Our Post Production team carried out the editing, grading, finishing and sound work on 15 half-hour episodes of Dinosapien, a children’s high definition co-production for BBC Worldwide and CCI Entertainment. The broadcast partners were the BBC and Discovery Kids (US).

With the production team in Canada and the post production team based in the England, BBC Post Production created an innovative workflow solution based on File Transfer Protocol (FTP) technology. The audio scratch effects, the animation and the offline edit were transferred across the Atlantic via our FTP site.

Nick Keene, Lead Editor, says: “Sharing files across networks is not new, but sharing files across continents on this kind of scale definitely was for the BBC: around 10,000 -15,000 files travelled back and forth per episode and required around 30 gigs of storage per episode. It benefited the production enormously, enabling us to save days in the schedule and deliver work within extremely tight deadlines. Moving media in this way also meant we could make the most of the time difference too and upload files in the morning UK time, to be ready for the Canadian team when they arrive at work.”

The programme combined live footage with CGI and also required the Post Production sound team to create sounds from scratch for the animated characters.

The workflow remained tape-based in part, as it was the most effective way to move material in the early stages. Daily rushes, shot on HD Cam were sent to our Post Production team in London and down-converted to SD. DV Cam copies were then sent back to Toronto for an offline edit. The Avid Bin of the first picture lock, without animation, was compiled and sent to Post Production so the programme could be conformed on Avid Adrenalines in London. After a grading session using Pogle, the animation backplates were sent to the FTP site for the animators to use as backgrounds for the CGI Dinosaurs.

Each episode comprised 6 minutes of CGI animation, provided by Yowza Animation, also based in Canada. The final animation arrived as a sequence of Tiff files for use in the offline edit in Canada and was also put back on the FTP site for use in the second conform. Once the Offline edit with the final animation was locked in Canada, the Avid bin containing the sequence was sent to London for the final conform using the same Tiff sequence as used in the Canadian offline. After the final conform, the dialogue tracklay was carried out and the final dub. There was then a foley mix to make the programme suitable for foreign broadcasters. Post Production also undertook all re-versioning of the series for BBC Worldwide.

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