Planet Earth

Our Post Production team was responsible for the HD editing of the landmark series Planet Earth narrated by David Attenborough, the BBC's first major HD series which began transmission on BBC One on 5th March.

From the world's greatest rivers and impressive gorges to the mightiest mountains, the hidden underground world of caves and caverns, to vast deserts, Planet Earth gives a unique view of awe-inspiring landscapes from all across the globe, revealing some of the most mythical creatures that live in these habitats.

The world's premier wildlife cameramen travelled all over the planet to create the series. It would not have been possible to film many of the breathtaking sequences without high definition cameras. The high definition cameras were able to slow down the action by over 40 times enabling us to see crocodiles dive out of the water to snap their jaws around wildebeest. Cameras were able to track not only the great migrations but to capture split-second action and get an amazing footage of land-based animals in their natural territories, however remote their habitat.

BBC Studios and Post Production invested in a new High Definition tapeless post production solution to support the series. The new grading and finishing technology, which included substantial data storage to eliminate video tapes, enabled us to deliver high quality content. The ingest, storage, editing, effects, grading and archive systems is based around a 9TB Sledgehammer NAS and includes Lustre and Smoke.

Transferring the material presented a number of challenges. Three years ago the formats used were relatively new and required significant development to ensure that wildlife filmmakers could maximise the cameras output. The key issues were ensuring that all the variables within the different formats could be dealt with. For example, although the programme was produced at 25p, the process had been changed to deal with variations such as slow motion shots.

The use of the revolutionary new logging system Colledia proved invaluable for the producers of Planet Earth , enabling them to produce storyboards and rough cuts to produce a pre-edit. The key issue for the ingest was to ensure that all the metadata was downloaded into the system to produce meaningful files for batch digitising.

In order to retain the highest quality from the film material, initial offline copies were made and then selected shot transfers at RGB 4:4:4 were ingested onto a timeline in the Sledgehammer. Video rushes were conformed directly into an HD smoke and then married up with the film rushes. The creation of both EDL's were a massive undertaking, due to the sheer volume of rushes and archive within the programmes.

Due to the tapeless nature of the system, all conformed material was stored as data DPX files. This enabled transfer of the material back and forth throughout the Smoke/Lustre/Sledgehammer, without affecting the quality of the material in any way.

Alastair Fothergill, Executive Producer Planet Earth commented: "The detail HD gives is incredible. The Planet Earth footage is of the highest quality and totally unique. We wanted to be able to preserve the quality of the content whilst also achieving an efficient, non-linear, data-based and cost effective route through post production. The solution provided meets all these needs."

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