Xsan revolutionizes post-production workflow

In 1992, Bunim-Murray Productions created “The Real World” and changed television forever. The Los Angeles — based production company moved seven twenty-somethings into a New York City loft and gave them a chance to “stop being polite and start being real.” With the creation of this landmark unscripted television series, Bunim-Murray launched an entirely new genre of entertainment and secured its place in the history of popular culture as the inventor of modern reality television.

Through its invention of reality television, Bunim-Murray turned traditional television production workflow on its head, placing new demands on editors and transforming post-production labor, data storage, and technology into cost centers.

100 hours of tape for each hour of programming

The average reality program generates an astonishing 4TB of data before the show even enters the editing process. And editing is where the heavy lifting begins. After the raw material is shot, assistant editors — called “loggers” — digitize and label the thousands of hours of video using nonlinear editing software. The content is then loaded into a shared data storage device. At this point, the editors have instant access to all the labeled clips as they move from rough assembly to the final network-approved cut. In the last stages of this highly collaborative process, the editing team adds titles, enhances the audio, corrects the color, and ensures the quality of the complete “on air” master.

Xsan makes shared storage so affordable. We’ve been able to give three times as many people access to the system. That helps us to produce a high-quality product faster.

— Mark Raudonis, Bunim-Murray Productions

The post-production challenge is in managing the media, storing it, digitizing it, and then editing efficiently to find the story buried in hours of film. “A reality program generates about 100 hours of recorded material for each hour of completed programming,” explains Joachim Blunck, an Emmy Award — winning producer and IT consultant to Bunim-Murray. “By comparison, the average situation comedy has a shoot-to-air ratio of about five to one. Technology and editors play a much bigger role in the production of unscripted programming.”

Improved workflow fuels creativity

Because post-production workflow for reality television is so labor intensive, Bunim-Murray wanted to include more creative professionals in its editing process. But this wasn’t as easy as planned because the shared storage required for multiple editors to simultaneously access files was prohibitively expensive. After turning to Xsan — Apple’s SAN file system — and Apple hardware, Bunim-Murray now provides three times as many editors with concurrent real-time access to its raw footage, with no increase in equipment costs. To edit and form the raw footage into story lines and coherent programs, the company uses Final Cut Pro HD, a nonlinear editing application from Apple.

“With so much raw material, we need to edit in a shared storage environment,” says Mark Raudonis, Bunim-Murray’s director of post-production. “Xsan is the holy grail of shared storage. Combined with Final Cut Pro HD, this system gives us the real-time editing capabilities we need for a fraction of the cost of competing solutions.”