By Randi Altman

Throughout this pandemic, we’ve seen creativity and innovation at its best. In order to keep producing regular content, late-night talk show hosts found ways to keep shooting from their homes while their tech teams created new workflows to keep things moving.

Maybe it was audiences’ ability to accept seeing their favorite shows presented in different ways that led to “DIY Conan.”

What’s “DIY Conan?” Over the summer, Conan O’Brien asked his viewers to get creative and make their own segments for an episode of his TBS show. And, boy, did they come through. The “DIY Conan” episode, which aired on September 21, featured live-action footage, puppetry, animation, stop motion and more.

We recently spoke to Conan’s edit team to find out about the challenges of editing and posting a do-it-yourself episode, with all its varying formats and video and audio qualities.

Rob Ashe

In addition to those challenges, the team was working remotely due to COVID. Let’s find out more from lead editor Rob Ashe and fellow editors Chris Heller and Matt Shaw, all of whom told me how lucky they feel to have been able to continue working through this pandemic… even from home.

How did this all work?
Chris Heller: Our web team took our full edited episode and posted it online to Team Coco’s website. The episode was broken into roughly 30-second pieces. Then fans were able to download and recreate as many chunks as they wanted and then just upload their homemade videos when they were done. Here is a link to what we asked for.

Our clips department (Alex Wallachy) then downloaded all the submissions and uploaded to Frame.io so we could access and download to our shared storage in Burbank.

Chris Heller and his fantastic COVID beard.

How did people send in their submissions? Did you ask for a certain format?
Heller: They mostly uploaded MP4 1080, but there were some pretty small clips that were SD, so we just took whatever they had. Surprisingly, most of my clips were shot horizontally, and those that were vertical made it easier to fit in a split screen, so that worked out well.

How many submissions did you get, and what was the process of choosing the ones that would be featured?
Rob Ashe: The editors were asked to first assemble an editor’s cut with what we thought was the best balance of quality and flow, and then producer Mike Sweeney worked with us to make adjustments for final assembly.

Heller: There were hundreds of submissions. I just began laying and syncing clips into a timeline on top of the original Conan show. Then I would see what clips I liked the best for a certain section and started switching between them. Some clips really matched what Conan did in the actual show, so we used those for split screens showing both Conan’s original video along with the fan’s.

Then each of the editors sent Mike Sweeney the three favorite submissions from our acts. These were later voted on by everyone.

Can you talk about the challenges of making sure all these very varied pieces of content flowed creatively?
Shaw: We had already constructed these “template” cuts with all the Conan clips that were used as reference for the submission recreations, so I began marking different beats throughout my template cut. Once we began getting submissions, I already had a rhythm established to begin a rough cut.

My act has 130 or so submissions, so sorting and pulling selects was a bit of an undertaking, with many, many passes. From there it became a puzzle of picking what select fits best for the beat by lots of trial and error, one section at a time until it was done.

Matt Shaw

Heller: We discovered last time with “Occupy Conan” [a contest from 1/31/2013 that asked fans to recreate and film one of 79 clips available on the Team Coco website and send the finished product into the show] that it’s more cohesive to use the audio from the original show most of the time, and use fans’ audio sprinkled in here and there. It makes it smoother jumping around to different clips when the audio is continuous. Also, fans’ audio was so different from clip to clip that it was quite disorienting.

Of course, some fans did things that needed to be heard such as cool voices or singing. For some sections we used both Conan and the fan’s audio together.

Ashe: For me, the audio was probably the most challenging aspect that I had to deal with, but only due to the plethora of various sources. In terms of flow, it was based on a mix of presenting the most creative choices while using split screens to highlight the craftsmanship and attention to detail of Conan’s fans.

Editing was done in Adobe Premiere? How was the job split up among the editors?
Ashe: Yes, in Premiere. Chris edited the first segment with the opening titles, monologue and live sketches. Matt tackled the Jordan Schlansky remote, and I edited the interview segment and helped assemble the Snickers’ Comic-Con segment.

