Rather than making the two copies of each file one at a time (which would have doubled Doug’s workload) he installed a copy of a utility program called ShotPut Pro on the Mac. This allowed him to make two hard drive copies simultaneously without any reduction in transfer speed. Once the backups were finished, those drives were put back into the Pelican cases for safe-keeping and were not used for editing. Depending on the size of a particular backup drive (either 4TB or 1TB) it would be used for several days until it was full, and then another drive would take its place until it was full. In addition to the two backup drives we also copied the XDCAM HD422 files to a third 4TB Seagate drive that was used throughout the production as the editing drive. We didn’t need the 4K files for editing so we only transferred the XDCAM files to this drive. This one drive 4TB drive was able to handle the entire month’s worth of files. Once the backing up and archiving of the footage was completed each night, the raw footage from both cameras was reviewed and Doug started editing the blog video. At the end of each long day, I would record an on-camera summary of the day’s events. That narrative gave us a blueprint to follow for each blog. For editing we used Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 on the MacBook Pro. We found that the XDCAM footage was no problem for the computer, and we could cut in real time and with no significant rendering or slowdowns. Once the blog editing was completed, every clip had to be graded because we had chosen to shoot with S-Log2 and S-Gamut settings. The advantage of using those settings is that they allow maximum versatility and quality for the footage that will be used in the final 4K edit, but the disadvantage is that they look washed out, de-saturated, and underexposed before grading.
Due to the run & gun nature of the production, exposures and white balances were understandably inconsistent, so every shot had to be corrected individually. This meant that Doug had to grade about 50-75 clips per day within Premiere. Doug then did an audio mix and added music . . . also within Premiere. Approved blogs were then exported via Adobe Encoder and uploaded it to CBS via Hightail (formerly known as YouSendIt). WiFi at most of the hotels was very slow so sometimes it would take 4-5 hours to upload a 500MB file.
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