scenes’ podcast compiled by Matt Rendell and Chris Boardman. By now, contenders are starting to emerge and storylines coming together. A theme that will come to overshadow the Tour presents itself on this day when German state networks ARD and ZDF pull the plug on Tour de France live broadcasts in the wake of the latest positive doping test involving German rider Patrik Sinkewitz.
But all’s well in London. At Molinare, in addition to the daily material provided on the multilateral live feed from the host French broadcaster and the feeds from Sunset + Vine’s travelling French crew, Wiggins has fast access to more than 500 hours of archive material on the Xsan – nothing is ever deleted. No one is lost for words either. The knowledgeable duo of Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen in the commentary box has to keep talking for as long as eight hours on the more gruelling stages.
Ongoing technical support is provided by root6’s team lead by Graham McGuinness whose primary concern was, “That the client retained access to every frame of material at all times.” Comforting news, as he provided the same high quality support on the last three Bond movies.
In the control room, two loggers work on the incoming live satellite and ISDN feeds keeping up with the action using a database specially built for the system around FileMaker Pro. Entries are automatically referenced against timecode and are updated instantly on the other FileMaker clients around the building. This aspect of the production is expected to grow substantially with expanded web publishing of the database and proxies to the crew in France.
All suites currently run on Power Mac G5s, the team will move over to Intel, Mac Pros and Leopard next year. Having the latest and greatest hardware & software isn’t a particularly good idea in a mission-critical situation; Wiggins & McGuinness locked down the software versions a month before the Tour. Two suites are used for editing, where, as the day progresses, the QuickTime files grow dynamically inside the FCP browser. Finished packages are reloaded to the server as self-contained movies.
The graphics suite is responsible for the considerable amount of on-screen information that accompanies the Tour. A VizRT machine has been connected to the Xsan for the ITV Sport house-style graphics such as leaderboards and name supers. Other editorial graphics are created in Apple’s Motion.
A third Mac sits in a conventional tape suite. Here material is repurposed using FCP to add value to content, for example for posting to websites and for the daily podcast. This G5 also runs Virtual VTR software where a standard edit controller enables QuickTime files to be laid off to tape for archiving or played directly to air from the Xsan.