MTV’s My Own Goes Tapeless

The MTV show My Own, which debuted last month, is an unusual hybrid of reality and dating show with a streak of karaoke. Much like the show, the production and post workflow is also a hybrid of disciplines.

Click Here to take a video walkthrough of this workflow at Studio Daily.

In its production and post pipeline, My Own mimics live sports and news by featuring a tapeless production and post workflow — including the hot concept of iPod dailies. The system was the brainchild of the show’s executive producer Billy Rainey, who asked Avid Technology and Wexler Video if it was even possible. It was an intriguing idea for Wexler Video Senior Post Production Engineer Lorey Andres, who has put together similar solutions for live sports events.

Andres said he and his team at Wexler, with assistance from Avid Technology, presented three options. “We gave them the option of a traditional offline and online with Avid’s 2:1 resolution,” he says. “But that put us in a bit of a bind, because 2:1 equals two minutes per GB of storage, which is a lot more than we could provide. The second option was to use the Media Composer’s 15:1 compressed resolution, but then they would have had to online the shows and batch-digitize.”

When Andres found out the show intended to make backup tapes on DVCAM, the third option immediately made the most sense: DV-25. “Billy looked at this third option and liked it the best,” says Andres. “DV-25 is essentially native to DVCAM.”

On the stage of My Own, the director and tape op coordinate with the digitizer via headset to dictate when to start and stop rolling. Each camera feeds its signal to the camera control room, and from there into one of four Mac-based Media Composer Adrenaline systems. The Avid Adrenaline systems then pass the video into Avid Unity, making it immediately available to any workstation in the facility.

Most importantly, the live ingest takes place with timecode intact. “The biggest issue was to make sure the timecode was correct, in case we needed to go to a traditional offline/online,” says Andres. “And they needed to be able to start editing right away.”

In fact, within minutes of the live ingest, editors were able to access material on their Avid Adrenaline systems and start work. “The shows used to be digitized in the evening,” recalls Andres. “They’d get the tapes to post and start digitizing them. It was five hours of tapes, so it could take six hours or more to sort all the tapes and digitize it all. With the live ingest, they saved an entire shift of work per day.”

My Own also debuted another innovation. Early on, Andres mentioned that Wexler Video was playing with the idea of distributing dailies via iPod. Rainey jumped on the idea and asked to try it out on My Own.

The application turned out to be fairly simple: From the Avid Adrenalines, a QuickTime reference was sent to a G5 graphics workstation connected to Unity. The workstation opened the reference in QuickTime Pro and then encoded it to HD.64, the format used to deliver dailies. “It works great,” says Andres. “The best thing is that we don’t tie up an edit system. We’re able to use that additional graphics system to do the work. It is also really quick. It takes a minute or less to export the QuickTime reference, and then the graphics workstation can take the time it needs to convert it, which was actually pretty quick.” The iPod dailies were a big hit among MTV executives, reported Rainey.

With My Own running smoothly, word is building about the new tapeless production/post workflow, as well as the iPod dailies. Andres says Wexler is already fielding calls to replicate the system for other shows.