By Alyssa Heater

postPerspective recently sat down with some of the team behind CBS’ The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to discuss how the talk show workflow influences storage and security needs. The Late Show, which airs four days a week, records live to tape, and as you can imagine, their needs are mighty.

Joining us for the discussion were VP of East Coast operations Richard Hart, senior technical engineer Erik Akerblom, director of technical and production operations Kamal Rountree and post supervisor Mark Spada. Let’s dig in!

Richard Hart

Let’s kick off the conversation by learning about your experience collaborating on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert?
Richard Hart: The team came together when Stephen took over as the new host of The Late Show. From that point, we merged two teams: the technical, below-the-line team and the new talent above-the-line team. Part of that process was picking the post and the technical teams, which Mark Spada and Erik Akerblom were both part of for the Late Show With David Letterman.

We’ve been working together from the very first conversations about this show. Stephen and CBS were committed to building a state-of-the-art facility — from the technical components to the office to the infrastructure  — and to restoring the theater back to its historical, initial build-out. And part of that was building the infrastructure for post and editing.

Mark Spada

Mark Spada: Stephen started here in 2015, and we redid our infrastructure for the editors at that time. When we went HD nonlinear for David Letterman, it was with shared Avid storage (then called ISIS) that enabled all our editors to share projects and footage between our three edit bays. When we started this show, we increased our storage capacity to the newer Avid Nexis drives and expanded our edit bays to six. We’ve also upgraded our record capability to use EVS playback and record devices to 16 channels.

Our EVS channels send the record ISO cameras directly into our Nexis storage to allow our editors to edit within seconds of recording. So we’re editing while the show is recording, and those streams come from our records downstairs up to our Nexus storage upstairs. At the end of every day, we archive all our material to storage over at the CBS Broadcast Center onto LTO tapes and our new cloud storage system.

Erik Akerblom

Erik Akerblom: We have such a tight deadline between when we start shooting and when the show wraps. All of that material needs to be edited in high res and sent to the broadcast center by a hard deadline every night in order for us to make air. After the show airs every night, it is then archived to LTO tape and into the cloud-based Glacier Instant Retrieval storage.

Hart: Overall, we are pro cloud. We believe in using it wherever possible. We just completed archiving the archival master of 1,400-plus shows to the cloud from our LTO robot. We will use the cloud as our primary storage going forward. We also store a low-resolution copy of the show for our MAM in the cloud, and we migrated our media-clipping platform, SnapStream, to the cloud from NetApp on-site storage two years ago.

As for the Late Show post production workflow and requirements, we have a solid work flow and will look into cloud solutions as needed,

The challenge is the requirements for live/near-live. From a functional and operational perspective, we’re very excited about migrating to the cloud. Our primary focus is delivering shows every night. The staff, writers and producers come up with ideas and produce what they need, and we turn it around and get it out.

Tell me about the typical workflow on an episode of The Late Show, from shooting to post to delivery.
Spada: The writers meet early, and we have a production meeting that runs down the schedule for the day. We typically have pretaped pieces that tape and air the same day for our opening piece, which we call the “cold open.” On the stage, we prep for our guests, audio test for the band and rehearse the house band. Then we have our rehearsal with Stephen, which incorporates all our graphics and news clips. After rehearsal, Stephen goes into rewrite to review the monologue and any other bits for that night’s show. Once the audience is seated, our in-house stand-up comedian, Paul Mecurio, hits the stage to warm up the crowd. Then there’s a performance by our house band, Louis Cato and the Late Show Band, before Stephen comes out to start that night’s taping… and off we go.

Kamal Rountree

Kamal Rountree: Each camera has different audio ISOs. Those will all be embedded within the cameras, so if the editors need to do any audio fixes, they have the stems embedded within the camera feeds themselves.

Spada: We ISO everything: the mics of all the guests, Stephen the band leader, Louis. It’s divide and conquer between my group of editors, the segment producers and executive producer Tom Purcell. They gradually go through each act to get the show to time, and as those acts are completed, our AD will view each act one at a time with the editor. As an act is completed and approved, it is sent to the broadcast center. They QC each act one at a time to ensure there are no picture or audio issues. It’s set up for air at 11:35pm.

For the past two years, we have created a podcast component for each show. It’s usually two or three acts, usually the monologue and lead guest, which we then convert to mp3 audio for review and then post for that evening’s podcast.

How do the West Coast and international feeds play into your workflow?
Akerblom: The individual acts get sent to the media distribution center, and after they’ve signed off and are ready to go to air, Mark runs an international trigger, which takes those acts and combines them into whatever format a different country might need, with two seconds of black between each act so they can insert their own commercials, etc. That happens after we put the show to bed and we’re ready to air in the United States.

SnapStream is another integral part of our operation. It is really the heartbeat of all the news stories, and we depend on it heavily every day to supply video content for the jokes, stories, and day-of news. SnapStream is like a DVR on steroids. It records news program on various channels and allows us to search content using the closed caption files. Before SnapStream, everyone was duplicating efforts by recording the same clips.

I’ve always wondered how you’re able to turn around those clips so quickly, and now I have my answer.
Akerblom: We’ve used SnapStream for years because it pulls all the clips for social media, sports, news, everything. It pulls from different sources and turns it around for multiple uses. It’s pretty cutting-edge.

Your team was the mastermind behind shooting The Late Show remotely during the start of the pandemic. Will you tell me about that and how you had to shift and make this all happen on a moment’s notice?
Akerblom: It was very quick. We did something different than other productions, which looked to the cloud as a resource to produce their shows. What we realized was that even though our theater was empty, it had all the resources we needed; we just had to figure out how to remotely control it. Once we figured out how to start using all those assets, we could do it remotely. In a way, our building was the cloud. Everybody would dial in to the building and do their job as normal.

We set up Zoom rooms between my home in New Jersey, Stephen’s home in South Carolina and wherever the guest was located. They were all local and could all feed out their images into our EVS record system, which would flow into our Avids. Trying to do it remotely in the cloud wasn’t working, so we sort of broke into the building and took control. And a lot of this workflow is still being used today.

Rountree: We had the whole control room on Zoom for the director, AD, TD and all the folks who needed to do things. We also had some other pieces of the puzzle basically set up in the cloud, such as a remote virtual-switching station for our TD and Ross graphics elements coming in remotely. We had some pain points in the first few iterations, which is expected. We got to the point where we were able to build out the remote facilities enough to make a line cut, which gave Mark much more time to cut things down. He had a lot of the comforts of home, but not home.

Kamal Rountree, co-EP Tanya Bracco and Richard Hart

Hart: We sort of built our own cloud-based control room. And now we’re looking at cloud-based control products for some of the other applications. It was very interesting, and we did a great job. One of the things we also did early was send a satellite truck to Stephen’s location. We had the cameras and communications coming to the building, and then we just tied everything together. We made the commitment early; we didn’t wait.

Let’s talk about security.
Akerblom: Our Avids are not on the internet; we don’t allow most of our production machines to reach out to the internet. If you sat down at one of our editing workstations and opened up a web browser, you wouldn’t be able to check your email. It’s very safe, and we’re constantly upgrading to make sure that nothing can be accessed, damaged or erased.

We also have a cyber team, whose job is to watch and guide us to ensure that we have the proper security.

Alyssa Heater is a writer and marketer in the entertainment industry. When not writing, you can find her front row at heavy metal shows or remodeling her cabin in the San Gabriel Mountains.