Feeding the Beast, Part 2: Production Workflow

Postproduction

The next stage is postproduction after all that’s done. Because we do a live edit to tape, usually all that’s left is to drop the media into Final Cut, add a bumper, lower-thirds, and any graphics we need to incorporate.

None of the examples in the two short clips that accompany Part 1 of this article had graphics, but we do include data charts and show live data sometimes.

Typically, we’ll do some audio tweaking, export, and then compress and upload using Telestream Episode--all in under ten minutes. So let’s say we shoot a video on the unemployment report that comes out the first Friday of every month. Ten minutes later it’s up on the site.

Publishing and Syndication

For publishing and syndication we use an in-house content management system. Sometime in the next year we’ll move to Adobe Experience Manager (formerly known as CQ5).

But if you’ve ever worked with a CMS, you know they’re all pretty similar: You log in, create your document, and add your metadata, title, description, and keywords. In our current system, we have fields for our URLs, and for our different video renditions and thumbnails, and so on.

Next, we’ll send the video out for transcription; we have an in-house transcription team in India that does that for us. We publish every video with a full transcript. There are a number of benefits to this. One is that our audience likes to read; they’re usually research professionals and they love reading. Or they might be in an environment where they can’t watch online video, so they really appreciate the transcript. In addition, the transcript helps a lot with SEO. You pick up a number of different key words or exact matches that you wouldn’t get just from your title and your description.

Closed captioning also works well for that. You Tube supports closed captioning. You can upload a transcript to YouTube, and it will automatically timeline your transcript with the content. We also use the RAMP platform, which performs that function automatically as well. When we get the transcription back we send it off to the site editors for them to spruce up the document and add anything that should be there before it gets published.

Archiving

Although some people tend to regard online content as ephemera, we want to keep a high-quality copy of anything we publish forever, because you never know when you might need to go back to it.

After we compress our version for the web, we’ll also encode a high-quality H264 version for archival purposes. We keep three months of media online on our RAID system at all times; after three months, we burn those archive versions to Blu-Ray data discs. There have been times when we’ve gone back to the Blu-Ray Discs for videos in instances where a client that we were interviewing in the video wants a reprint on their site, which we’ll pull from the high-quality master and recompress it for their purposes, or make additional edits as needed.