The reality of editing reality TV – alleviating post production pains with Avid | Edit On Demand

When it comes to cutting reality television, editing teams have their work cut out for them – no pun intended. This is in part due to the “always on” nature of reality TV that involves 24/7 filming, resulting in hours upon hours of content. This was also the case for the editing team behind the Paramount+ lifestyle series All Star Shore, which was tasked with cutting a massive amount of footage – 2,500 hours to be exact. With four ISOs recording 17 hours a day and 13 more on set ENG style, the folks at Eggplant Picture & Sound knew they’d need to ramp up quickly if they were going to meet the production deadline.

Located in downtown Toronto in the heart of the production community, Eggplant Picture & Sound is a full-service post-production facility and creative studio that provides a combination of video, audio, motion graphics, animation and VFX. After being approached by White Label Productions, the producers of the All Star Shore, the Eggplant editors had four weeks to prepare their workflow and find a solution that would allow their team to get set up quickly. Given the short amount of lead lead time to get everything into place, Eggplant tapped Avid | Edit On Demand to get their workspace set up in just a few days.

With a simple and seamless onboarding process, Avid | Edit On Demand got the editors up and running fast, allowing them to get to work ASAP processing footage using a DNxHD LB Proxy workflow. After being uploaded into Avid | Edit On Demand, assistants then started the sync mapping process of organizing the hundreds of hours of footage that was spread across 1.2 million individual files.

“The ease of implementing a remote workflow with Avid | Edit On Demand set our team up for success,” said Joseph Murnaghan, post production system administrator, Eggplant Picture & Sound. “All Star Shore is easily one of the largest projects we’ve ever worked on, and Avid | Edit On Demand helped us get the job done. There’s no way we could’ve acquired the comparable amount of hardware in time.”

Equipped with 12 editors running on advanced seats, 10 running on standard seats and four people to assist, Avid | Edit On Demand allowed the 26-strong team to collaborate on the project from anywhere, saving money on VMS seats by tailoring the situation to the operators’ preferences and eliminating the need for 20 in-person editors. For instances where Eggplant had 12 editors working on the project shot in multi-cam mode, there were hundreds of megabytes being processed per second, so the playback on the storage being worked on was very high. Being able to handle such a large amount of data was crucial for Eggplant.

“The ability for Avid | Edit On Demand to handle this volume of data without any hiccups proved vital to enabling us to complete the project on a tight deadline,” said Murnaghan.

With these remote editing capabilities, Eggplant was also able to widen its hiring pool, opening its borders to international talent and being able to find the artists with the most relevant skills for a project – without being limited to physical locations.