Working on the Olympic games has been a great experience for 2 main reasons; it’s something I’ve never done before and is a lot different than what I normally do in editing, and I met a lot of great new people that have a wealth of experience in working on sports.

The staff was made up with a mix of freelance people and APTN staff. There are pro and cons to both positions. Th staffers are paid their standard rate and we bank overtime to use later, I banked over 3 weeks worth that I can use later for vacation. The freelancers got paid more than I did, but they work for a day rate regardless of how many hours they put in. As a staffer I have the company benefits like medical coverage and a steady gig, while freelancers would have to pay for their own insurance. We had a few discussions amongst us about that aspect.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Paul Sampson. Paul is an Avid guru, he’s done training for APTN staff for about 3 years in different software and hardware systems, he’s been the System Administrator for the duration of the games and set-up the edit suites and workflow. When we had an edit suite problem he was there to help and got it done quick. In addition to that he does a lot of research and writes manuals for Avid, such as the one on XDCAM. 

After taking this week off I go back to my usual role as Editor/Producer in Creative Services. I think that many of us that have worked on these games now have a higher standard and will bring that with us in producing content on APTN and making it better than ever.

We are going to be packaging this game for tonights encore plus show, then its off to the wrap party.

The game is on in nearly every edit suite and anywhere there is a monitor. There are people walking all around downtown winnipeg with canada jerseys on heading to the MTS center and various pins to watch the game, its pretty cool.

Thursday was a record for our edit suite in the number of items pushed. In total we pushed 30 individual items which amounted to over 3 hours of 40 minutes of material. Lets see the other edit suites top that!

Here are pics of the avid bins with all of the items we pushed.

French show 10:30 to 2
english show 2 to 5:30
Aboriginal show 5:30 to 8
french show 8 to 11:30
Encore plus 11:30 to 2

We will full that with live sports, highlight packages, features on athletes and interesting people, live calls from the desk, etc.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/entertainment/TV/speaking-in-tongues-olympic-coverage-in-10-languages-broadcast-from-aptns-portage-avenue-studio-84292177.html

You can listen to it here.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=ice-ice-baby-the-physics-of-curling-10-02-18

I have never been much of a sports fan, which is somewhat ironic because I have done media work in sports for over 11 years. In college we covered hockey and basketball games in full mobiles, and I was a regular camera operator for manitoba moose games at the winnipeg arena and the MTS center for about 5 seasons.

I think the appeal to me about figure skating is its similarity to pro wrestling, of which I am a fan. What? Pro wrestling? Yes, they see very similar. They are both an athletic exhibition with pre-planned routines and moves, which require a partner to co-operate with you in order to put on a show, though pro wrestling largely improvised. Perhaps we will see pro wrestling at the olympics someday

Currently we see running Symphony Nitris in the Aptn edit suite and I have a media composer running at home. Here on our setup for the olympics we are using the Newscutter systems.

The differences between these software packages in their current forms vary; media composer and Newscutter are very similar, though Newscutter has a few quirks that I find annoying like not being able to enter trim mode by lassoing a cut in the timeline (see the pic below) and having strangely coloured icons for sequences that I can’t change. Otherwise they have much of the same tools and procedures.

I will admit that I do miss my trusty symphony Nitris that I use day in and out while working in creative services. The biggest difference between it and the other edit systems is that it has very robust color correction tools which help when really trying to get the best picture possible.