Having looked again at this on iPlayer, each team clearly only has one system to use. The laptop appears to be for QC purposes and probably to create the DVD cover artwork. There is no second production PC as some imagine, nor is there a second tape player.

However the company said four per hour for the whole process, including filming. Each team split in two dividing the 15 minute process between them. One half filming, the other adding the background and transferring it to DVD. Thus eight DVDs per hour is theoretically possible using one system but with the recording and transfer equipment working in parallel. That's what Liz meant when she said "working at full capacity".

My original point about this was therefore wrong, but not for the reason people thought.

It's difficult to know how the mistake happenned. A continous recording results in one file. Why someone should then start the mixing of background and camera footage with adding a second file is beyond me. The camera stopping and starting will result in another file. I suspect it was a one off mistake by Stella. Though she did query that it might be more dvd's. Which suggests she thought the mistake was down to some working method. Personally I think it may have been a one off that the show highlighted for drama purposes.

Perhaps the mistake was from the camera team. Using the same tape for more than one. Stella assumed that one tape equalls one customer. That is, everything on that tape is for one dvd. Perhaps she was querying 'have they combined more than one customer on a tape?' Which would have broken their supposed system.

Errr not sure why you think this? At the risk of being pedanatic (on a forum? what a rare thing!) The filming part is completely independant and can be done at any time. The frequency of that step is dependant on customers being available, not dvd production burning, software/hardware constraints (which is measurable so that is what they quoted). Sandeesh's team prduce/sell at 8 per hour later, so there have to be two burners, QED.

The combining of background and camera footage is done on a laptop. The resulting file is then sent to a tower unit (which we see Stella using), some form of cd/dvd replicator I would expect.. The latter probably has a hard drive. The transfer between laptop and dvd burner taking 2 minutes or such. Though the laptop controls it and kicks off the burning, the laptop is now free to do more editing. Stuart is seen having a second laptop. Which he should be using to check the burnt dvd's. But it's Stuart, so maybe he can't be bothered.

Btw it takes about 15 mins to burn a dvd at 4x speed. I expect they burn faster, but there is stlll the time taken by the software to verify the burn. So a total of 15 mins per dvd makes sense.
We know that Sandeesh's team burn at about 8 per hour due to the number they produce/sell in the second half of the day. As told it's 47 in six hours. Which would be maximum capacity. And simply not possible with a single dvd burner.

The result of the real-time Chroma-keying was transferred by video tape, like the ones in the runner's hand.

We all saw the result on the TV screen. All that would be need would to capture the video to tape.

Import tape into iMovie
Add / amend opening title
Delete ALL the old footage from the timeline (otherwise you may get some other kid on it)
Drag new footage onto timeline
Add / amend any captions
Share video with iDVD
Burn DVD

It may take 15 minutes to burn, and verify, a full DVD with 4.7Gb of data but I doubt it takes that to produce a DVD with only three minutes of footage. I'll try it for real in a minute.

Once burnt, remove DVD and review (apparently) on laptop.

In parallel to this amend, and print the label.

Any you still banging on about this?

You've no credibility when you insist on talking in brand specific terms about a process that can just as easily be done on any platform with several different packages.

It's all irrelevant anyway. This whole sub-discussion only came about because people were slating a candidate for the number of DVD's that were purchased on the basis of a figure given for the entire process when it was clear that the number of DVD's that could be produced per hour was twice the number that you got from diving an hour by the production rate quoted.

The minutia of how the work-flow progressed through the system is utterly irrelevant.

Since we saw, in real-time, the resultant Chroma-keyed image on the television and saw the footage being delivered on video tape I think you are the one with a credibility problem as far as the workflow is concerned.


By the way.

I've just burnt a 3 minute DVD for real on my Mac Mini.

3 minute, pre-encoded, movie to DVD.

Start: 09:44
End: 09:48
Duration: approx 4 minutes.

So the 15 minute estimate to burn is probably over-estimated.

What has that got to do with anything?

We were discussing the time it took to produce DVD's from the tape.



That's very slow.

I can burn and verify a 20 min clip on a PC in that time.

But, again, it's all irrelevant because we know from the production rate at its peak that they could produce more than 4 DVD's and hour - so all this obsessing about details is meaningless.

