While Trevor Noah may have left The Daily Show, his time there had an impact, earning 17 nominations during his run. This includes his last season, which was recognized for best writing, talk show and editing.

As you can imagine, editing a live-to-tape daily talk show is challenging and takes a village. While we reached out to two of the show’s editors — Storm Choi and Einar Westerlund — these editors were also nominated: Eric Davies, Tom Favilla, Lauren Beckett Jackson, Nikolai Johnson, Ryan Middleton, Mark Paone, Erin Shannon and Catherine Trasborg. They were recognized for their work on “Jordan Klepper Shows Trump Supporters January 6th Hearing Clips.”

Let’s find out more…

What is your typical workflow on the show?
Storm Choi: Some segments on our show are edited over weeks, while other breaking news pieces are cut in just minutes. So the workflow is fully dependent on the day, and flexibility becomes very important. But regarding our nightly delivery process, after taping we generally have one editor assigned to each act to quickly make any changes and to cut it down to time. The acts then go through a QC check and are assembled onto a final sequence, which we feed to the NOC (Network Operations Center) by playing out through a fiber connection.

Einar Westerlund: The Daily Show is a variety show with many editing requirements and many discrete teams who focus on particular portions of each day’s delivered content. Every editor on our team performs every role at one point or another —be it prepping the day’s open and graphics materials, assembling news clips and montages to support the host’s headlines, fine cutting the live interviews and/or chats, or cutting longer scripted and unscripted segments. I focus on cutting the unscripted segments where Jordan Klepper attends a Trump rally to explore the impact of the January 6th Hearings on the MAGA faithful.

Cutting Jordan’s field segments is a challenging and exciting process because it is one of the featured aspects of the program in which The Daily Show reports the news with a first-hand account. Memorably, Klepper and The Daily Show production team actually attended the January 6 insurrection in Washington, DC, back in 2021, so getting that content onto the air quickly felt urgent as it showcased how special The Daily Show really is. Our segment from June 2022 is in many ways an extension of the work for that original piece and as always, the executives wanted to air the segment as soon as was possible.

In terms of workflow, the priority is editing quickly to make a coherent, poignant and funny segment for air within a day or two of production. Our production team is very experienced in gathering material in the field, and they rarely overshoot. They pre-select interviewees with an ear for articulate and provocative characters who can give a segment energy and surprises during a 5- or 10-minute chat with Jordan. They get all the releases beforehand and shoot with two cameras and an experienced sound crew so that almost every frame is of high quality and fair to use. Because the content is highly topical and attached to the day’s unfolding news, Klepper and the producers don’t have much time to sift through and organize the segment before we edit. The editing assistants and I have to get started completely on our own once we get the material.

When this shoot wrapped, the crew forwarded all the audio files so transcribers could begin making timecoded transcripts almost immediately. These are always helpful for everyone because the segment can be effectively “paper cut” in rough form within a few hours. Once the footage was loaded for cutting, I organized everything and synchronized the multiple cameras and multi-track sound files. Also, I searched in advance for the best B-roll cover to use with the inevitable voiceovers that would guide the audience through the material.

Once prepped, I began screening the interviews myself, often at double speed in places, and marked the parts that I felt might be funny or serve our story. Soon after, Jordan Klepper, Ian Berger and Stacey Angeles provided me highlighted transcripts of sections they felt were most important. I assembled these “selects” and together we decided the parts that seemed best. Often there is an abundance of good content, so we will roughly order the selects into thematic “buckets” to more easily compare and contrast the answers to similar questions from different characters.

Within a couple hours, this long assembly was ready to review, and we discussed the arc of the whole piece. Most importantly, the expositional portions of the interviews had to tell our story and allow the funniest parts of the interviews to land for the viewer who might not be familiar with all the elements of the investigation and controversies.

Once the basic order was formulated, I started tightening the beats right away. We looked to reduce the overlong expositional elements and tried to finish each beat on the laughs or shocks that we felt made the segment really sing. While this was happening, Klepper, the producers and the writers honed the voiceovers, and requested any special graphics and news cover we needed for the final.

