FesTV - Production Stories from the Street

Shooting, Storing and Cutting Video from the Los Angeles Film Festival

User: - Ryun Hovind, Post-Production Supervisor

Event: Los Angeles Film Festival

Product: Focus Enhancements FS-4 Portable DTE Recorder

Anyone covering live events knows they typically entail long nights and tight schedules. For us, covering the Los Angeles Film Festival was no different. Running from June 22 to July 2, the L.A. Film Fest attracts emerging filmmakers and film masters alike, screening over 175 narrative features, documentaries, and shorts.

We were responsible for producing FesTV, a daily one-hour program highlighting the day’s events, as well as providing footage to local media outlets like the L.A. Times and onsite festival venues with film clips, footage from parties, and interviews with celebrities and filmmakers. Our film crews captured all the action—often returning at 10 pm. And we needed to have footage ready by the next morning, which meant our editors would be facing a long night. We looked at ways to cut down on production time and let our editors get some sleep.

We selected and equipped our team with FS-4 portable DTE recorders from Focus Enhancements. With the FS-4 on hand, our film crew could record directly to disk via FireWire and then transfer it directly into Final Cut Pro—no more capturing, file transfer, or conversion.

For most of us, this represented the first time recording to disk. I condensed the FS-4’s operations into a single page quick guide to help ease everyone’s transition into the new technology and new workflow. And we still continued to use tape as back up. In one case, this allowed us to give the DV tape to a local news team right their on location, while we brought back the FS-4 for our own production needs. 

By eliminating the intermediate steps like capturing and conversion, footage was ready for editing almost as soon as it was brought in. This alone saved us at least one hour in editing time per tape. It was amazing to shoot an event at 9 pm and then be editing minutes later. We’d start filming a red carpet event at 8 or 9 pm, and bring the tapes back at 10. With tapes, it wouldn’t be until midnight that we’d have the footage in and ready for edit. With the FS-4, we were ready to go by 10:20 pm. Our editing team enjoyed a shorter night—leaving by 3 am instead of watching the sun come up.

In addition, the quality of the finished product was far better, since editors could focus on being creative instead of capturing tape. In my experience, it’s essential to just get in there and start editing, especially with the evening shift. People tend to get lethargic when they need to wait around for several hours capturing tape. They can get out of the zone before they’ve even started to edit.

“Direct to Edit” technology also let us make more effective use of our computer workstations. We were using powerful stations, but we still couldn’t expect to edit and digitize at the same time. I couldn’t do much else if I was digitizing. Using FS-4s allowed us to free up workstations, enabling more editors to work on different segments for FesTV at the same time, in addition to making footage available for the L.A. Times, Producer Steven Spielberg, and others. In the end, more people were able to get the footage they wanted, and in the format they needed, because we had the FS-4s.