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."