Act 1 timeline

Heller: I picked Act 1 because I did that for the “Occupy Conan” episode and really wanted to do the top of the show again. Occupy was and hour-long episode, and DIY was a half-hour that breaks up into four different segments. Rob did Segment 3 and 4, and Matt Shaw did Segment 2, which ended up having the most submissions by far.

What other tools were used? Color grading, plugins?
Heller: I used Adobe Lumetri for color and render and replaced audio with Adobe Audition, then I applied the Speech volume leveler and saved back to Premiere. That way all the fans’ audio was in the same range and we get rid of the MP4 audio, which takes longer to export in the end.

You were all working remotely for this episode. Can you talk about setting up for this and some of the challenges?
Shaw: Yes, we’ve all been working from home since the shutdown began in March. The first challenges were figuring out how to edit via screen-sharing, how to get media fast enough to edit with for a daily show, and how fast we could upload to send to the network from home. Everyone had to max out internet speeds for smooth enough screen sharing using Evercast and, most importantly, uploads via Aspera.

At first, we were shooting the show entirely on iPhones and Zoom, so it wasn’t terrible to pass around media with Frame.io as the hub.

Eventually, we moved from working off our home systems to using virtual computers and then remote-logging into our edit systems at Warner Bros. Conan had a small crew film him at the Largo Theater, where we are taping his monologues, using Panasonic XDCAM cameras that transmit through LiveU to the cloud and to our WB studios and Zoom interviews (featuring guests) with a skeleton crew.

I think I was the biggest challenge for the tech team because cable internet isn’t available where I live. We tried a few different virtual machines at first, then our IT engineer, Rob Gage, got me a better cellular router so we could work remotely off our CPUs at Warner Bros. This was preferable because it meant we could use the shared storage Avid ISIS and deliver to TBS from Burbank.

Rob Gage: The main challenge we faced was dealing with large media files and a short turnaround time. Bandwidth was only an issue when our editors had to upload media. Downloads rarely impacted our workflow. Prior to getting everything configured for our editors to work from their edit bays on the lot remotely and using the LiveU equipment, our goal was to minimize files having to be moved and limiting movements to downloads as much as possible.

The main tool for use in our WFH workflow is Frame.io. This acts as our central hub for media. It was the easiest for us to adopt since our editors, writers and producers were all already familiar with it. Originally, we used Frame.io to distribute media to editors; they would work from their local systems and simultaneously I would sync the media from Frame.io to an AWS FSx share. The editors would relink, export and upload the final acts to TBS via HBO’s Aspera.

We’ve gone through many changes as we’d added additional equipment and this workflow wouldn’t allow us to reliably go back to a day of show. We’ve added LiveU packs to our cameras at Largo, which we use for the comedy portion of the show as well as a single of Conan for the guest interviews.

That footage is captured to the cloud, which we then download to our shared storage at the WB lot. Our editors remote into their edit bays at the WB lot to edit the show. Our editors use Evercast to work with writers and producers for cutting the show as well as pretaped comedy pieces. Once the final segments are completed, they are exported to EVS, and our playback operator plays out the show to TBS. Our workflow is pretty much the same as it was when we were on site with the exception of how we get the media since we are using LiveU.

Are you all still working remotely? If so, how is that going?
Heller: I love working from home but it does introduce varying levels of distractions from whatever is going on at home at the time.

Shaw: It seems like we’ll be working from home at least until the end of the year. I’ve always been a homebody, so working from home isn’t terrible. I get to hang out with my wife and dogs and get my own bathroom.

My biggest challenge is separating work from home when it’s all the same now. During a workday, I’ll stay in the office for the bulk of the day and not go back in when finished to keep a routine and separation.

I also just really miss seeing my team in person!

What is everyone’s favorite submission and why?
Shaw: I had more of a favorite section than a single submission. When producer Jordan Schlansky describes his morning routine regarding experimenting with oats and whey — we had quite a few very strong animations elaborating with their own styles that you don’t see very often in popular animations.

Heller: I really enjoyed all the fans’ creativity, but the animations were my favorite.

Ashe: Personally, my favorite submission was the “Home Invader” during the interview segment. I thought it showed amazing imagination.

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 20 years.