It appears that macs come with a program called
iWon't Let it Go

No. I think it's the iPhone that has an app for that.

Well, as I've been as guilty as anyone for not letting it go I'm keeping my head down.

Never in the history of the apprentice has anyone ever worked in full capacity...

look at the bread task, the promised 1000+ bread and the delivered 12.

To work in full capacity you will need to do your trade day in day out, know exactly what to do and how to do it, and then when you''re super familair with it, only then can you even consider working in full capacity.. and even then it would not be possible because the 10am saturday crowd will be thin on the ground, you wouldn't have the crowd to pull in to get back to back sales.

But, you know it's very eaasy to criticise, you have to bear in mind, each and every task is a bit like someone's first day at work in a completely unfamilair trade.

You don't know what to expect, what to charge, where to place people, where the money lies etc.. you just have to wing it and hope you had a good plan to begin with, which is impossible to do given that nobody has done anything like this before.

I would mark down 20% from full capacity than up 20% from full capacity though..

Which is what Liz did.

My personal gut feeling was to go for young teenage girl market, I thought the bollywood theme and or some singing/stage singing performance would be the way to go.

Maybe karoke with pop star background or something, I think teenage girls in groups are a lot less camera shy than boys..

have lots of different accessories etc.

However hindsight is 20:20, so I think the boy in the car concept was definately a winner, and may have been better than the singing concept.


The sking concept was terrible, I know everyone is saying it now, but I said it while the posh guy was suggsting it, who in the right mind would create a dvd of themselves fake skiing?

This is clearly designed with adults in mind, and the only adults I could see making themselves a video fake skining is david brent.

What made the kid market work was that

a) nobody is narcissistic enough to put themselves centre stage doing something that is ultimately cheesy, so it's easier to get a friend to coerece their friend to do it, or better a parent to encourage their child to do it.

b) parents like to spend money on their kids, and this is a unique and innovate experience [for the parent at least, the child is clueless]

Do you really suppose the laptop is doing the high power video processing and the large tower unit just burning the DVD? No need to replicate either, they only need one copy. The tower unit was next to the tape drive being used to copy the tape and add the background. We saw Stuart reviewing the finished DVD on the laptop. Stuart was not involved in production, he was supposed to do the quality check (badly as it turned out).

I'm sure the tower unit had a hard drive. No doubt the laptop had one too. As for Stuart doing the video processing and Stella burning the DVDs, that's really not likely either, is it?

If you look at the programme again the operators of the equipment clearly tell Liz that the whole process is 15-20 minutes including filming. Thus four per hour, unless you do the filming and processing tasks in parallel, not in series.

As for taking 15 minutes to burn a DVD, that depends how long the DVD is. These weren't two hour features, they were five minute (-ish) videos.

I think the laundry task a couple of years ago was one example of a team working at full capacity. The boys team doing the hotel laundry were absolutely flat out and working like a military operation.

I do suppose, yes. Here's a dvd replicator/burner. It has a hard drive! You send the finished image to it and that leaves your laptop free for the next. This page gives times for Lightscribe printing btw.
http://www.prolok.com/premium-duplic...plicator.shtml

Yes they are working in parallel as they have two teams. Camera operators and dvd production. The filming time could be anything. The kid may be good and get in the car, or it might cry and hold everyone up. The video post production and burning are pretty much set times once you know what you are doing. No matter how many they film, it's the dvd output times that put the upper limit on sales units. It's getting customers to be filmed that sets the lower sales figure, again in units.

OK so all those who keep saying 4 per hour, please explain how they managed to produce 47 in six hours? Liz works out they could get through a maximum of 88 in an eleven hour day. That's 8 per hour. Does she know something a few others on here don't?

Tercet2, most PCs have a hard drive, so there being one in the tower unit is not a significant point. However burning DVDs is surely less demanding than video production, and it's likely the tower PC has more graphics processing power than the laptop. I repeat there is no need for duplication. Each DVD is a one off.

If you are correct, why put the tape deck next to the DVD burner PC, when you really need it next to the laptop? Why was Stuart, who was accused later of not doing the QC properly, according to you actually doing the video processing? Why wasn't Stella accused of the QC issue instead as she was supposedly operating the DVD burner (while also operating the tape deck for Stuart)? It's much more likely the laptop was used to check the finished DVDs and print the covers.

