By Alyssa Heater

Unscripted reality series and the sheer amount of footage captured for each episode poses unique challenges, especially when it comes to storage.  

To find out more about how these shows manage all that data, we first spoke with BBC Worldwide post producer Chris Gats, who works on the unscripted series Life Below Zero and its multitude of spinoffs. The remoteness of the series’ shooting locations is a driving factor in its storage needs, and Gats details how tripling the storage plays into the workflow.

We then sat down with 3 Ball Media Group (3BMG) EVP of post Neil Coleman and director of production and operations Scotty Eagleton to learn about storage solutions for high-volume footage series — including one with 28 cameras running 24/7. 3BMG is the force behind reality series including Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend and College Hill: Celebrity Edition. 

BBC Worldwide

It seems like the bulk of your work has been in the reality TV/unscripted realm. What inspired you to go this route?  
I kind of fell into it. I started as a production assistant for the company [Stone & Company Entertainment], that which produced game shows and docu-reality shows like Loveline, The Man Show and Shop ‘Til You Drop. I just grew up through post in that company, and it became my niche.

Tell us about the typical workflow on an episode of Life Below Zero, from shooting to post to delivery. 
Reality shows have a tremendous amount more of everything. A scripted show might go out with one camera and one microphone. We go out with several cameras all filming the exact same thing. One hour of footage in the scripted world is several hours in the reality world. That’s the main difference… more cameras and more microphones on-set. We film it, we archive it to hard drives, then the hard drives make their way down to Los Angeles. The post team take it from there.  

Specifically on Life Below Zero, because the show is so remote, and it is very difficult and expensive to get the crews in and out, we have them make three copies of their footage. It’s on in triplicate, just in case FedEx loses one, a producer’s bag falls into a river, or whatever it could be.

The producer will hold onto one copy, then the two others go to our production hub in Anchorage. Once the footage is handed off, they immediately send one of the hard drives down to post in Los Angeles, and the other one is archived onto their hard drive. So now we have the footage flying to Los Angeles on a hard drive, it’s in Anchorage on a hard drive, and the producer has their a copy. And if we lose one, we’re fine because we have two back-ups.  

Once the footage gets to Los Angeles, we archive it to an LTO tape right away. Once we get it on LTO, we tell production up in Anchorage and then they can wipe their two drives and send them back into the field. It’s always on a constant rotation. In Los Angeles, we also copy it into our computer archive system and send the drives back up. Throughout the whole run of post, Anchorage has a copy of our media, it’s in Los Angeles in our edit system, and we also have it archived on an LTO tape.  

What about storage for the post process?  
For most of the shows I run post for, we use the post facility FotoKem. They supply our offline equipment, and we go to them for some online and audio mixing. They invented an all-in-one, on-set color correction and archival machine called nextLab. It allows us to go out in the field, upload our footage, add our LUT to see what the shots are going to look like, automatically sync the audio, and even archive to LTO right on-set. It can also timecode and distribute dailies.  

It also serves as storage by ingesting and archiving full-resolution media. We have at least a petabyte of 4K media in it now. From there, we take the footage, down-rez it, and shoot it over to an Avid Nexis for editing. So, we have two things: the HD/UHD archive in the nextLab, and the low-res on a Nexis.   

Did COVID impact your storage process with hybrid and remote workflows?  
We kind of lucked out with the Life Below Zero shows. It takes a year to film these. We film three episodes at a time, in part, because of hunting seasons and crazy weather. Also, when we send humans out to these remote locations, we don’t want them to be there too long. The show features four people an episode, so we film at four different locations. It takes a while to film, but as we start to film and stockpile, we then send to post. 

We were in the process of shooting Season 9 when production was shut down. At this that time, FotoKem and BBC got together to figure out a solution. Both bought computers to help facilitate a remote post workflow. We were only down for one calendar week. We kicked everybody out of the office, then the following week, I was calling everybody to come back at a scheduled time frame to grab their computer and anything else they needed to take home. We got everyone set up, and then I got together with FotoKem and we started the remote workflow. The next Monday, post was up and running entirely from peoples’ people’s homes. By the time we were about to run out of footage to edit, the government let us go back to filming.

