Ontario Deserves Better - Case Study
With the success of the 2023 Nurses Talk Truth campaign, it was decided that the 2024 version of the campaign should maintain the same look and feel as before, but we needed to find a way to elevate it. So, instead of hearing a multitude of voices in one commercial, we decided to make each spot focused on a single nurse, giving them the chance to speak their truth, and allowing the audience more time to connect with their direct message. We also decided to add a secont camera into the mix, giving us not only the ability to get even closer to our storytellers, but also to allow for more flexibility in the edit.
With this in mind we set about casting and interviewing over 30 different nurses from across Ontario, with a wide range of experiences, specialties, and stories to tell.
There was only one problem: we were now going to be dealing with an even greater volume of interviews, and by adding a second camera in the mix, we were going to have a mountain of footage to pour over; and knowing that our campaign would be launching merely weeks after we wrapped our largest round of interviews we needed to find a way to sift through the mountain of footage as quickly and efficiently as possible, ideally with as many hands on deck as possible.
Enter Descript; a powerful tool for creating and editing transcripts of video and audio. I had already been using Descript for a couple years to enhance the workflow of my podcast, and dabbled with it a couple times on video projects while at TIFF, but never used it on a project of this scope and scale. And unfortunately, because of the nature of our project I knew it was going to take some experimentation and workflow management to get it to meet our needs. But I was confident it was going to be able to do what we needed it to do, even if it meant a few extra steps along the way.
Here’s a breakdown of how I used Descript to help us manage over 30 multicam interviews and turn around a complete television and social media campaign in record time.
The Interviews
Everything of course starts with the interview setup. Each interview was shot with a pair of Sony A7IVs. Our team absolutely loves this camera for its portability, and absolutely gorgeous image quality. However there’s one or two minor downsides to using it for this purpose: you cannot jam-sync timecode (unless using an expensive third party Tentacle system box) and audio must be recorded to a separate audio recorder.
Now, generally speaking, these are not difficult obstacles to overcome. Final Cut Pro can build multicams from your video and audio files with ease, and its sync via audio is extremely accurate. The larger issue was what would the ramifications be when it came to using Descript? The short answer: very minor (at least for this workflow).
To help with the sync, as well as allow for us to take notes of great moments throughout the interview, we used an iPad running Movie Slate in order to slate each take, as well as use their built in “Shot Notes” feature to log anything we wanted to circle back to in the edit quickly. By making sure the cameras timecode were matching the time-of-day timecode on the slate, I would be able to jump to our favourite moments relatively quickly; even if the timecode had drifted by a few seconds here and there. This became extremely helpful working in tandem with the eventual Descript transcript, and allowed me to use my notes from the day to quickly jump to the moment I wanted.
There’s one slightly larger hurdle to overcome however. Remember what I said about timecode? Well the Sony camera handles timecode in a somewhat frustrating way. For reasons I don’t fully understand, but apparently related to codecs and wrappers Final Cut Pro cannot natively read the timecode from a file shot on an A7IV, but tools like Adobe Premiere and DaVinci Resolve can. I wanted to stick with Final Cut because it’s my NLE of choice and the one I’m fastest with, and if we stayed entirely within the Final Cut ecosystem this timecode issue wouldn’t be a problem. However, our colourist would be grading in Resolve, so we needed to make sure the software could talk to each other, and that meant we needed to get the timecode to be consistent between the two.
Getting Edit Ready
Here’s the good news; this problem is easily solved. The bad news is it’s just a little time consuming, and very storage consuming (and a little bit expensive). By using the software Edit Ready by Hedge (who also make the program Offshoot which we used to transfer our cards and ensure we had copies of everything on multiple drives) you can simply bring in all your footage and “Rewrap” into a new container that will contain the timecode information in a format that Final Cut Pro can read. It’s really as simple as drag and drop, set your destination, and let it rip. The only downside is that it effectively requires double the storage, as you’ll have the original media, and the re-wrapped media. Once re-wrapped, you should be able to delete the original media and make the new re-wrapped version your canonical version, but as a long time assistant editor, I’m loathe to delete anything until a project is wrapped, so for now we kept both copies.
Putting It Together
With all that table setting out of the way we can now actually start the process of putting the pieces together.
The first step required building out the Multicam clips for each interview. I would load in the A and B cam footage, along with the interview audio, add the appropriate metadata to ensure that Final Cut would arrange the multicam in the right order, and then create a new multicam that synced via audio. I made sure to create a single multicam clip per “take” - most interviews were a single take, but sometimes we had interviews that spanned multiple takes.
Once the multicam clips were built I then created Proxies using the built-it tool in Final Cut. This gave me 1080p ProRes Proxy footage that I kept on my actual laptop at all times meaning that I could edit no matter where I was (my home office, our Toronto office, or on location) without having to connect to our RAID with the original media. Incidentally: despite the RAW 4K media clocking in at over 7TB, the proxies came in just shy of 400 GB, and the ProRes Proxy codec delivered more than enough quality for offline editing.
The next stage required us prepping our clips for transcription with Descript. I created a new timeline for each interview, and dropped in the corresponding multicam clip(s). Then I applied the timecode reader plugin to each multicam. I adjusted the properties to ensure we were given the timecode of the clip not the timeline. This would be critical later in the process.
A Quick Note: During this process I discovered that the multicam inherits the timecode from the earliest clip. This means that if one of your cameras (or in our case, the audio recorder) isn’t properly set to time of day, the timecode of your multicam may actually be different from, say, the timecode your notes with MovieSlate. Thankfully I discovered this issue early enough in the shooting process that we were able to rectify it for later shoots.