I agree 8 per hour is possible, but it does not need two systems. There is no second processing unit or second burner. I suggest you look again at the programme on iPlayer as when he mentions the 15-20 minute time he clearly says "including filming", i.e. the whole process end-to-end.

The filming time is also standard by the way, or at least it has a minimum. Basically that's the length of the background video.

Whatever the laptop and tower unit did, they form part of the single system each team was given. There is no unseen second system. 8 per hour is achieved by doing the filming in parallel with post production, as below:

Time........Front......Back
1100:00....Film 1....*waiting*
1107:30....Film 2....Prod 1
1115:00....Film 3....Prod 2
1122:30....Film 4....Prod 3
1130:00....Film 5....Prod 4

etc.

Note each DVD takes 15 minutes to produce from beginning to end, but a DVD is finished every 7.5 minutes. Liz was smart enough to realise this when ordering DVDs. Stuart's team appeared to be working on 4 per hour for their DVD estimate before Stuart arbitrarily decided on an even lower number (correctly as it turned out).

*realises need to get out more*

Pretty much all do (we'll ignore some render farm systems).
The laptop is doing a fair amount of processing to combine the two video streams. You don't want to be burning a dvd at that point. Instead you send it to the replicator. Maybe you want one, maybe you burn two cos the grandparents are getting a copy. Not thought of that? Check the prices on Stella's chart. Some look to be doubles £10/£20

As to why which machine is next to which.....cables??

In real life the camera team are doing a lot more than just processing one child after another. You can't possibly work out a standard time for them and expect it to be followed. Sometimes, often, they won't be any customers. The DVD person can still work at the rate they can if they have a backlog.

I never said Stuart was doing the processing. He was ferrying tapes, dvds and being a manager instead. Stella is doing the dvd work. You really think all she is doing is putting dvd's in trays?

There doesn't have to be a second system! Just two burners and a hard disk to feed them. Which is what you get as standard in a dvd replicator. It's like sending a file to printer, it does in a buffer. In this case a hard disk. Not the one in the laptop.

Interesting maths. But a waste But why are you guessing at what did what when it's not as complicated as you are making it. You've admitted you don't really know the process No don't 'correct' me any more please

Are you ignoring the fact that there was a real-time, live feed of the Chroma-keyed image on the television screen?

We were watching it.
The kids were watching it.
The parents were watching it.

That video signal was probably also recorded onto the video tape and taken for importing and burning.


ETA:
Being ever-so sad, and going through last weeks episode frame by frame the appear to be using an Ultimatte DV - Live Chroma Keyer unit to do the Chroma-keying.

Oooh looks like a lovely bit of kit to have a play with.

So did you why even mention the presence of a hard drive?

If the laptop is doing the post processing then whoever was operating it would have to keep asking stella to load and unload tapes. So while cables can physically connect the laptop to the tape drive why put it by the tower when it needs to be within reach of the laptop user?


Yes, but they still have to film the child for the time it takes for the background to run. The filming takes time, and that time was included in the 15-20 minutes mentioned. Why do you keep ignoring this fact?


So Stella was operating both the tower and the laptop? Perhaps she's been at the Octiclean and has six extra hands.


Look, the company said the time to produce a finished DVD was 15-20 minutes, assuming that means with one set of kit. No one said you can double the throughput by adding another burner.


I'm no more guessing at what did what than you are. But I know (because the guy on the show said so), that the 15 minute time included filming. You continue to say it didn't which is perverse.

If the 15 minute process is all in the back room and the filming time is irrelevant, as you claim, then how on earth could they double throughput without changing the system? What you seem to be saying is that the quoted process time of 15 minutes was with the equipment working at half capacity. How is it then the minimum time?

Well spotted! They are probably using the Ultimate DV to combine and output onto DV tape. It's not always used to do the latter, but it is always used to provide a live preview. The only query being Stella seems to think the 'changing child' is a fault at her end. That suggests she is editing. But it's more likely that she is confused and the fault was caused camera side.
Nevertheless, the Mac Pro she is using will have to spend time encoding the DV file into a DVD format that can be played on a normal DVD player (on a tv). There may be extras like titles that need to be added too. I don't know if things like Lightscribe are available on Macs or were done here. If they were, that's extra production time.

