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The Nine Network of Australia is one of the three commercial television broadcasters operating in Australia. John is a senior editor at the Darwin office for Nine, with over 26 years of experience working in television. EDIUS is used primarily for producing advertisements, as well as lifestyle and tourism-oriented programs for the greater Northern Territory region. According to John, the timesaving real-time output and multi-layering capabilities of EDIUS come into their own when producing commercials.
"Unlimited video and audio layers is quite an important feature in EDIUS. It enables us to complete a project and then, if that project is not 100 percent satisfactory or if the client has a change of mind, we can recreate the project on another timeline, with the (original) timeline under it, turned of but available if we need to go back to the previous job.
"We can produce a base and also a finished commercial, as we've done for the Top End Hotel, which is going to need to be updated on a weekly basis. We are able to turn on or off the layers that are required, per week, depending on what competition is going to be used at that time."
Although John's projects don't require a sophisticated array of special effects combinations, there is still the need for video filters to enhance or correct footage used within his productions.
"The use of filters in our day-to-day workflow is quite good, particularly the real-time aspect of the filters. The lifestyle/tourist program we've just completed is called 'Postcards from the Outback.' We did six episodes and used the filters fairly regularly. We used the Film Effect filter to recreate some old footage.
"Unfortunately, a couple of clips were shot not using the correct color balance. The use of the Balance filters helped us out quite considerably there. The use of the White Balance, in that instance, was quite helpful, enabling us to bring the footage into line with the rest of what had been shot."
When applying color treatments, John also makes use of the real-time monitoring tools found within EDIUS, which are designed primarily for broadcast content creation.
"The Waveform monitor and Vectorscope are handy tools to use and, well, they're essential for broadcast in particular. We need to keep an eye on things like that as well as on our color balance."
With the availability of a professional television studio environment and equipment, John's work involving Chroma Key compositing is made even easier with EDIUS.
"A commercial in which we used Chroma Key, of late, was the Top End Hotel and that was quite successful in creating an end look to the product. We shot talent on a green screen in the studio and brought it into the EDIUS system and it keyed perfectly. I'm very impressed with the real-time Chroma Key."
In addition to three-point editing, EDIUS supports four-point editing with real-time speed control adjustment, a feature John requires when editing for television.
"I really like the speed control in EDIUS. The ability to speed things up and slow projects down is very good and is done in real time. The Speed Control has been quite handy, in particular for a project on which we recently worked, where we had to zoom in on a subject. That zoom had to be a stable zoom and had to finish at a set point, so we had to do it quite slowly to get the desired effect. Being able to speed that up and play that back in real time helped the look of the end project."
While much of John's work is created directly for broadcast transmission, there is still a high demand for edited projects to be exported to a variety of different, non-broadcast formats. With the inclusion of ProCoder Express with EDIUS, John's task of creating distributable copies of television commercials and programs is made much easier.
"We've just completed a job for a consolidated pastoral company whereby they required several hundred DVDs for distribution, for their recruitment efforts. We were able to burn those straight off the timeline onto a master copy, which we then gave to someone for distribution.
"On the completion of jobs, if clients can't be here to view their commercials or possibly if they're interstate, we export from the timeline direct to ProCoder and convert them to a (Windows) Media file, which we then e-mail for approval."
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