For example, in one segment, we had to describe for the audience the conspiracy documentary 2000 Mules, so loading and picking clips of that were vital. Once all the VO, clips and graphics were ingested, I dropped them in and did my finishing — audio mixing and color.

Storm Choi is pictured, center, bottom row

What are some of the challenges your team experiences?
Choi: Many times, the challenges are also the fun parts. We’ve grown more adventurous in what we think is possible, and that’s very apparent in the studio greenscreen segments at the desk where we’ve put our hosts into movies, car chases, a TSA checkpoint and inside the US Capitol — one time we turned Leslie Jones into a chicken.

These segments are often conceptualized in the morning and have to be ready to rehearse in the afternoon. This involves quickly creating and testing various background plates and foreground elements, as well as often implementing sound effects, lighting, graphics and props — it’s a multi-department fast dance, but it’s the ability to turn these around quickly and adjust on the fly that frees up our showrunner, director and writers to be as creative as they dare to be. And I really enjoy the puzzle-solving process.

Westerlund: Our team has been doing this for many years, and our process is very well refined. Of course, we do constantly feel that the segments can improve and be made more quickly. We have tried live streaming the production cameras, uploading footage immediately to import from the cloud, messengering cards during the shoots — but most of these efforts to expand the amount of time for edit have yielded only small gains and produced other problems.

Our greatest challenges at this point are editorial. We often disagree about the appropriateness of certain controversial content, as well as disagreeing about what is most funny. Sometimes, for instance, as in the case of the two influencer women in our nominated segment, we were torn about whether they deserved being associated with the other extremists on parade as they seem to have only stumbled into the fray by accident because it was a big event.

What gear did you use, and why?
Choi: We edit on Avid Media Composer, though some digital content is cut on Adobe Premiere Pro. For plugins, we use both Sapphire and Boris FX Continuum. In the past year, we’ve also developed a remote editing system as well. For that we use Cisco AnyConnect, HP ZCentral Remote and Evercast.

Through the pandemic and in moving to two different studios in the past couple years, we’ve been lucky to upgrade our everyday post technology. Because of the various sources of footage and the range of editing work on our show, we need as many tools as possible at our fingertips. I imagine our tech will continue to evolve as we go into the election coverage in 2024.

Westerlund: For me, the Avid Media Composer networked with the other Avids and a shared Unity system for the media is the indispensable heart of the editing setup. Having several systems share a project folder and large hard-drive partitions allows the team to ingest the material on several systems at once. In a crunch, other editors or assistants can import supplementary materials or even locate hard-to-find sound bites and visuals without disrupting the main edit. Occasionally, part of the footage may have audio or visual problems, and the DP or audio engineer can try to make a custom LUT or sound filter in another edit as well. The multiple Avid setups allows the principal editor to press ahead without digressing for technical reasons.

Additionally, Adobe Media Encoder provides very fast file conversions to distribute rough and final edits for executive and legal approvals. Making these small files and creating secure Shift MediaSilo links has proven to be very efficient. Our show began making these links while we were all working from home during the pandemic, and the process has proven to be a huge time saver. We no longer have to schedule screenings or make numerous tape outputs during the edit.

When this segment was ready for air in our live-to-tape studio setting, I sent the final version to an EVS system directly from the Avid for the control room to roll into the studio.

What does this Emmy nomination mean to you?
Choi: My team is special. I know everyone says that, but it’s true. Our entire staff feels more like a family than any other TV show I’ve worked on, and that sentiment only gets stronger regarding the editing team. There are nine of us, and you honestly couldn’t get a wider range of personalities in this band of quirky rascals. But we’re really tight and love each other, and I’m continuously amazed how talented my colleagues are. To get to share this nomination together makes me so grateful and happy.

Westerlund: Emmys are the industry’s highest honor. Although we have been nominated and won Emmys numerous times over my 27 years with the show, I never fail to feel humbled and appreciated when we get a nomination. The work we do at The Daily Show is always challenging, and I feel the show provides a unique and informative perspective on our culture and especially on our politics. The Daily Show truly reveals the “pulse” of America almost every night. The Emmy nomination is an affirmation that what we do is still appreciated by the industry and the public.