Post editors historically have worked from a facility, whether that is rented space for a specific project or at the studio where they are employed. However, that was pre-COVID. Once the pandemic hit, the “traditional” workflow had to change, and change it did! Independent editors working out of temporary locations on a per-project basis as well as those at studios where they are employed suddenly found themselves — like so many others across the industry — working from their homes. Some like it, a lot, including one editor we spoke with here. Others prefer an in-person scenario, as was the case with a producer we interviewed who works particularly closely with her editors.

Looking to the future as COVID restrictions lift, it appears that the genie has been let out of the bottle, opening the door to at least a hybrid situation that includes some remote workflow for those who prefer it.

Valerie Lasser — Big Sky Edit

Valerie Lasser

While post editor Valerie Lasser at Big Sky Edit in New York City has tackled a range of projects, including independent films and short films, she enjoys the short-form projects assigned to her there. “I like the excitement of starting a new project from a clean slate. This creative energy totally fuels me. No sooner do you ship the spot than the next one (hopefully) is coming in,” she says. “The art of short form — whether it’s comedy, dialog-driven or docu-style — is a puzzle and a challenge in itself, and I enjoy making the story work in the given time frame.”

Lasser began working at Big Sky Edit immediately following graduation and has been at the boutique studio for 27 years and counting, shortly after it opened. With a focus on collaborative workflow and mentorship, the company has maintained a small employee footprint, running lean and mean — a big advantage, particularly with the roller-coaster ride that the industry has experienced during the past year and a half. “We haven’t had a stagnant time with no work, even during COVID,” says Lasser. “We just shifted to working from home.”

Working remotely, in fact, is something Lasser is doing full-time right now, as opposed to just a few days a week pre-COVID due to her lengthy commute into the city from Long Island.

“I’ve always prided myself in running an ‘apocalypse-ready’ household. There was never a better year than 2020 to put it to good use,” she says.

More recently, Lasser is experiencing a particularly “remote” workflow, as home for her and her family of late has been a country house she is restoring in a very small town in a remote section of New Hampshire, near the Vermont border. “Working remotely has really fine-tuned the best combination of my creative habits with new, healthier physical habits and a better overall mindset,” she says, but admits that Wi-Fi can sometimes be a challenge.

Lasser’s remote setup prior to the virus closely resembled her editing suite in the studio, which comprises Avid’s Media Composer. So getting up and running and accustomed to the off-site workflow was not an issue. “It’s pretty much the same system, and it just proves to be far more efficient to work locally than trying to be remote-accessing another system somewhere,” she adds. “We have a shared workflow because there are often instances when we’re all accessing the same project, pulling from the same media, at a given time,” Lasser adds.

Lasser’s remote setup

Lasser also does a lot of sound work as a large part of her editing and favors Avid’s audio capabilities. “When working with unscripted dialog footage, ScryptSync and PhraseFind are two features I cannot live without, and they are exclusive to Avid,” she says. ScryptSync enables the synchronization of dailies to an actual transcript, and when combined with PhraseFind, enables the user to locate lines or words stated in the footage, all within minutes versus days or weeks.

She also points out that hardware is “light” these days, so she can toggle between a laptop or a desktop with ease. As for storage, “We have shared storage at the office, and then on a per-job basis, we synchronize that to local storage we have at home.” Big Sky Edit uses a Facilis shared storage solution, which is accessible to all the editors and assistant editors, and Lasser also uses a Promise Pegasus at home along with various shuttle drives as backups.

Whether working in-person or remotely, Lasser’s workflow is pretty much the same. And that includes relying from start to finish on having a great assistant editor by her side. “When a project and dailies are handed to you organized and ready to go, it’s a huge weight lifted right out of the gate,” she contends. “Then along the way, when you have the luxury of collaborating with your assistant editor, your producer or another editor, it eliminates the vacuum editors can sometimes get stuck in, akin to writer’s block — after all, editors are writing a visual story. You get boards, scripts, art cards and footage and have to mix in your best creative ideas to help all those pieces work together and unfold into a story.” (On a number of projects, Lasser has been given a writer credit in addition to an editing credit for her extensive work in this area.)

Frank Gehry

During her career, Lasser has placed her creative stamp on a plethora of commercials. However, she has done likewise on some recent long-form work, too, mainly for documentaries. Due to the length of these projects, she believes a personal connection to the topic or subject — whether from the start or one that comes gradually during the work — helps in the storytelling.

She has worked on a number of Frank Gehry projects with director Ultan Guilfoyle, ranging from the design behind the Guggenheim Museum Bilboa in Spain to a documentary on moving one of his early buildings across the country to a new site. One of the latest works was a documentary called Frank Gehry: Building Justice, in which the legendary architect explores whether there is a better way to design prisons with a more rehabilitative environment. The project, which played at the 2019 ADFF Film Festival in LA, involved lots of candid footage of architectural students and their design projects, location footage from existing prisons in the US and Norway, as well as extensive interviews, including those with former inmates.

Boston Scientific

For now, Lasser is continuing to work remotely from New Hampshire and hopes to maintain a hybrid solution moving forward. “We have all proven it can be done well and that it is sustainable. And once we have a little time to reset with some normalcy, I think we can do it even better,” she says. While Lasser admits there are pros and cons to a remote workflow, she believes the pros outweigh the cons, particularly in terms of lifestyle.

“I don’t dismiss the idea of going back on an as-needed basis, and it’s good to have face time with your clients and coworkers — that personal connection is good, but you don’t need it every day,” says Lasser. “I had been commuting by car for an hour or two one-way, and there’s no way I could ever go back to that on a five-day basis. There is so much more time I can give to a job without the commute.”

