Behind the Scenes: Editing The Man Who Knew for PBS's Frontline
Steve Audette, Master Editor with WGBH Boston, tells the story of his latest editing effort, The Man Who Knew, a documentary that was nationally broadcast Thursday, October 3 on PBS. Steve takes you behind the scenes, with a step-by-step account of how he turned hours of footage into a high-level production. Audette's 31st documentary, this is the third time his program was featured on the season premiere of the PBS documentary series, Frontline.
The Man Who Knew is the story of an FBI agent who felt the threat of Al Qaeda to America since 1995. His name was John P. O'Neill, and long before the world knew about Osama bin Laden, Agent O'Neill was obsessed with him. He warned his superiors at FBI headquarters of the growing threat, but headquarters thought O'Neill was too much of a maverick, and they didn't listen to him. In the summer of 2001, O'Neill was finally run out of the FBI. He took a new job -- as head of security at the World Trade Center, where he died on Sept. 11.
This documentary painstakingly follows O'Neill's investigation of Al Qaeda, his personal crises, and his struggles inside the FBI bureaucracy, In the end, The Man Who Knew is an investigation of the internal power struggle at the heart of the FBI's failure on Sept. 11, but for those of us who have come to know Agent O'Neill in the course of making this program, it is also a journey into the heartbreaking irony of his death.
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For this 90-minute documentary, 100 tapes were shot on Beta SP anamorphic 16x9 with M/S stereo audio (not the interviews). About the same number of tapes were acquired for stock footage. In the Avid, we blew-up the 4x3 stock to match the 16x9 footage with a resize. Then letter-boxed the whole thing. (Exactly when is that digital future going to happen?)
I cut the show on a Media Composer 1000 xl at 15:1 (I love to pack my drives). I worked with eight audio tracks (1-4 mono. 5-8 stereo) I edited the sound design at the same time as I edited the picture. Just before the mix I spread the audio out over 16 audio tracks (keeping the M/S stereo stuff away from the rest of the stereo audio.
As part of my work flow, I digitized entire interviews and used script integration to match them up to their transcripts (Very handy when you are trying to get a guy to stop talking. Just find the same word with a period at the end -- double click, and drop it in audio only.) Once lined up, I never looked at the interview bins again -- only the scripts.
For the mix, I consolidated and then created two OMF files. The first, audio 1-8 (almost 2 gigs with 90 frame handles) and the second 9-16 (also almost 2gigs). These two OMFs were copied to a fire-wire drive and sent to the mix house. It was mixed on a DSP workstation and then put back to a DigiBeta mix master, with audio channels 1&2 mixed in stereo, and audio channels a 3&4 stereo mix, minus the narration. The mix took four days. Sync was insured (though never a problem) by sync pops at front and tail that matched the sequence.
I also cut with up to six video tracks but most times I collapsed them down to four. V23 I used for Titles, and on V24 I kept my letterbox resize handy for making dubs.
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