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Final Cut Pro & Xserve RAID in Malaysia

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Introducrtion
The Tour de Langkawi in 2005 was nothing new to me as an event, I¡¯d already covered seven of these for VTV since 1998. What was new though was the fact it was the first time a nonlinear solution was going to be deployed. Fast turnaround sports are the last vestige of traditional linear edit suites ? they are quicker to use and don¡¯t suffer from crashes. An awaiting satellite feed and large Asian audience won¡¯t wait for you to do a quick reboot. So with the full backing of my director and production company, my Final Cut Pro edit suite was flightcased up and shipped out to Malaysia for a month. Read on for the story.

I suppose the purchase of a brand spanking new 5.6 Terrabyte XserveRAID had provided the trigger for the possible use of FCP on the TdL. (Incidentally, if you ever buy one of these, don¡¯t open the box it comes in from the top, pull the plastic lifting handles out of the side first. Interestingly, the unpacking instructions are packed inside the box!) Before the XSR purchase, I relied on a SCSI Medea RTS 480 and although this had worked without a hitch for 2 years, 5 hours of 10bit uncompressed just isn¡¯t enough for a sports event that lasts 10 days. This leads to the nightmare of having to selectively delete clips as you go and believe me, it¡¯s very frustrating when you come to make highlights at the end of job!

So, the 47 hours of storage the new purchase had made available were surely going to be enough to have landed on planet Neverdeleteanything. (If you are an Avid user don¡¯t compare times as you are probably working in softer 8bit.) The other trigger factor about using FCP was the Director¡¯s push that we should move the coverage on a bit this year. For the last 7 years we had more or less used the same ¡®format¡¯ for the show. Now before you think we took a leftfield approach and did something radical, a cycling race has a start, middle and end and unlike a Tarrentino film, you can¡¯t really get them out of order. What we did do though was use more colour pieces to break the action up. Malaysia is a beautiful, diverse and interesting country and the cycle race tends to cycle past most of it without stopping. Enter Asha Gill, a Malaysian reporter/DJ/celebrity who the race organiser thought would do a good job of showing off her country to a wider audience. Now, although a lot of her pieces ¡°would be run as a onner¡± to quote a famous TWI executive producer, there would be quite a bit of package editing to do. The show gets transmitted to an international audience at such an early TX time, one edit suite wasn¡¯t enough to cope with the editing pressure, so a second edit suite was going to be needed anyway.
Now don¡¯t get me wrong, although I love my FCP setup, I¡¯m still a huge fan of editing on tape. Maybe it¡¯s because I can put in a huge bill because the number of skilled VT editors is decreasing everyday, but it¡¯s probably more the complete real time nature of tape and the lack of digitising & laying off to tape that does it. The man who invented pre-read was a complete genius, even though he thought it was only a cool way to see what you were recording over! The Tour de Langkawi is rather a special event as the whole race is covered by ENG cameramen. Actually, to call them that is a bit unfair as sitting on the back of a motorbike trying to film a cycle race in the rain is not an easy task. However, when the sun shines you get a tan, something us edit suite dwellers never get the opportunity to do, returning from a foreign job looking the same colour as we left. My friends down the pub have learnt a long time ago not to ask if the weather has been bad when they see me for the first time in a few weeks.

There are three motorbike cameramen who work on the TdL, cunningly called Moto1, Moto2 and Moto3. The idea being Moto1 stays with the leaders, Moto2 stays with the chasers and Moto3 is at the back of the race mopping up stragglers or shooting ahead and waiting for the race to go through to film ¡°pass bys.¡± There is a lot more to covering a bike race than that, but let¡¯s leave it there so I don¡¯t blow a load of hard earned trade secrets in a paragraph!

The quickest way to edit these down into a transmittable programme in a short time is to have a tape suite with a digibeta deck for every Moto (let¡¯s face it, anybody could do it in a week; doing it in 4 hours is a bit trickier). Traditionally that¡¯s the way the half an hour highlights had been made. Oh another thing to chuck into the equation is that we also have an OB van with 5 cameras covering the finish as the bikes have to divert for safety and of course the tapes from the helicopter.

