Area 51 relies on SpeedEDIT to Edit NASCAR promotion

When California-based Emmy®-winning animation and effects house Area 51 was approached to create animated conclusions to cliff-hanger TV spots for Fox Sports, they didn’t realize how far out of the box this project would take them. Nor did they realize at the time they would rely on the speed and flexibility offered by NewTek SpeedEDIT.

Area 51 is a facility used to collaborating on major Hollywood productions, and was prepared when producers for Fox Sports arrived with a somewhat unorthodox project: They had shot a television campaign of three commercials promoting the upcoming NASCAR season, “Who will Flinch?” This campaign begins with live-action NASCAR drivers doing extreme stunts, such as driving boats off the top of Hoover dam and base-jumping from skyscrapers. At the most extreme moment, the commercials unexpectedly end, teasing viewers with a link to the Fox Sports NASCAR page to see how the adventure ends.

According to Area 51’s Emmy winning animator Don McCoy, the producers arrived with some ideas, but nothing had been finalized. “It was done with a skeleton crew and no time,” he says. With just two other staffers and only a few weeks to complete the job, McCoy knew this would require some efficient use of limited resources.

The producer still didn’t have the live-action sequences that the Area 51 team was to match to, so McCoy launched his recently acquired version of NewTek SpeedEDIT and loaded in the audio bed, which had been finished. “Without the usual storyboards, we needed to quickly get a feel for how all these pieces would cut together. Using SpeedEDIT, we laid in some of our early renders, and within minutes, we had our first four clips timed to the soundtrack, and we realized at that moment that our stuff was going to cut together.”

McCoy says from that moment on, SpeedEDIT became their ‘Post Storyboard’ to easily see how the web-based campaign would flow. SpeedEDIT helped tremendously with its resolution independence, since the final pieces were to be delivered in one-quarter HD resolution (480x270 pixels). When the video clips did arrive, they were shot in HD and letterboxed for SD broadcast. McCoy was able to drop the larger clips into SpeedEDIT and instantly re-size these clips to match their rough animations without rendering or conforming the clips beforehand. As they’d planned, the live action was blending very well with the animations they were modeling, surfacing and cell-shading in NewTek’s LightWave 3D®.

McCoy says even another joy was capitalizing on SpeedEDIT’s unique inherit feature. “First set of clips we had were just animatics without any motion blur. With the SpeedEDIT inherit, I showed my boss how rapidly I could replace rough cuts with final renders by just dragging the new clip in place.” McCoy added that this was something perfectly suited for storytelling, “I never had to worry about time-code math or adjusting in or out points on these newly-rendered clips, as inherit set all that for me. Drag and drop, then hit play to see what we had.”

SpeedEDIT real-time capabilities helped McCoy as the producer was assisting in the edits, noting that “on several occasions, we’d realize the pacing was not quite right in some of these sequences, and SpeedEDIT allowed me to change the playback speed of our animation, all while maintaining our 24 frame-per-second target output.”

There was another production facility that had been slated to edit Area 51’s animation sequences, but McCoy says he and the project producer were so comfortable working in SpeedEDIT that they just breezed ahead, and quickly started augmenting the project with additional sequences from the NASCAR driver’s point of view.

Clip types delivered for this project varied for both input and output, but SpeedEDIT was ready to drive across the finish line with its multi-format workflow. The Area 51 crew had the video sequences delivered in Sorenson-based QuickTime, which dropped right in. The animation sequences had been rendered in PhotoJPEG QuickTime, which were more faithful in maintaining the cel-shaded look, and these all mixed perfectly together. AIFF Audio from the live sequences and MP3 sound effects all meshed flawlessly on the timeline together as well. For web delivery, Area 51 rendered the project out in Sorenson 3 QuickTime files. “SpeedEDIT could have rendered out in the final flash video format, but the webmaster wanted to do that” explains McCoy.

With the same project on the timeline, McCoy made some resolution adjustments, and easily re-sourced the entire series up to D1 resolution to burn to DVD for the producer.

McCoy was pleased with his first SpeedEDIT project under tight deadline. “It was extremely easy to use, and if I needed to makes changes with the producer over my shoulder, he could see how easy it was to re-arrange clips, and was helping with suggestions along the way. It was so easy for him to say ‘speed it up’ to boost the cadence of a particular clip and I could do it for him in real-time.”

SpeedEDIT, says McCoy, is a story-tellers delight. “It’s so easy. I don’t have to think about how it works, and it’s such a fluid interface, even on the timeline, since there are no limitations to the number of layers and alternate cuts I can set up.”

Area 51is a full-featured effects house in Burbank, California. Their work has
garnered two EMMY awards for "Frank Herbert's Dune" and "Frank Herbert's
Children of Dune" as well as two EMMY nominations for "Into The West" and
"SPACE: Above and Beyond" and a MONITOR award for "Dark Skies".

You can see the finished “Who will Flinch?” campaign, woven in and out of the live-action sequences, on the Fox Sports NASCAR page.