Media 100 Breaking Through

"Everything we do is critical and under deadline", says John Buck, owner of Velocite, a major post facility serving clients all over "Down Under". "A company like ours cannot afford down time or an editing approach that is anything less than the best. That's why we depend on our several Media 100 systems."

Based out of Surry Hills, a leafy suburb of Sydney, Australia but with a branch office in Shanghai, China, Velocite is the post production center for many international TV commercials such as the Qantas Airways and Cargill Foods spots that aired during the Super Bowl as well as several TV shows including "Backstage Pass" for Australia's Nine Network.

As a former MTV Award winner, Buck swears by his Media 100 Producer software on an Apple Powerbook laptop running the latest OS 10.4.7 for enabling him to keep pace with his hectic editing-without-borders schedule. In fact, he recently took his Media 100 system to Bangkok, Thailand on the inaugural flight of Australia's new low cost airline, Jetstar, for a series of prestigious commercials that had to be shot and edited within a 24 hour turnaround. The spots were shot in high definition using a Sony HDW-F900 HDCAM camcorder and a HDV Z1 HDV camera, edited on location with the help of portable LaCie hard drives, and the onlined finished files were sent overnight to the client's FTP site for broadcast in Australia the very next day.

“I don’t think any other post production package on a laptop except Media 100 Producer would have let us complete the project under that schedule,” Buck insists. “It gives us what we want, when we want it and where we need it.”

That's a quantum leap from Buck's beginning as a tape-to-tape newsroom editor just over a decade ago.

"I started cutting 3/4" tape at a TV station and immediately was attracted to the speed and flexibility of the Media 100 nonlinear disk-based editing approach," Buck recalls. "I had run across a magazine story about an editor on the TV cop show 'NYPD Blue' who had test driven the Media 100, so when I started Velocite back in 1995 I figured that system would give my company an affordable cutting edge."

During those days Buck was running the Media 100 board-and-software set on a Macintosh Quadra 840 with a 3 gigabyte hard drive digitizing source material off borrowed Betacam decks. But since then his Velocite facility has purchased three standard definition Media 100 systems and one Media 100 HD Suite running the new vers. ion 11.5 software just released in October 2006. He's convinced that his company's success has been due in large part to two things: having a good accountant, and the amount of features Media 100 offers for the investment.

"Without question, being an early adopter of Media 100 was the best decision I have ever made," Buck says.

Buck finds one of the strengths of the Media 100 system is its shallow learning curve despite its professional features. "When I'm training new editors I tell them not to over think the process," he says. "I've taught three novices how to post professional projects within 30 days of starting on the system and don't think we could have accomplished that with any other nonlinear editing approach."

These days, in addition to TV commercials and high end corporate videos, Buck's Velocite facility is posting "Backstage Pass", a popular weekly music show for Australia's Channel Nine that has recently included interviews with iconic music stars such as The Red Hot Chile Peppers and Chris Isaak and Hollywood luminaries like Tom Cruise.

"The challenge with 'Backstage Pass' is that we need to incorporate material from everything including HD sources, DigiBetas, hand-out tapes, JPEG graphics from album covers and even home movies," he describes, "and the whole thing gets sent to the network's on air department in the 16 X 9 aspect ratio every Friday directly from our Media 100 system."

But that’s only the beginning, since Buck and his editors at Velocite simultaneously remaster “Backstage Pass” in 4 X 3 format to become part of Qantas Airline’s in-flight entertainment programming on flights out of Australia.

“Qantas does not want to letterbox the material they show their passengers, so Media 100’s ability to output multiple formats from the same timeline is key for us,” he says.

The new version 11.5 software on his systems at Velocite also allows Buck to output the “Backstage Pass” projects as a QuickTime movie which he can send to an audio sweetening facility for use as reference for their sound mixing. “They use the QuickTime version as a guide for the OMF files we provide on disk with each show and send us back a completed AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) track,” he says. “Then we just drop it onto our timeline and the project is finished.”

But if Buck had to single out one aspect of Media 100 that puts it over other NLE’s ,it is the system’s reliability. As he puts it, “I know that every time I tell it to master a show from the timeline, I can just walk away and have a cup of coffee. Once I hit ‘output to tape’, the hardware/software combination is so solid I never have to worry about dropouts or missing multilayered scenes. That is critical for a schedule like ours when we absolutely have to deliver material either to a major network or our clients on deadline.”

Buck gives Media 100’s new owner, Boris Yamnitsky, a lot of credit for keeping the editing software ahead of the pack. “They listen to the users and have added lots of new features like the ability to ingest from Panasonic’s P2 solid state recording directly into the system,” he says. “As a result, Media 100 is not in danger of becoming an isolated island of technology. You can bring in what you want and output what you need. That makes the system in my mind really cool, and a lot of that can be credited to the energy Boris has brought to the latest version. It’s a beautiful irony that he was with the system at the beginning, and is now back at its helm. That’s good for all of us.”

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