Apple's 'Behind the Mac' Video Dives Into Severance Season 2 Editing Techniques

I've been an assistant editor on an episodic series for a major streaming service that was cut in Avid Media Composer, which used a similar remote desktop Mac workflow, so I can share some insight if anyone's interested.

All the media files (video, audio, vfx shots, etc.) live on a big file server, like an Avid Nexis server ('https://www.avid.com/products/avid-nexis/storage-and-specs'). (Our show used Tiger Spaces ('https://www.tiger-technology.com/software/tiger-spaces/') server software which simulates an Avid Nexis.)

Avid effectively requires all media that you edit with to be converted into an Avid-friendly format. (Unlike say Adobe Premiere which is almost always happy to work with video files in their original camera format. Avid technically supports this "linked media" in theory, but in practice it crashes constantly.)

So all the video files the editors work with in Avid is transcoded into an Avid-friendly format like DNxHR or maybe ProRes. The 3 assistant editors they mentioned are the people who bring in the media and transcode it into Avid format. (Or maybe Avid proxy media is made on set by a DIT like @vladi (digital imaging technician) overseen by the cinematographer.) They usually will make medium quality media files for this "offline" edit, something like DNxHR SQ or ProRes LT at 1080p. And they will apply a basic LUT to the Avid proxy media files to make the color look decent. Good enough for everyone to look at during the edit, but not good enough for broadcast.

Avid is a very CPU-intensive program, it does very little work on the GPU. As someone mentioned before, until last month Avid was still an Intel-only program. The Intel versions do run fine on Apple Silicon Macs via Rosetta, just not as optimized.

According to IMDB there were 3 editors on Season 2. Probably each editor had a dedicated workstation computer sitting in the edit facility on a fast 10Gbe+ network connected to the Avid Nexis media servers. Then the editor can access their dedicated workstation via remote desktop, the video actually shows them using Jump Desktop (see screenshot below) which is the same remote desktop app we used on our show too. It's very good most of the time.

For Severance Season 2 to premiere mid-January 2025, the editing process was probably done in Summer 2024. The finishing of color grading and sound mixing would be done no later than Fall 2024, their final deadlines to deliver the finished show to Apple TV+ were almost certainly before Thanksgiving. (Our show premiered in January and it was due to the streaming service in like Sept/Oct. They want plenty of time to make all the foreign-language dubs, subtitles, marketing trailers, all that jazz.)

So it's quite possible in Summer 2024 that the editors were working from Intel Mac workstations in the edit facility, as Intel CPUs are the platform that Avid was really optimized for at that time.

It's also very possible that they were editing on M1-M2 Ultra Mac Studios or M2 Ultra Mac Pros. But an Avid edit facility wouldn't have been highly motivated to buy Apple Silicon Macs in 2024 since the performance of Avid specifically on Apple Silicon wasn't much better than on the 2019 Intel Mac Pro, and sometimes worse. (The show I worked on in 2022-23 was using a mix of 2019 Intel Mac Pros, some then-new M1 Ultra Mac Studios, and even a couple of 2012 Mac Pros were in the mix too, as a last resort.)

The press release says "On a lower floor within his apartment, Richman edits on iMac, which remotes into a separate Mac mini. This Mac mini runs Avid — the industry-standard video editing software — from a post-production facility in Manhattan’s West Village."

I'll believe them that the Mac Mini is the Avid workstation, so I'd say it's a bit of a toss-up whether that's an 2018-2023 Intel i7 Mac Mini with 64GB max RAM, or a 2023 M2 Pro Mac Mini with 32GB max RAM. (The high-end Intel Mac Mini was still on sale alongside the original M1 Mac Mini, until the M2 Pro Mac Mini arrived.) I'd actually lean toward the Intel Mac Mini being the most likely investment for the post facility to have made, as a less expensive workstation option to the Intel Mac Pro. If they bought M2 Pro Mac Minis in 2023, they would have also had the option to buy Mac Studios, which they definitely would have done if they were buying in 2023.

Intel i7 Mac Mini would be quite capable of editing 1080p DNxHR / ProRes footage (easiest to edit formats)... that 70 camera multicam marching band scene though... wow.

Also, the iMac Richman uses at home is likely to be the 27" 5K Intel iMac, like the 2019-2020 i9 model, that was a very popular iMac with editors as it gave even better performance than the 2017 iMac Pro for less money. That iMac Pro was also a popular editor machine. And it was probably a Covid investment in work-from-home equipment right at the start of the Apple Silicon transition, as we needed fast reliable machines to continue working dependably while this whole new architecture transition and global pandemic worked itself out. I can't see many pro editors spending any money on a smaller screen 24" Apple Silicon iMac with limited RAM and CPU options. (My 2020 workstation purchase was a closeout 2019 MacBook Pro 15" with Intel i9 and Vega 20 GPU that I still use sometimes along my M1 Ultra Studio, although I mainly work in Premiere if I can help it.)

