Avid Everywhere is more than just a nifty marketing soundbite from a savvy corporation. Avid has continuously expanded its workflow and team-oriented services to accommodate large-scale projects with multiple editors working simultaneously from locations that are often worlds apart. The power of Avid was everywhere in the production of Mad Max: Fury Road, the fuel inefficient, post-apocalyptic bloodbath that reinvigorated a cherished franchise.
What Did Avid Do for Mad Max that Couldn't Be Done by Other Programs?
Have you ever been strapped to the front of a dune buggy spiraling through cascading dunes while firearms and vehicles are exploding close enough to shake you? On the off-chance that you haven't, it's a chore to maintain a sense of what's up, what's down, and what's alive. Fury Road embodies that experience and amps it up to the extreme with most scenes using at least ten cameras to capture as much as possible, producing a smorgasbord of footage for the editing team to piece together as they pleased.
AfterFor the eight months of filming on set in the remote deserts of South Africa, it took two years of editing for over a dozen experts to produce the final cut. A 44 TB ISIS storage system was used to distribute the massive amount of raw film to the collection of workstations running Media Composer and in-house software. More time-sensitive elements could be parcelled out and sent over the limited network connection speeds to the on-site team in the Namib Desert.
Margaret Sixel, the talented lead editor of the film, pushed the team a few hundred steps past the minimum. For each scene, Director George Miller was presented with several variations with snips and cuts that let him pick out the right sequences to create the hellish highway motor-brawl. Sixel described the number of options presented by the Avid NLE software as "daunting", but their presence was welcome throughout the post-production phase.
Avid Collaboration for Teams of Any Size
You might not need to parse through 500 hours of footage, but being able to have various workstations processing through the same reel at the same time is invaluable for meeting deadlines and allowing you to hunt for the beauty hidden in every shot. In the words of Sixel, Avid makes the editing process "straightforward" and "intuitive", letting her brilliantly showcase both the technical expertise and creative forces behind the film.
