Diligent's annual Elevate conference brings together governance leaders for two days of keynotes, sessions, and testimonial interviews. For the third year running, they needed a same-day recap edit: a finished piece ready to premiere before the conference closed, as well as clips, highlights, and a full set of testimonial videos after the conference.

I was brought on to design and run the entire post-production operation, and to cut the same-day edit myself.

The system I designed let everything run in parallel without anyone waiting on anyone else. The DIT offloaded cards directly to the NAS and backup SSDs. While that was happening, a utility machine automatically archived the full project from the NAS to project backup drives and generated media analysis files so Premiere was ready to swap shots based on whatever I could think up. No bottlenecks, no one sitting idle, no drive-shuttling between machines. As soon as a session wrapped and cards landed on the server, I built a synced multicam sequence from the footage. Those multicam clips were graded once, and that grade carried through to every sequence across the production that referenced them.

Keynotes, testimonials, and on-the-street interviews went into Descript right after ingest, giving the director a fast way to search and surface sound bites from memory as the day progressed. Adobe Podcast cleaned up the audio on both the outdoor interviews and the keynotes, which had a pretty significant echo bouncing around the venue.

The edit wrapped at midnight on day three. The client came back with two shot swaps. The next morning, she pulled me aside after the piece premiered to the full conference audience to tell me it was one of her favorite videos ever made for the company, and it was on social by lunch.