I, along with my fellow supervising editors John Larson, ACE, and Sean Basaman, oversee the creative and technical editorial workflow, and a team of more than 40 editors and assistant editors. This includes overseeing 3,500-plus hours of footage per year of unscripted shoots, from stage and rehearsals to interviews and home follows.
John, Sean and I (pictured) are actively editing from the opening creative offline process to the fine cut and lock of each episode. I also take all the episodes to final finish, including overseeing online, graphics and color.
Already an enormous undertaking in Season 1, the scale of the show has grown exponentially over the years with the addition of the Knockout and Playoff rounds, and new elements, such as the Block, Steals and Saves, have required us to adjust our workflow multiple times over the last 26 seasons. This is a massive undertaking, and we needed to find a way to get above the trees to see everything. Originally, we started with editors following individual artists through their show journey, but quickly recognized the limitations of a single editor tracking all that media. We also found that playing on the specific editor’s strengths they brought to the show gave us the creative flexibility we needed.
With our diverse team, we divide and conquer the stories and media in order to explore all the artists’ journeys, then collaborate with the producers to dial in the edit and build out each episode. For example, John and Sean edit and oversee edit teams that concentrate on the story elements of each artist, while I edit and lead the team of performance editors. This basically allows more people to work on the first, second and final acts of each artist’s journey in an episode. Constant coordination between editors and producers keeps us on-track, making sure we’re all seeing the same storylines, feeding them and playing them off in the end.
All of this, of course, centers around our team of assistant editors under the leadership of lead AE Breeana Kovelman and lead AE Delana Wilkinson. All media, cuts and outputs are handled in Avid and Avid NEXIS in combination with some additional nearline storage. Outside the online editors and me, all our offline editors are remote, spread out across three time zones, and the AE team takes shifts between remote and studio shifts. We created our workflow to centralize all media for easier updating by AEs and allow all editors to personalize their own projects for creative editing, then return cuts for review and episode integration back through the centralized project. It’s very efficient and allows the AEs to update once and for all editors to receive updates simultaneously. This also helps ensure the latest cut of anything is easily trackable for producers, editors and AEs.
The Voice starts and finishes on Avid. From Avid Media Composer to Avid Symphony, the chain is not broken, even for our final mixes in Pro Tools. Having all the media online - professional and amateur-shot - gives producers and editors the ability to check everything at any time in the process. Remote editors having difficulty discerning shot quality due to internet compression can have someone in online check immediately. Comp shots started in offline are completed quickly in online, then passed back, keeping the creative process moving forward.
Avid gives us efficiency for creativity. My edit bay on the Universal Lot is one of the best small screening rooms in town, and it’s all for the comfort and viewing pleasure of the execs. It is set up as a colorist bay and screening room with a seasonally-calibrated Sony PVM-2541 and Sony VPL-XW6000ES projector for the 12-foot screen. The room has some of the original theatre seats from the theatres on the Universal backlot and seats 11 very comfortably. Sound is provided by JBL LSR28P monitors. Our senior production mixer Michael Abbott supplied these to match what is being used in production for all the mixes as a way to ensure complete sound alliance from live performance to final picture. The Voice never looks or sounds better anywhere else.
My Avid Symphony is very unique and maintained by Chad Wilkerson of Moviola. We’ve been a team for over 20 years now (and multiple TV series) and my technical and creative needs would be wanting without him. Together, we’ve created an Avid Symphony that includes physical and digital gear never designed to work together. Some is legacy gear, such as the plug-ins from Tiffen that are no longer available (or supposed to run on this version of Avid…Such is the talent of Chad), and some of it is gear never originally meant to be used on an Avid, such as the programmable X-Keys pad I use on the side. I use a custom Azio mechanical keyboard as well as the original Euphonix MC Color and Avid Artist Mix consoles. Standards are the Kensington Turbo Mouse, Sapphire, DFT, and Boris plug-ins. I gather my color information from my Leader LV 5770A multi monitor and use that to also toggle the confidence return to my system during output and to the projector.
Our nominated episode - Episode 2408 “The Battles Premiere” - is the culmination of work from all the assistant editors and editors at The Voice. We are lucky enough to be recognized presenting our body of work for an Emmy this year, and we are thankful the TV Academy sees that not all shows work in the same way. Just as we start each season looking into the forest of footage to find the trees, we work in the same way: we are the trees that create the beautiful forest. Each of us brings our individual creativity to these artists’ stories and presents them in a way that is authentic, natural and real. My direct contribution to this episode lays in the pleasure I have working with all these editors in working on a show that elevates the artist’s journey to be seen on stage and behind the editing keys.
Robert M. Malachowski Jr., ACE, is a multi-Emmy-nominated editor and long-time, active member of the TV Academy and American Cinema Editors. He has edited The Voice since the first episode. He currently is a Governor for the Picture Editor Peer Group at the TV Academy.