To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 mission and man’s first steps on the moon, National Geographic commissioned 1895 Films to produce “Apollo: Missions to the Moon”. The documentary weaved together more than 10,000 photos and 1,300 hours of video and audio — including rare behind-the-scenes and never-before-heard mission audio from NASA. Renowned documentary editor and producer David Tillman helped lead the post-production phase of the project, and used Final Cut Pro to edit the film, which went on to win several awards, including Outstanding Achievement in Broadcast Editing from Cinema Eye Honors and Outstanding Producer of Televised or Streamed Motion Pictures from the Producers Guild of America.
Workflow
The documentary team first sifted through thousands of hours of archival footage, and cataloged and digitized it for use in the documentary. Producers and editors extracted notes taken on more than 100 archival tapes in a word processing document and imported the data into Final Cut.
Here, Final Cut’s organizational features really shined. Editors were able to create a rich catalog of keywords, so they could find footage using search criteria in Smart Collections rather than using a rigid folder structure. To annotate archival interviews, the team used Lumberjack for iPadOS to take notes and capture keywords while a subject was speaking. The notes would then automatically sync with the video to create a searchable database of interview footage — saving hours of replaying and annotating footage by hand. The team also used Roles to organize thousands of hours of audio from NASA’s Mission Control Center, and used Producer’s Best Friend to create lists of footage and audio used to apply for copyright clearances.
As a final step, the team needed to export audio and the final edit in order to finish the documentary in different apps. They exported audio as an organized AAF project to Avid Pro Tools using X2Pro from Marquis Broadcast, and exported video as FCPXML and sent it directly to DaVinci Resolve for final color grade and delivery.
