Musicians, magicians, and all forms of performers show off their incredible skills in Dominicana’s Got Talent (Dominicana Tiene Talento), the Dominican Republic’s hit installment of the global Got Talent franchise.
But the stage performers aren’t the only ones with talent on the TV show. Behind the scenes, a skilled production crew and video editing team pulled off exceptional performances week after week with the help of their EVO shared storage server.
Jaw-dropping performances, emotional backstories, and the fan-favorite Golden Buzzer made Dominicana’s Got Talent an instant and colossal hit in the Caribbean nation. “We were on top of the ratings. The whole country was watching,” said Tuto Guerrero, Director/Producer at Guerrero Filmworks and Executive Producer for Dominicana’s Got Talent.
Only The Best Will Do
Dominicana’s Got Talent is an absolutely massive broadcast television production with 13 cameras in the studio (some shooting 6K), 9 cameras outside and backstage for interviews, hundreds of contestants and extras, and lightning-fast post-production deadlines. Guerrero knew he needed a made-for-media server that could handle such a demanding broadcast production.
“We needed a lot of horsepower in the editing room to make the show,” Guerrero said, so he went searching for the best shared storage server on the market.
“When I went to NAB, I saw this EVO, and I was blown away. I found the Ferrari of NAS!”
“I knew the only way we could pull this off and meet our deadlines is if we have the SNS EVO,” Guerrero asserted. So, he ordered an EVO video production server and got to work making one of the top reality TV productions in the Dominican Republic.
Editing For Emotion
Speed wasn’t all they needed, though. ShareBrowser—the media asset manager included with EVO—was particularly important in the making of Dominicana’s Got Talent. With searchable tags and bins for media sharing, ShareBrowser helps editors find what they need, faster.
“ShareBrowser was really important because we could categorize all of the emotions that we need in an act and have that instantly available by a keyword,” said Guerrero.
“We had hours and hours of footage that needed to be cataloged for our editors,” he explained. To save his video editors time, Guerrero brought in a team of college grads to classify content in ShareBrowser. “The first thing they did was take judges’ reactions and make categories so we could have b-roll and make cutaways within the show.”
“Got Talent is made of b-rolls,” Guerrero continued. “If you have emotions in a b-roll, just insert that and you transform a piece. Applauses, fireworks, judges’ reactions—we had everything cataloged. We could find whatever we needed. It was easy to get the closeup, the smile, the tear, and to inject that emotion into the story, all because we had ShareBrowser.”
Searching With ShareBrowser
“ShareBrowser is the most important thing that I use,” Guerrero said confidently. Here are a few ways his team used the ShareBrowser media asset manager in producing Dominicana’s Got Talent.
ShareBrowser MAM Software
“If I wanted to change something, the editors could go and access the server, quickly find something with ShareBrowser, send me a little clip, and I’d approve. ShareBrowser shrunk our editing time by a lot.”
ShareBrowser Web App
“I would connect from my house and use the Web App remotely. I would look for footage, make a bin with it, and have all that footage for the promos. It was so much fun just to find everything. I even had writers inside ShareBrowser looking for stuff. It was a game changer.”
ShareBrowser Panel for Adobe Premiere Pro
“I’ve been a Premiere Pro editor all my life. I could use the panel inside of Premiere and find something really fast. All that tagging and cataloging was available directly inside of Adobe Premiere Pro with the ShareBrowser panel, so nobody could say that something was not there. Because I found it; it’s right in Premiere.”
Indexing Beyond EVO
“Part of making the decision to go with EVO was the ability to catalog and index all of our content, including our old server where we have about 700TB of media stored. A lot of the footage we have there—drone footage, beauty shots of the Dominican Republic—it’s all in a ShareBrowser bin now. There’s so much that we can do now with the systems integrated with ShareBrowser. But, there’s even more that we can do with the EVO.”
Flawless Execution
For the reality show’s debut, Guerrero’s video editing team worked closely together to get everything done on time. “We had 18 video editors working on the server all at the same time. One team was working on Episode 1 while another team was working on Episode 2. I felt really comfortable having all my data on EVO and knowing that my projects were going to run flawlessly. Finally, we had something that worked!”
“It took us probably a week to edit each episode,” he continued. “We were even making changes while the TV show was on air. I wouldn’t dream of doing that in a million years without EVO, but the speed was blazing fast, and I was confident the server was not going to let me down.”
“To achieve what we achieved, looking back at what we did, it was really something,” he added. “We did a TV show that needed at least 2 months to edit, and we did it in about 30 days. I’m really proud of what we did with that little amount of time, and we couldn’t have done it without EVO.” Read more in The Making of Dominicana’s Got Talent.
The Show Must Go On
Season 1 was a huge success, and Dominicana’s Got Talent was greenlit for Season 2 in 2020. But, things went a little differently the second time around as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The world stopped, but television had to continue,” said Guerrero.
“We did all of the casting online, and we found a lot of talent. That was reassuring, but the problem was editing,” he explained about his production process. “We were going to have 18 guys in the same room sharing time with each other during a pandemic. We started editing the show normally…” He paused ominously. “The first week on air, half of the team got Covid. It all fell down like a domino effect.”
How did his team make Season 2 happen? As soon as disaster struck, Guerrero Filmworks started using Nomad, the remote editing utility included with EVO. With EVO and Nomad, they could edit the reality TV show entirely from home.
“Nomad was a lifesaver,” Guerrero smiled. “We could organize everything with Nomad, download the content, and edit from home. Even the guys with Covid—they were feeling good with their health, so we shipped them computers and they could export and edit everything at home with Nomad.”
To sum up, Guerrero said this:
“I’m truly grateful for having an EVO for Dominicana’s Got Talent. We made 16 episodes in 2019 and 15 episodes in 2020-2021, and I can tell you that if it wasn’t for the indexing process and ShareBrowser—and Nomad for Season 2—we wouldn’t have made it happen. We couldn’t have done it without EVO.”
To upgrade your TV production workflow and create better video content, faster, schedule an EVO demo today.