So you can see if you wanted to cut all of this on a non linear, you would probably still be digitising when the TX time arrived. So this year we actually had two edit suites, my FCP setup and the four machine digibeta suite manned by my colleague, editor Rob Blake. It would be a case of mix and match, use each suite what it¡¯s good for, fiddley bits on non linear, long racing chunks on tape.

Getting the kit there
The actual logistics of getting the kit there, the carnet and through customs was, thankfully, handled by the production company. Although my kit regularly goes out on OB¡¯s, it¡¯s normally been in the soft brown flightcases, ok the cardboard boxes it came in. Time to get everything flightcased and luckily I happen to live close to the Flightcase Warehouse who did a superb job of measuring everything up. My G5 is actually this one in the picture!

Everything got picked up even though it meant carrying a 60kg XSR in flightcase down two flights of stairs. Let¡¯s fast forward to the Crown Plaza hotel in Kuala Lumpur, where five days later I got a call in my room to say the gear had arrived. I should have known something was up as the front of the XSR case didn¡¯t look right. It was fairly obvious from the chunk missing in the side of the case that it had been dropped from a fairly high height. Probably about the height of a 747 I would guess. Who has any idea how robust an XserveRAID is when travelling, who knows? but I was about to find out.

Dead, completely dead. No noise, no happy lights no anything. Never mind, what¡¯s the first rule of fixing anything technical that¡¯s not working after it has been moved? If you said reseat all the boards that¡¯s exactly what I did, three times. Still completely dead. Feeling slightly sick I decided to turn my attention to the G5. Well, the power light came on and I could hear the fan, but no display. Not what I¡¯d hoped for but one up on the XSR. I use Motion a fair bit (A review of Motion1 here if you¡¯ve hadn¡¯t read it already) and because of this I bought myself the Nvidia 6800 Ultra. Slide the G5 door off and a resounding click of the GPU beast back in the PCI slot bought the G5 into life. Another reseating of the two power supplies, two fan units, two controllers, two battery backup units and all 14 400gig drives of the XSR was not so fruitful, still dead. Only one thing for it, head to the bar. If you¡¯ve ever met me in a bar, you know I like the odd beer or two. Apparently that night I wasn¡¯t particularly good company as there was one thing on my mind; the now defunct XSR.

I got back to my room and decided to have another go at trying to fix it before I threw it out of my hotel window. Which would have been a real challenge for the robustness of the Apple metalwork as I was on the 32nd floor. Having removed all the things I could remove from the unit, I decided to take it to bits and see what had happened. My worry was that the PCB that runs perpendicular to the drives had cracked. If it had I would definitely have no means of propulsion up that famous waterway. Quite a few screws later, I had the lid off, problem found.
If you are familiar with the XserveRAID, then you will know it has RAID5 protection, redundant power supplies, redundant coolers/blowers/ redundant battery cache and dual fibre channel controllers. It has however only one ribbon cable connecting the power switch to the PCB and at the switch end the ribbon connector had fallen off. If you happened to be in the next room in that hotel in KL that night, I apologise, because my shout of ¡°I AM A MAC ENGINEERING GOD¡± at three o¡¯clock in the morning must have woken you up. Either that or it was the hotel floor lights dimming when I triumphantly powered the thing up at last. Bed.
Pre editing
So if the race starts in Langkawi, why have you got your kit setup in a hotel room in KL? you might ask. The decision had been made to edit the titles and associated stings out in Malaysia so it all could be wrapped into the same budget. What we had done though was predigitise the previous 8 years archive tapes so we had some footage to use. It was the 10th anniversary tour after all.

I was using two 23inch Cinema displays and unfortunately the second DVI to ADC adaptor that I¡¯d ordered through the Apple Store had failed to find / reach my door before I had left for Malaysia. The Nvidia has two DVI outs. Through Apple Europe (Thanks Dave C and Peter Barber in Singapore), I had been put in touch with the local Apple Reseller & maintenance company. (Just in case anything went wrong!) Mazlan from Axis Computers very kindly dropped the new adaptor into the hotel and as he had never seen (and nearly didn¡¯t!) a 5.6TB XSR before wanted a picture of him next to it. Interesting, he used to work for the Petronas Towers and said that the whole building had only a 2TB RAID to service the operations of the buildings. If you are not too hot on the tallest buildings in the world section of Trivial Persuit, The Petronas Towers in KL were the tallest until the completion of Tapei 101 in Taiwan. The now ¡°Tallest Twin Towers in the World¡± stand at an impressive 491m - I only know this as I see it written everyday on my ¡°twin towers¡± fridge magnet. An interesting benchmark for storage capacity outside of video files though.