Looking at Mac Pro specs, you can fit two 'Super drives' aka DVD burners into a machine. They can burn different data independantly. This is not an issue for Stuart's team because they only have 30 DVD's for the entire day. This is not the case with Sandeesh's team! They burn 55 DVD's (+ 2 uncollected) in 11 hours total (47 in the last six hours), despite the company saying it the rate is 3-4 per hour. So how? The Mac Pro having two super drives is the only logical answer. As it's job is to make DVD's, you'd fit the maximum it can take. This explains Liz's estimate of 88 DVD's for the day. The machine has the capacity to do that.

Stuart's laptop is probably doing very little other than sometimes checking a DVD. He's not there for much of the time. We see nothing of what Christopher is doing in the busy afternoon/evening. But somehow he is going at nearly 8 DVD's an hour to keep up with the camera team's shooting. Jamie is probably busy ferrying tapes back, too busy to help otherwise.

I mentioned the hard drive because you did! You created the DVD 'image' ready to burn and store it on the hard drive. When a burner becomes free, you kick the job off.

I was wrong about the laptop, a Mac Pro is doing all the work here. It is the production system.

I'm not ignoring the time the background takes to run. What I am trying to answer is how Sandeesh's team manage to produce 47 DVD's in 6 hours. Well in excess of the timings the company tell us on camera. What I was trying to explain was that selling/dealing with customers is a much more glut and famine situation than the steadier world of production which can work at an even rate through a backlog. That's what I meant by the filming being anything, the gaps inbetween filming/setting up the child in the car could be anything. For Christopher to spend 6 hours producing almost 8 DVD's an hour suggests working at a steady maximum rate. The question is how he does he manage this?

The system they have, if fitted with two burners, which it can handle, would help with doubling the rate. No waiting for the one burner to be free. Your timings on previous post are possible, but require the camera team to be as steady and constant as the dvd making person. In real life the former team is having a much more stop/start hectic time of it. They canno plan such timing because they are governed by customers being available and fitting in with such a tight schedule. That won't be the case in real life. In practice Christopher has at times a backlog of tapes and at others he's only just cleared them before Jamie turns up with more.

The fact we see Stella only operating the top drive doesn't mean the other bay is empty. Her team is working at a slower rate. One drive is enough. Christopher can only double the stated output times if the camera team are working in total sync with him. As I explained, customers will mess that up. So having two burners in the machine gives him the capacity not to be a bottleneck. As I pointed out in a slightly earlier answer, it makes sense to fit the system with as many burners as it can take (two) as that is the system's function, burn DVD's. Makes sense in case of hectic periods.
You'd expect the company that supplied the kit to do that. Their quoted time was for one DVD on it's own. Liz works out 88 DVD's, she knows that working at twice that capacity is quite possible. An exact doubling suggests two burners rather than working out a rigid timetable is the reason.

Actually you first mentioned hard drives in post #53.


At least you now agree the laptop had little to do with production.

You might be right about the second burner, but why would they add one having previously demonstated a system with only one? They weren't shown how to operate the enhanced system. Also you still ignore the fact that on day 1, the operator clearly told them the 15 minute time included filming. Thus the time to take the tape and burn the video onto a DVD must be much less than that.

My timetable isn't rigid at all, I put it like that for clarity. In practice the film crew and backroom crew would not need to be synchonised. The key to the apparent doubling of the rate is that DVD production only takes about half of the total time they talked about on day 1, the other half of the time being the filming. My reasoning allows the rate to double without any extra computers or burners being used.

It's really very simple. 15-20 minutes was the time it would take to make a single DVD from start to finish. Because filming and post production are done in parallel this is roughly halved when you are producing a series of them.

You are right that for long periods the filming crew had little to do due to lack of punters, but then likewise this then applies to the backroom crew too. Full capacity means a queue of customers out front being dealt with in turn which will keep the backroom fully occupied too. Thus 8 per hour can only be achieved with a constant supply of people to film.