Ryan Cunningham — Running Man Post

Ryan Cunningham

When COVID restrictions thrust a remote workflow onto the industry, individuals and post houses had to take a hard look at what that would mean in terms of technology, logistics and workflow changes and adjust accordingly. Among them was Ryan Cunningham, co-owner of the post house Running Man in New York.

Cunningham, who also runs a development company called Running Woman, has been working mostly in the comedy space for the past 13 or so years. During the pandemic, she co-produced two Showtime series, comedy specials for HBO Max and Comedy Central, and two pilots. “Since COVID, I’ve been working almost exclusively from home,” she states. “The only people in our Running Man office are our colorists.”

While Cunningham is no longer heavily involved in the daily operations at Running Man, as a producer, she brings post work to the facility and works from those offices. “As a producer, it allows me more control over the [post] budget,” she says.

Prior to the pandemic, the post house had six employees along with 11 edit rooms, six assistant edit rooms and four finishing rooms, including an HDR room. All of the offline edit suites run Avid’s Media Composer and Adobe’s Premiere. However, due to COVID, only the color and HDR rooms remain open at this time, although Running Man still does all of the daily processing and prep for offline and all the finishing. “We were uncertain as to what security precautions would be required and how long this all would last. And Running Man has some of the largest offline edit rooms in New York City, so proper social distancing is possible. So we made the decision that we didn’t want to get into the remote editing business right now. We felt it was going to require too much tech support and be a little too high-maintenance,” says Cunningham. “Instead, we work with Frame One, a division of Final Frame in New York, which has made a business of setting up secure remote editing portals.”

Ziwe

Using the remote portals is more secure than sending drives to editors’ homes and is better-suited for shared media, contends Cunningham, who used the portals for the two series she produced during the pandemic: Flatbush Misdemeanors (10 half-hour episodes) and Ziwe (six half-hour episodes), both for Showtime and both first-season shows. Communication among the group was done via Zoom and Slack. The editors would sign in on their remote edit systems (running Media Composer) and broadcast out of their Avids to the Zoom feed, and then sign on from a separate device (like a smartphone or iPad) to converse with the group. So, there would be one window in Zoom that was feeding all the information from the Avid that participants could see in real time and another window that contained the actual editor, she explains.

According to Cunningham, the remote workflow took some time to get used. Flatbush Misdemeanors is more straightforward and scripted; Cunningham feels it went extremely well, smoother than any first-season show she has done. “I wonder if that’s because of the remote aspect of it, forcing all of the executive producers to really focus hard on their notes,” she says, noting the group actually finished post two weeks early. In contrast, Ziwe has a lot of visual effects, graphics, archival materials coming from all kinds of sources, interviews, field pieces ….

Ziwe

One of the challenges of the remote workflow was in the time delay, no matter how small. “It’s there. But you have to trust that things are in sync,” Cunningham says. And that was an issue of concern with Ziwe, which is a complicated show with many moving parts. “There’s one main music video in every episode, and you’re trying to edit to the beat but not totally sure of the sync, so the editors would understandably get frustrated.”

She also finds that a remote workflow can lead to a breakdown in teamwork or a lack of feeling like a team, especially for people who have not worked together previously. Whereas in an office, people get to know one another through natural interactions, even if it’s simply chatting for 10 minutes in the kitchen, which forges a sense of camaraderie, teamwork and trust. “When you don’t have that, and people are working remotely, everyone’s kind of working in their own bubble and things can be misinterpreted. I find that some read a lot of snark into emails and things like that,” Cunningham says.

To combat that issue, Cunningham implemented daily 15- to 30-minute check-ins with the entire team, giving them a chance to get to know one another on both a personal and professional level and build trust among the group.

Flatbush Misdemeanors

Another hurdle to the remote workflow: internet speed, or the lack thereof. “It’s become a big thing now. When I hire an editor, I have to ask them whether they have fiber, FIOS or cable and what their up and down speed is,” says Cunningham. She now has them conduct a speed test in order to avoid this technical problem.

While the remote process worked well for the offline edit, when it is crunch time and time to fine-tune the edit, Cunningham believes it is more advantageous to work in-person. “Yet, there is something to be said for not having to add a commute to your schedule,” she acknowledges. ”Edits take long hours, and then to have to do a long commute on top of it can be difficult.”

Are there any plans for Running Man to reinstitute the editing rooms? “That’s a discussion co-owner Troy Thompson and I have had multiple times,” Cunningham says. “The pandemic has changed the way a lot of things are done.”

Flatbush Misdemeanors

In fact, Cunningham believes that from now on, there will be more of a hybrid model across the industry, where a show may rent only one actual edit room and then cycle the editors through it for the director and producer cuts. “I believe they need to work in-person [for that] because I think it is more successful that way. The lack of in-person so far has definitely affected the creativity and the time things take,” she says. “But the way I see it, and the way I’ve seen it reflected in budgets lately, is that this sort of remote, offline editing is going to be around for a while — at least for editor cuts and things like that. So as a facility, the question is, should we reopen all 11 rooms as edit rooms after the pandemic, or should they be used for something else? We’re just not sure yet.”

At the start of the pandemic, Cunningham joined the New York Producers COVID Response with the goal of establishing best practices for producing a show during COVID. “With post production, I think everyone was saying, ‘Editors can just work from home. Everything’s fine.’ But the biggest thing that people don’t think about is content security, especially with higher-profile shows for big networks. Nobody wants leaks, and it’s not as easy as just sending someone a drive. There’s a much more complicated aspect to it to get everyone up and running, especially with a series when you have to share a lot of media.”

Karen Moltenbrey is a veteran writer covering visual effects and post production.