We were one of the first to get to go back to work because of our remoteness. We sent four people up to film the episodes: a DP, a producer, a DIT/PA-type person, and then we a “safety manager.” The safety manager handles the cooking, and shelter and brings a gun in case of bears or any danger. It’s crazy what they do.

Will you touch on why security played a factor in selecting the right storage solution for Life Below Zero?
Nat Geo is now owned by Disney, and they adhere to the highest security standards. FotoKem dealt with the highest level of security possible from Disney and did whatever they needed to dowas necessary to make our network secure. When editors are working from their homes, they log into FotoKem’s closed network, and are, in a way, using FotoKem’s internet connection to access the footage. Several years ago, we were exploring how to work remotely, and then we expedited it due to the pandemic. Now we’re remote, and it’s working great.

3BMG

Tell us about your experience in the reality TV/unscripted arena and what inspired you to explore this niche within the industry.
Neil Coleman: My background is as an editor. I started editing commercials and music videos at a post house, and one of our clients was the talk show, The Jenny Jones Show. We used a linear editing system, the Grass Valley CMX, and that’s how I learned. I went from there to The Oprah Winfrey Show where I spent 16 years, starting in editorial then moving to project management. When The Oprah Winfrey Show ended, there was not much television, media or entertainment work in Chicago, so I moved out to Los Angeles and started working on The Jeff Probst Show. The post supervisor for that show had worked at 3 Ball Media Group (3BMG) previously and they were looking for somebody to take over their post department. I’ve now been at 3BMG for about nine and a half years. Prior to that, I never worked in unscripted reality, just talk shows, music videos and commercials. The nomenclature is different, but the work is all very similar.

Scotty Eagleton: When I first got into the industry, I started in the music video space but felt it was quickly going nowhere, so I accepted a job with 3BMG. I worked on a few reality shows, then left 3BMG and shifted my focus to scripted and I bounced around as a project manager on various sitcoms for a long time. I wanted to have a role with more longevity, so I went back to 3BMG, helping with deliverables and working with the production teams.

Once Neil and I started working together, and then our production services business, Warehouse Studios, came about, I started learning more about post workflows. That knowledge has really helped me collaborate with Neil and find the types of people required to produce content and ensure our clients’ needs are met.

3BMG works on big reality titles, including Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend and College Hill: Celebrity Edition. Tell us about the typical workflow on an episode of an unscripted TV show.
Coleman: Both of those shows shoot a lot of content, both on fairly concentrated timelines. Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend shot eight episodes in eight days — one episode per day. And they had something like 28 cameras, which was very intimidating for us because the turnaround was very tight. We can absolutely handle that kind of footage, but turning it around that quickly… there is a lot going on. College Hill was also just four weeks, and it had around 28 cameras as well, but they were running 24/7 because they’re embedded in a house, and it’s more documentary-style. There’s just a huge volume of footage.

Our typical workflow, regardless of whether it’s local or across the country, starts with how we receive the footage, which is typically electronically. We use Signiant’s Media Shuttle, which allows us to receive the footage much faster than the traditional way, where everything is offloaded by the DIT onto an external hard drive and then FedEx-ed back to us. For argument’s sake, if you shoot on a Monday, the footage will be ready on Tuesday, and because you’re FedEx-ing it, that means you don’t receive it until Wednesday. If you’re transferring electronically, and your speeds are high enough when you finish shooting on a Monday, then you start receiving the footage right away.

In the unscripted world, media is edited on Avid, then we use AMA (Avid Media Access) to connect to the raw source footage and then transcode for the proxy media. It’s a tried-and-true workflow, but it requires a large volume of people because it’s a linear, single-file workflow. If you have one machine, it does one file at a time.

