Or how to get 15,000 Hours of video Edited to 90 seconds in 3 weeks
Client: Sonos and Apple
Work Done: Post Supervisor, VFX Supervisor, Colorist.
Production Company: Weber Shandwick, Imaginaut Entertainment
In February, we had a whirlwind few weeks of post-production for the campaign, “Music Makes It Home.” A truly unique endeavor, the video was a result of a partnership between industry titans Apple and Sonos, this being the first time Apple has produced a joint campaign.
The result is a distillation of data gathered from an in-depth, international case study involving families from all over the world. You can read more about the study here, but here’s the skinny. Participating families were given Nest cams, iPhones, iBeacons, and Sonos speakers; and were monitored for two weeks. The first week, the families were deprived of all music; and the second week, music was encouraged through the use of the provided Sonos speakers.
Families were captured by the Nest cams and some also kept video diaries, and eight chosen families were visited by a professional crew in addition to the other methods of self-capture with the iPhones. The result was over 15,000 hours of footage, and this is where we came into play. Chariotdrive’s role was wrangling the footage captures and getting them edited down into a 2.5-minute video. Under normal circumstances, this would have been fine, but this had to be done in 3 weeks.
The creative behind the project was Weber Shandwick, a PR agency out of Boston, and Imaginaut Entertainment handled production and teamed up with Chariotdrive and set up post-production at WeWork in downtown Los Angeles.
How we did it for Sonos and Apple Music
There were eight editors, each focused on four families. Each day pulling down the previous day’s nest camera footage and making selects.
Each editor laid down ten minutes of footage from the twelve hours recorded the previous day on the nest cams and iPhones. They laid down ten minutes of footage, cut that down into two minutes sections and then turned that into thirty seconds of super selects.
At the end of each day, the lead editor was able to dynamic link to all the sequences in his Adobe Premiere project and grab the parts that worked for the cut.
Metadata
In addition to the linking of projects, each editor injected a great deal of metadata relating to their edits so that it could be easily searched to pull useful clips and other editors grab clips they needed to create those great moments.
For example, if an editor wanted to create an edit with all the touching moments, he or she could literally type the words “touching moments” and view all the clips that contained such content.
The Setup
We set up ten edit systems comprised of Macs and PC’s. We did not have the budget for a fast server, so I opted for local edits that automatically backed up to a Synology Diskstation.
The Disksation was 5x3TB in a RAID 5 config. The final result was a fun, immersive, energetic campaign that marked a successful meeting of the minds for all parties involved.