LoveSpring, the Lifetime Channel’s new hit comedy about a somewhat unusual Beverly Hills dating service, found the ideal camera for their 3-camera production.  The Canon XL-H1 is light, flexible and generates a breathtaking HD image – perfect for LoveSpring’s improvisational 360-degree shooting in tight spots with half-hour takes. But, after shooting and posting the initial 6 episodes using the XL-H1, the new editorial crew that arrived to post episodes 7-13 decided to tackle an issue that the first crew encountered in LoveSpring’s post-production workflow.

“We were conforming in 29.97”, said Chris Mohr, an editor on the show, “however, our delivery requirement to the distributor was 23.98. We could deliver this way, but we quickly realized that the workflow would be a lot smoother if we could produce HDCAM masters off the camera tapes that were 23.98, instead of the 29.97 frames per second coming from the camera’s HD-SDI output when we dubbed.”

Further complexity included the use of Avid™ Meridien™ systems for offline. These systems required as input 29.97 SD video that was frame accurate with the HDCAM masters. Time constraints meant that both the HD and SD tapes needed to be created in one pass. In addition, the workflow would have to be changed while shooting and editorial were underway, under tight deadlines. 

What LoveSpring needed was a highly accurate frame rate converter that would perform a 3:2 pulldown on the 29.97 material and calculate the correct 23.98 timecode.  Skymicro, a producer of video encoder and decoder boards for broadcast and other video applications, was contacted to see if they could provide assistance.  “LoveSpring’s scenario was the type in which Skymicro’s Merlin hardware architecture can excel”, said Rudy Lopez, President of Skymicro, “The Merlin’s hardware frame buffers and real-time frame processing capabilities enabled us to engineer a solution in a matter of days.” As it turned out, a few days was all the time Skymicro had to solve the problem before shooting was over.

Mohr and Dino Donofrio, Assistant Editor on LoveSpring, were responsible for putting Skymicro’s equipment through the kind of testing only a production can provide. “We were already well into production when we met Skymicro and they got started”, remembers Mohr, “Skymicro engineered around us and tested during off hours. Their focus was completely on improving our workflow. It’s unusual and much more difficult to re-engineer a workflow while in production, but working with Skymicro, we did it. LoveSpring put Skymicro’s rate converter into the workflow for the last few episodes”.

Skymicro’s Rate Converter, nicknamed RateX during development, did more than eliminate the issue at LoveSpring – it changes the cost equation for producing broadcast television in HD. By eliminating a costly conversion process, the Canon XL-H1 and Skymicro Rate Converter set new standards for price/performance in HDTV production. With three 1/3-inch native 16:9 CCD shooting 1080/24f and producing an image whose quality significantly exceeds other cameras in the price range, the Canon XL-H1 can now readily be used in a 23.98 workflow with outstanding results.

“Canon and Skymicro are working together to provide the solution to TV productions”, said Joe Bogacz, Product Development Mgr at Canon, “working together, we can continue to optimize the workflow in ways previously unimagined or not thought to be possible”.

Although Lifetime broadcasts the LoveSpring program in SD, the HD masters are “Simply stunning”, said Joshua Throne, Producer of LoveSpring, “I hope everyone eventually gets to see them. And, now that we’ve achieved a 23.98 workflow, we’re very happy”.