What is a Digitizer?

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

This is my first time ever being away from home during the holidays. It's tough, but makes me look forward to flying home for Christmas! In the meantime...I wanted to keep myself busy today.

Most people heard about my promotion, yes? When I tell them I'm a "Digitizer" they don't really know what that is. So! Let me explain.

I'm pretty sure that most shows/features have their own Digitizer that works specifically on THAT show. This is where I'm different...I work on ALLLLLL the shows (that are in production right now). Keeps me busy.
Now, say hello to my little friend. These XDCam discs have become my best friends since starting my new job. I work with these A LOT. This is the disc the Camera Operators film onto. (They don't have to be Sony, some are Maxwell and Fujifilm).

Okay, so I'm pretty much STEP ONE of Post Production. I have people from Production bring me these discs (sometimes as few as 4 to duffel bags full of them). First I have to label all those disc covers you see above. I have to write the date, the disc number consisting of Camera A, B, C, etc and the number, and the specific show. So, in the end the disc will have a name like 0910B03RW26. Which means, Real World Season 26, filmed on Sep. 10th camera B disc 3. Get it?

Now I have to keep all these in order or everything goes wrong. I have to label the disc correctly, and type in that disc name multiple times into the system when I digitize or proxy. Little mistakes mess up the entire process like accidentally typing an O instead of a 0. I know, you're like, "Huh?" Lets back up.

Next, I digitize, which means I ingest allllllll those tapes into a XDCAM deck. These decks are about $3,700 a piece and I have 13 of them to work with. It makes digitizing the tapes much faster. These decks just read exactly what is filmed onto the discs and puts it onto the computer. They film in HD 1920 x 1080 (which is what you guys watch at home on your TV). Since HD is great quality it is a HUGE file and takes up a lot of space on our servers. So, I have to then, transfer all the High Rez footage onto the render server computer (which can take awhile). Then use Compressor to make them into Lo Rez quality which is 384 x 216. MUCH SMALLER FILE SIZE! We do this because it takes up a lot less space. The Offline Editors edit in low rez quality until the show is Locked and it moves to the Online Editors. Then they (sometimes the digizters) have to digitize JUST the necessary clips from each disc in the locked cut to do all the technical fixes like color correcting, blurring, beeping out stuff, etc. Once it is all compressed I put all the low rez footage onto the appropriate server for that particular show.

Some shows film a TON of footage like The Real World, Bad Girls Club and The Challenge. Those shows have Loggers (see previous blog for explanation of a "Logger") and they watch an EVEN SMALLER file size of the same footage. So I have to make a proxy file of all those same discs, except I can only do it 1 disc at a time. Luckily, since the file size is so tiny that the process goes by pretty fast!

So, pretty much a Digitizer is a Professional Multitaker and Organizer. It can get very confusing (especially at 2am) when I'm digitizing, proxying, and compressing, multiple different shows at the same time. It is a huge responsibility because I'm in charge of organizing and handing over all the footage to the Assistant Editors to begin Post Production.

Hope all that made sense!

I love you for reading this.
Until my next blog....