This campaign was a logistical feat and was a reminder to me that having the right people on your team is priceless. I had an amazing Line Producer that I worked very closely with. We both understood that the more she was aware of what I needed to create a smooth post pipeline, and vice versa, the easier we would all be set up for success.
We also had a large team of editors going on multiple edits at a time. We knew we had to be very organized from the beginning and have the pipeline locked in from the beginning - from the way we ingested footage, to file naming, to reviews and receiving notes, to handing off edits for finishing, etc. We all had multiple calls from the get go to sort this out, and as soon as we noticed something not working, or maybe thought of a way we can do something better, we adapted the pipeline.
For example, when the team would receive notes from their CD, or even from client, they were quickly adding up to be too much to sort through for each edit and editor. I was able to notice this confusion early and create a live doc (that was copied to a more permanent doc for archival purposes) that had each editor separated out to their own sections that they could quickly look at every morning to know
1. What they are working on
2. What they should work on next.
There were also sections that indicated what edits that had just been posted to client, what edits were locked, and what edits were sent to their respective vendors for finishing. I previously had offered a spreadsheet, but that was met with less enthusiasm, so this live doc seemed to work the best with this team.
Some other instances of learning to adapt and implement best practices for our pipeline were the archiving of the footage for both our team and client-side. The client had never done such a large campaign previously, which is very exciting, but also presented some challenges with dealing with the amount of footage that needed transcoding, tagging, and uploading to their database. Unfortunately the specifics of what client needed when uploading the files wasn’t communicated until after some of the shoots were already wrapped. With this project being unique, they didn’t know what they needed until they knew. Essentially, the files did not include the specific metadata they needed, to be able to easily catalog the footage in their database, so we would have to manually go in and catalog each file. We also had to re-transcode all the previously shot footage to the specs they needed (which was different from what we needed in our pipeline).
Time to solve the problem! With the footage that was already shot, unfortunately we did have some backtracking to do. But I immediately connected with the live action team so that we could talk through how to best set up their pipeline so that when we receive the footage from the next shoot, it’s exactly the specs and have the metadata that we need for our internal pipeline as well as the client’s side.
As much as this project was a beast, there were so many instances of learning and growth. Those are always my favorite.