Mazlan also had a laugh at the power switch story, but as he remarked there was little he could have done to help as there were no spare parts for the 5.6TB version in Asia. So titles made, the next job was to install the kit into a converted bus for the tour. This bus would then drive to the start of the race on Langkawi, then move to the finish each day in the mornings. The bus was stationed at TV3, the ¡°host broadcaster¡± for the tour and after a few hours everything was in place and working. The screens, monitor, & digibeta would all travel in flightcases on the floor. Now, it takes about an hour to get up the coast in a plane from KL, it takes considerably longer by bus and ferry. This gave rise to the problem that we had a day and a half on Langkawi before we could do anything, oh no!
I expect you think the next paragraph will be how much sunbathing we did and how much alcohol we managed to consume, well it would have been apart from two things. The Tsunami had hit the coast of Thailand & Malaysia just over a month ago and although Langkawi had managed to escape the big wave because of its sheltered outlying islands, there was still a slightly unnerving feeling on the island. Langkawi is so close to the Thai border, yet all that happened was a bit of flooding. Indeed, the owner of the Oasis beach bar told the story of how she and her staff were laughing as they had to recapture all the chairs that floated away. When the water had subsided, her dancefloor had been completely washed away and that¡¯sw where we are standing in this photo.

 

 

Back to the race
Well, it all worked and worked very well. I¡¯m afraid I haven¡¯t any stories of edits from hell or further computer engineering feats. What it did enable us to do though was to polish up the beginning and end of each of the shows. FCP allowed us to incorporate more graphics from the networked Viz and do some nice transitions such as customised wipes with a travelling animation. Motion paid its airfare too, allowing the creation of graphics with video embedded, something that would have taken too much time in a traditional suite.

I suppose the only problem we had was the bus and equipment not turning up! The first day on mainland Malaysia proved to be somewhat fraught as the two edit suites were stranded on Langkawi due to the fact the ferry had missed the tide. One OB truck that couldn¡¯t get to Langkawi in the first place because of its size & weight was positioned at the finish already. That was to be our only facility for that day. Paul Ryan who does an excellent job as technical co-ordinator for Sunset & Vine had to go into the maternity hospital where the truck was parked to ask permission to set the commentary position up in their covered corridor. I won¡¯t detail the entire story, but I¡¯ll just say he had to barge in on the senior doctor who was inspecting an expectant mother at the time. I¡¯ll let you sort out the mental picture!

Well, we made air and the show looked ok even though all the editing was done machine to machine with no proper audio monitoring. TV3 did a sterling job of driving two more digibetas up from KL and wiring the OB truck up for the extra workload. The downside was that we had to remake the show with all the trimmings for the international version that gets syndicated round the world.
Job done, it was time to head home after a month away. Our last task had been to edit an hour¡¯s highlights which was going to be shown on Channel 4 a couple of days later. This would be voiced by one of the commentators, Phil Ligget back in London. By exporting a burnt in timecode DV copy of the show, it meant that the script could be written on the plane on the way home. Pretty cool and it also gave us an extra half a day¡¯s shopping in KL!

Back in the UK, it was time to unpack the kit and power it up for my next job. Guess what, get the XserveRAID out of its new flightcase ? (which incidentally took only four hours to make on the eve of Chinese New Year) go to power it up and yeup, you¡¯ve guessed, nothing! This time I went straight for the screwdriver and took off the lid. The ribbon cable was still attached to the power switch, but it had fallen off the other end!

My final line is that because the FCP experiment proved to be such a success, the decision was made to use FCP & Xsan for the ITV coverage of The Tour de France, but that is another story, take a look at: www.apple.com/uk/pro/video/tourdefrance

Peter Wiggins is a high profile broadcast editor working on non-linear & tape edit suites. He also owns a 10bit ¡®fully loaded¡¯ Final Cut/Motion/Shake edit suite. In between editing he also manages to squeeze in consulting, R&D, beta testing & writing. www.peterwiggins.com

Date: 01-02-2006

 

 

 


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