We use something that’s more enterprise-level: a transcoding tool called Telestream Vantage. Our setup transcodes up to 20 files simultaneously — much faster than an assistant editor’s Avid would. For example, we got 28 cameras in for College Hill on a Monday. By Wednesday morning, the footage was already grouped, prepped and ready for our story producers and editors. So it took around 36 hours total, and those are huge shows.

When we go to online, mix and color, we’ll AMA and consolidate the media. When we are finished with the low res, we’ll create the final 4K or HD media. One of the advantages of using Telestream is when we’re creating the proxy media, we’ll bake a LUT into the log footage so that it looks correct as a proxy. If you AMA it, you have to rely on the Avid to add the LUT. If you’re grouping multiple cameras, that LUT requires processing power just to be able to display it in Avid, whereas in Telestream, it’s baked in, and you don’t need the Avid to do anything.  

What is the collaboration process like with other creatives and stakeholders? Do you have anybody that you’re working with outside of your team, like on the production side? 
Coleman: We’re preparing to begin a show for Hulu after the first of the year. As soon as the show is green lit, we’ll start speaking with the executive producers about what their needs are, how they envision creating the show, what types of cameras they want to use, etc. Those are all very creative conversations about how the DP likes to work. The linchpin of that whole dynamic and interaction is the DIT — the digital imaging technician — who is the point of contact between what is acquired in the field and what ends up being transferred to us. It is imperative to have strong communication and a good relationship with that person, and also for that person to have strong communication with the camera team and the producers out in the field. 

Communication is key for everything. Once we’re in post, we have conversations with the post teams about their needs, how they like to work with graphics, music and all those creative elements that require a technical foundation. We like to cater to those needs while still within our existing infrastructure because we have multiple shows going on simultaneously, and we have a lot of shared resources. We want to make sure that everybody is moving in the same direction yet have some control of their own individual shows. 

Neil Coleman

Do you use the same storage systems across all the projects that come through 3BMG, or does it vary per project?  
Coleman: It varies a little bit per project, and that often has to do with restrictions or mandates that come from the network. For instance, we have to go through a security audit for Amazon when we work on their shows. They have, in a way, set the bar for what we provide for everybody: security in the facility, encrypted drives, ensuring that we have the correct IT infrastructure and beyond. Regarding storage, we primarily use Synology Network Attached Storage (NAS). We also use 45Drives’ NAS and Storinator. We also use the Nexis for Avid, as well as archive to LTO. Then some networks, like Amazon, have us upload directly to their S3 in the cloud.  

Was security a big factor in determining what kind of storage that you use?  
Coleman: With the Amazon security audit, we made sure that everything we are using hit their specs and met their requirements in order to be approved to work on their show. For the most part, everything that we already had hit those specs, we had to just make sure they were configured according to their requirements.  

Has the evolution of hybrid and remote workflows affected your storage needs at all?  
Coleman: I don’t think so. The way we do it here, and the way I understand it, it’s fairly similar to the other unscripted companies. People will remote in from their home locations or wherever they’re working into our facility, into their edit bay here at our facility, and they will work as if they were here in person. Our infrastructure on-premise is the same as if you were in-person or remote.  

Scotty Eagleton

All of our worlds changed when COVID hit and everybody did work from home, but that’s basically remoting in. We really don’t use cloud for much of our real day-to-day editing. We primarily use the cloud or high-speed internet for transferring footage from one location to another and then for MediaSilo or Frame.io or review and approval. 

Do you have anything on the horizon that you’d like to talk about?  
Eagleton: 3BMG owns a company called Warehouse Studios, which Neil and I oversee. It was founded because independent producers who are selling content have a need for reliable production, post and accounting services. Often, a producer who sells a piece of content to a network won’t have anywhere to take and produce it. That’s where we step in to assign a whole team to ensure that they’re taken care of every step of the way. It’s another layer to the services that we offer.  

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.