Unserious Race Vegas - Recap
The Unserious Race series is a text book example of challenging quick turnaround workflow. For these jobs we turn around 15 camera edits in 30 hours or less. I function as the Post Sup and Online Editor, typically I cut the racing action and then combine the segments from the other editors and maintain the master timeline.
I structured the project as an Adobe Premiere Production for collaboration. We had 3 Editors working on the YouTube asset, a social news cut, and a social team all working from the same shared storage and project.
Inside the Production, I structured all the content into 3 main, multi-cam stringouts. Two POV multi-cams of GoPros including GoPro Max 360 cams, and a story cam stringout that for all the Sony story cams, and the two drones. Our camera department worked really hard to make sure all the cameras had time code, and were reel indexed correctly so laying these out was pretty straightforward.
One of the things I was most excited about with this workflow was manipulating the audio inside the multi-cam sources. If you’re familiar with this work, you know that changing the audio after they’re built can be fraught. But having tons of redundant tracks not only makes the timeline cluttered, but it’s also confusing to the post team. On this job, we had all the characters and hover crafts wearing Tentacle Track E recorders recording 32bit Float audio. The characters also had wires, and Senna Comms in the helmets. What I did was remove all the redundant audio, and used the 32 bit float sources as the primary mics. This left the story cam stringout with only 9 or so audio channels.
In Vegas we added an additional element.. Audio Mastering and Color Grading via a remote session at Red Bull Media House HQ in Austria. For us, that meant a 2am deadline for a picture locked up that had gone into post just 18 hours prior SHESH.
Below you can see the progression of the main timeline from a pictures only line cut of the action, to the first assembly, cleaned timeline to send to Post Audio / Color and the final master timeline for delivery.
Unserious Race - Miami
StringOut - DIT / Post Production Supervisor / Race Story Editor