With the timeline all prepped, I did a 720p export of each individual timeline. From there I would take each exported timeline and upload as a new project in Descript.
Descript
If you haven’t yet played with Descript I highly recommend you check it out. Once your video has been uploaded, it is automatically transcribed. Using that transcription you can make edits just like you would with a word document, with those edits being reflected in the resulting video.
These Descript projects were shared amongst the team, so while I was going through and making my selections, other members of the team could also review the transcripts to make use for our print ads, as well as highlight their favourite moments that they thought might work for our commercials. They could even test how a commercial might sound by simply cutting and pasting lines they liked into a new composition, and get a rough idea of how the spot would look/sound. I could then go back and look at those highlighted sections, watch these rough comps, or read their comments, and inform my own work.
Now, in a perfect world, I could simply do all my “offline” editing in Descript, then export my resulting document as a timeline (a FCPXML file) which I’d import into Final Cut and then have a nearly completed edit. But unfortunately for us, this isn’t the case because we’re working with multicams.
However, this is why we created timelines with timecode. Once we found a section of the interview we liked, I could look at the burned in timecode in Descript, hop over to the multicam in Final Cut Pro, enter in that timecode and instantly jump to the section of the interview I wanted. From there I could add keywords and build out my library of sound bites.
A Quick Tip: after a few hours of manually jumping back and forth and entering in the key commands to jump to timecode I wondered if there was a way I could more easily approach this task. I discovered I could set-up a macro with my Logitech mouse and its software (the MX Master 3S - aka the greatest mouse ever which if you don’t already own you should go buy one right now) so that by clicking the scroll wheel while in Final Cut Pro it would instantly jump to the timecode input, where I could punch in the on-screen timecode from Descript. This little trick saved me so many keyboard clicks.
Incidentally, had the cameras we used recorded audio directly from the boom we might have actually been able to build the multicam using Descript, but because we had 3 sources I opted for this alternate workflow. Hopefully Descript will refine this process in the future allowing for a more seamless integration with NLEs and working with multicam clips.
MISCELLANIA
Part of the reason we went through the whole re-wrap process at the start of the project was in order to be able to easily round-trip the footage with our D.O.P./colourist who works in DaVinci Resolve. Ultimately however, because of the intense time crunch we opted for an alternative delivery method. I delivered each individual spot as a ProRes 422 HQ file, with no LUTs enabled (but with any camera reframing applied) and had our colourist simply grade the export, and send it back to us. While this is not an ideal workflow, and I’d always prefer to have the colourist work from the original media, this was the quickest way to ensure we’d meet our deadlines.
Incidentally, the 15 second social media spots we made were actually graded by myself from within Final Cut Pro making use of the outstanding Dehancer Pro plugin for Final Cut, and matching the original grades as closely as possible. It’s a testament to the plugin and its capabilities that we were able to so closely match the DaVinci film emulation as well as we did.
For storage we were using a pair of LaCie 20TB 2big Dock RAID, which we kept mirrored during the offloading process (again, using Offshoot by Hedge). Unfortunately I wish I could wax poetic about how much I love these RAIDs but on the contrary, we haven’t exactly had the best luck for this project. While I’ve used the 2big Dock RAIDs in the past with little to no issues, this time around we had a brand new unit fail to mount fresh out of the box, requiring a replacement, and the other unit we had ended up failing only a couple months later, also requiring a replacement. It also turns out Vistek, the company we initially ordered the drive from, will not do returns or exchanges on open hard drives, even if they fail right out of the box, requiring us to deal directly with the manufacturer (needless to say, we won’t be buying drives from Vistek again any time soon). The replacement process (via Seagate, who now owns LaCie) can be a bit onerous, but so far the replacement drives have worked fine (knock on wood). Unfortunately, with Seagate having bought up just about every major drive company out there, I’m not sure what the best alternative is (feel free to share your favourite desktop RAID setups with me so I can opt for that in the future).
Our transport drives on the other hand have been great. We got a pair of Samsung T7 Shield 2TB SSDs and they worked great! Zero complaints there.
Incidentally, most of the time I was editing I actually worked from my local Proxy copies, since that meant I could edit without being attached to the RAID and we could work from any room in the office. However, when I did work from the original media, Final Cut Pro had absolutely no issues whatsoever handling multiple streams of 4K video, even despite it technically being in the compressed H.264 codec. These M series machines truly are incredible, and I absolutely adore my M3 Max MacBook Pro.
WRAP UP
When all was said and done, we shot over 30 interviews, and nearly 26 hours of material. To try and sift through that much material on the timeline that we had simply would have been unfeasible. Thanks to Descript’s powerful transcription tools we were able to sort through hours of material and quickly turn around rough edits within days of wrapping the shoot. In addition, the simplicity of the Descript interface meant that everyone on the team was able to work with the material, regardless of their abilities as a video editor. And because of this I was able to leverage their work to build out selects faster than I could as a single editor. The end result was that we were able to deliver twelve 30 second television spots, as well as thirteen 15 second social media ads, each in three different aspect ratios, all in record time.
While I’d still love to see tighter integration between Descript and Final Cut Pro so that I wouldn’t have to build out workarounds to the current limitations, we were able to find a solution that worked, and was reliable. Best of all, these transcripts can continue to be used for future projects.
In the future though, I'd love it if Final Cut Pro build out its own built-in transcriptions like Premiere Pro and Resolve have which would allow us to avoid this multi-step process. That said, the efficiencies granted by working in Final Cut still make it the best option for my NLE.
For more about the Nurses Talk Truth campaign, as well as to see the spots and other campaign collateral, visit their website at NursesTalkTruth.ca