CBS’s Joan of Arcadia Visions and Revisions Happen in HD

At Modern VideoFilm, summer has never gone by so quickly. One of the busiest pilot seasons in memory meant highly compressed production schedules and brutal deadline pressure. Thanks to Modern’s four-year history posting in HD for broadcast – as well as having the right tools in the edit bay – editor Roger Berger was able to make his drop-dead deadlines on CBS’s divinely inspired Joan of Arcadia without keeling over.

Shot in 24p, Joan of Arcadia is being talked up as one of the best-looking on the fall schedule, so expectations are running high. That’s nothing new to the Modern crew, which posts a majority of its episodic work in HD. The facility boasts seven HD telecines, five HD edit bays, and is adding a third 2K color corrector. Berger edited the Joan of Arcadia pilot in a Quantel iQ suite, starting by bringing all of the source material and an EDL from the production office into the iQ, putting it together and building some effects (such as resizes, optically faked camera moves, and a couple of transitions), and then outputting to tape.

Of course, that’s not the end of the story. As time became critical, and the production office fired back a series of revised edit lists, the iQ became Berger’s best friend. "We’re able to load a new EDL for a revised cut and output it almost immediately," Berger says. "The machine knows it has the material, it finds it, and it puts together a new timeline, so the turnaround is really fast. We went through a number of revisions quickly and painlessly."

Changes were being ordered even after color-correction had taken place. "When the show is 99 percent finished," Berger explained, "you can still go back and add a couple of shots to the color-timed master, then use the color corrector to match and integrate the new scenes seamlessly."