So when Apple says in the video that "Severance is edited on Mac mini, iMac, and MacBook Pro" what they seem to mean is that the iMac and the MacBook Pro are the client computers running Jump Desktop, and the Mac Mini was the Avid workstation, and probably 2 of those 3 were Intel Macs. He mentions his MacBook Pro has HDMI, so it must be Apple Silicon, I think the 2015 MacBook Pro is a little too old now to be plausible. The little M4 Mac Mini with Studio Displays they show in the video wasn't available until after the show was finished, so it was just a staged shot for the purposes of the video. Or maybe the editors / post facility have now since upgraded to M4 Pro Mac Minis and so that is truly their current workstation at the time this video was made.

The Assistant Editors, by the way, are the ones who usually make the exports when a new cut of the show is ready to be screened. It is highly likely the Assistant Editors use the most powerful computers of the team, as they are the ones who do the heavy lifting of transcoding media into Avid format and also exporting cuts out of Avid to H264/5 Quicktime screeners. The AEs are almost guaranteed to have been working on Intel Mac Pros, or else M1/M2 Ultra Mac Studios or Pros. As Avid uses CPU rendering far more than GPU, the fastest multi-core CPU performance is the most important thing.

Anyway, what happens after the "offline edit" work is done in Avid (late summer / early fall 2024) is they then make exports of their editing decisions, and it goes into an "online edit" process, where another team then replaces the Avid offline media with the original quality camera files and sound files. Then a colorist will work on making the final color graded version of the picture, and sound mixers will work on building out the sound scape of the show. Final VFX shots will also be added at this time, probably during editing they were working with temp VFX placeholders. Usually something like DaVinci Resolve will be the tool used for color, and Avid's Pro Tools will be the tool used for sound. It's that Resolve+Pro Tools "online" version of the show that finally will go to broadcast. It's very possible those parts happened on Mac too.

Edit: this turnover from the offline edit to the online edit is probably the strongest suit of Avid compared to other NLE (non-linear editing) software like Premiere or especially FCP. Avid is really good at making the various exports needed for the colorist and sound mixers to work with. As it was the industry standard editing tool for a long time, the whole post-production pipeline kind of got built up around getting things into and out of Avid, so it can still do that part of the job quite well, and other people further down the chain usually prefer getting turnovers from Avid vs any other NLE. Although Resolve could be a good NLE option here too, if you edit in Resolve and your colorist finishes in Resolve, there's even less of an export needed, I imagine.

Edit 2: also the ability for 6 editors and assistants, plus a few others I'm sure, to all be working in the same project at the same time with the same set of media, that has been another long time strength of Avid that other NLEs are working on catching up to. Multiple people can have the same project file open, and when they open a "bin" of sequences/clips, that user is the only one who can write to that bin, it gets locked read-only for all other users.

In television especially the deadlines are the tightest, so there's the greatest need for multiple people to be working at the same time, to edit a ~10 hour long season. That's why a strong multi-user system like Avid continues to remain popular in TV in particular. In feature films there may be a smaller team with less of a tight deadline, so there can be more freedom of choice of NLEs in feature films.

Unlike Avid, Premiere historically locked the entire project file to the first person to open it, making the whole project read-only for everyone else. Adobe released a new "Productions" project format a few years ago that tries to work more like Avid, so you can have a meta-project of project files that can work more like Avid's bin locking system. It's decent, but not as seamless as Avid. Resolve also has a fairly new project sharing system that allows locking of individual sequences, I believe. FCP I think has no such native project sharing ability for multiple users, without the addition of extra software like PostLab ('https://hedge.co/products/postlab'). (Kind of like GitHub for video editors.) I'm sure there are workflows people have developed ('https://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/workflows/') for dealing with multi-user projects in FCP, but it's not as easy as the other NLEs. (I could be wrong about FCP and Resolve, I don't know those tools as well.)

Imagine if Apple would have their own video editing software... oh wait...

So, how is Siri’s AI delay progressing? Apple should concentrate on its core business rather than venturing into self-congratulatory Hollywood culture.

I know I want the people making videos for Apple products working on code engineering. Totally the same disciplines, anyone can learn to code amirite?

So, how is Siri’s AI delay progressing? Apple should concentrate on its core business rather than venturing into self-congratulatory Hollywood culture.

I am telling you with 100% certainty that the dev teams have nothing to do with the filming and production of TV shows.

Incredible show edited only on the most incredible machines.

Imagine if Apple would have their own video editing software... oh wait...

HAHAHA yeah, I was 100% they would plug Final Cut Pro.
It seems not even apple is so sure about their editing software.

I work in the animation industry, and I know a few editors.
None I know uses Final Cut Pro.

Some use Davinci, some Premiere Pro (actually more and more people, lately), the super-hardcore editors Media Composer, but none Final Cut Pro.

Pity, as (from what I understand) it actually does some cool things with its interface, and it feels the sleekest.
Premiere Pro is a powerhouse, but I hate the interface.