Early in my career as a Post Supervisor I was hired onto a show at the start of production. Instead of having a few weeks to plans and test the post production workflow, I was brought on after the Production Manager had booked and planned everything. I should have known there were going to be lots of problems when the Lead Editor walked in on the same day as me. “Think we can get Bob editing by lunchtime,” the PM asked me while handing me my start paperwork.

“Lunchtime! I thought today was the first day of production. Do we even have any footage from the field?” I asked. But it was already too late. One of the most important phases of Post Production is also its least understood. Episode Preparation is the set of activities between receiving raw footage from the field and cutting the first frame of your show. Understanding these vital and necessary steps will help you create accurate schedules that keep your show on budget.

The list of activities below are usually the domain of experienced Assistant Editors. As a producer you don’t need to know ‘how to’ do them, but having a solid grasp on the concepts will allow you to knowledgeably enter the conversation.

Copy: When raw footage from the field arrives, the first step is to copy it onto whatever storage your show is using. On large multi-editor shows, this is often a shared storage system, like Avid’s Nexis. But copying is necessary even if you plan on editing locally or using a ‘sneakernet’.

There are multiple factors that affect your show’s copy process: the first is how much total storage your show requires; the second is how much time your team will need to import the footage. Most post houses will ask you three questions to estimate your needs:

Which codec are you recording? How much footage will you be recording each day? How many total shoot days?

Transcoding: Cameras often record video in a format that is not optimized for your NLE. These are often referred to as acquisition formats (like xdcam or XVAC) and can cause playback issues if you try to edit with them. Therefore many workflows will require your team to convert the raw footage into something ‘NLE friendly’ like ProRes or DNxHD. We call this process transcoding and boy does it take a long time! Since our NLE’s do not include tools to measure how much time this step takes, testing is the only way to reliably estimate how much time your support team of Assistant Editors will need.

Organization: The next step is a general high-level organization. This is work an Assistant Editor will do to get themselves set up for the next 2 steps. Consider this like a post production mise en place. This step does not require much time, but your show’s project level organization will reveal indicators of future potential problems. Your Assistant Editors should have their own Avid project separate from the rest of the team. Inside of this project your AE’s have their work bins. If your facility allows it, your AE’s should have their own Volume for their work.

Too much access can be problematic down the road if editors or story producers get into sync-stacks or un-Grouped footage. On one show a pushy editor insisted that he have access to the AE project. One night while “searching for missing footage” he irrevocably ruined work sequences. Instead of prepping new material the AE’s had to spend the better part of a week reworking footage; setting the show further behind.

Syncing: Syncing is the process of lining up all of the camera footage in simultaneous and chronological order. So let’s say the your production team recorded an art gallery opening with five cameras. Syncing is when the Assistant Editor creates a timeline in which you could see what each camera was taping at that particular instance in time.

Then let’s say there was a fight. We’d be able to see that perhaps Camera A covered the fight from in front of the main cast member, while Camera B covered the fight from behind her. Syncing would also reveal that Camera C was outside covering a conversation between two of the guests and how they reacted to finding out there was a fight going on.

Syncing is time consuming and error prone work. Building a good “Sync Stack” requires hours of unbroken A.E. attention. On average, I estimate that it requires 1.5 x – 3x more time than the amount of raw footage being covered. So a 3 hour scene will, on average, take an A.E. anywhere from four to six hours to build a clean sync stack. It is very important for this work to be done correctly because errors here will carry on to the next phase.

Grouping: Grouping is the process of converting the “Sync Stacks” into a clip that allows the story producers and editors to cut between camera angles quickly. While you could theoretically edit directly from a stack, the Grouped Clip is akin to a control room where you jump from camera angle to camera angle with the click of the keyboard in real time. Grouping is extremely important in many genres of Reality television, like competition and docusoap. It is less important in the other formats like single camera comedy or documentary.

Grouping used to take hours and require complex keyboard macros, but on my recent show we used the game changing GroupItForMe. Developed as a web application that automates the Grouping process, this service creates flawless groups in seconds! Few products are as revolutionary as this one. Do your show a favor and budget in the $500/month cost for their unlimited grouping option.

Bin Distribution: after your AE is done creating the Groups sequences, they will need to distribute their work to the editorial teams. Effective communication is the most important aspect of this activity. On all of my shows I ask my Assistant Editors to write shift reports that describe the work they completed, where the work is located, and any challenges they experienced along the way. These Shift Reports become a vital tool down the road when we have to troubleshoot problems for editors or our online facility.

My teams also create something called a “Media Status Grid” in Google Sheets. This sheet allows us to track footage at every stage of the episode preparation phase. Every show I’ve worked on has had a “Media Status Grid” but every show’s sheet has been different. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that the grid must be created organically. Every team member who uses it must make a contribution to help make it their own and specific to the individual needs of the show. In the future, I’d like to look into using a real database. The web application Airtable looks promising too.

Conclusion: The activities above are the minimum required to get an unscripted show ready for edit. Variations in your show’s workflow can have an enormous effect on the amount of time episode preparation requires. In addition, activities such as Import and Transcode could have numerous sub activities; like manually distributing the transcode across multiple available workstations. Until NLE’s provide us with analytic tools to measure workflow efficiency, you’ll need to develop methods to keep an eye on your show’s progress or hire someone who is technical and articulate to help keep tabs on the episode preparation progress.

And as for Bob, we didn’t get him editing until Thursday. A huge success in my book, but the PM wasn’t happy that she had to explain that our Lead Editor was idle for three days to a cadre of executive producers. Accurate planning, helps set accurate deadlines. Accurate deadlines, allow producers to perform their most important function: managing expectations.