Adobe Success Story

Infinitely entertaining
Video directors for Madonna’s Sticky & Sweet Tour turn to Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium software to wow audiences with HD video experience

Madonna has set a lot of records, and with the Sticky & Sweet Tour, she set yet another. Madonna’s tour, which visited 17 countries in 2008, raked in $281.6 million in ticket sales, according to Pollstar magazine. It earns Madonna the crown for the top-grossing tour ever by a female or solo artist. The 28 dates on the North American leg grossed approximately $91.5 million, with the concert being seen by almost 550,000 fans.

Benefits

• Increased efficiency with tapeless workflow
• Entertained audiences with outstanding visual effects
• Produced entire show in HD
• Enabled fast previsualization
• Quickly output work to a variety of formats for review
• Worked compatibly with industry-leading hardware

Project Details

While Madonna’s talent is an indisputable draw for fans, she’s also backed by an elaborate set, complete with a car that takes several spins around the stage, a faux 3D subway from which performers emerge, and dozens of accomplished dancers. In addition, Madonna’s performance is accompanied by stunning HD video footage displayed on 17 giant screens. Video and audio producers deliver the dramatic experience using Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium software, including Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Encore, and Photoshop Extended running on HP workstations.

“People come up to us after the show and tell us the videos are amazing,” says Assistant Video Director Jason Harvey. “They say the quality of the HD video is like watching their plasma TVs at home, and they ask, ‘How did you do that?’ The answer is Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium software and one-to-one, pixel-for-pixel HD playback.”

Video with verve
As with previous Madonna tours, Video Director Christian Lamb and his production company Frank the Plumber designed and produced many of the videos for the songs. Four other production companies contributed pieces to the show. Each song has its own unique vibe. “Vogue,” for instance, features high-resolution black-and-white footage of models in lace stockings. “Devil” offers up footage of water droplets and vortexes shot at 1,000 frames per second and slowed down. During “Hung Up,” the entire video screen is transformed into a giant chess game.

An end-to-end Adobe workflow
Video content for the tour pours in from the different production houses on hard drives, memory sticks, or via FTP. Then Lamb and Harvey edit digitally—tweaking images and creating backgrounds using Photoshop Extended, correcting colors and checking frame rates for consistency in Adobe Premiere Pro, creating visual effects in After Effects, and outputting videos to Blu-ray Disc or DVD for interim review using Adobe Encore.

Harvey also streams and controls the video content during each night’s show. To make his job easier, he creates a template in advance for each screen using Adobe Photoshop Extended software. The templates provide a way for the 17 different video sources to play in different boxes that all appear on one screen.

Once the files from video production houses come in, he loads them onto his HP workstations and positions the clips within the boxes in the templates. Using multicam editing in Adobe Premiere Pro, he can drop in and easily sync multiple camera shots. He then manipulates the clips within Adobe Premiere Pro as necessary, performs color correction, creates comps of the multiple video streams for each of 17 screens, and renders them out in HD for play during the show.

Saving time through integration
Harvey and Lamb often use After Effects to create more complex effects, which must be played out on the giant screens for approval. Harvey uses Dynamic Link to play the After Effects compositions straight out from Adobe Premiere Pro—without time-consuming rendering—giving Madonna a near-instantaneous way to previsualize the shots.

“The integration among applications in Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else,” says Harvey. “Dynamic Link is a huge timesaver, and that’s crucial in an environment like this that’s always spinning at breakneck speed.”

In cases where there is more time for review by Madonna and her staff, the team uses Adobe Encore to output content to Blu-ray Disc, DVD, or H.264 files posted to the web. With Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium, Harvey will also be taking advantage of the new Adobe Media Encoder—a separate encoding engine in the software suite. “With Adobe Media Encoder, we will be able to encode faster and work with an even wider variety of formats,” says Harvey. “This is a big benefit because we are constantly having to quickly output materials for executive review—some want Blu-ray Disc, others want H.264, still others want DVDs.”

The team captures every show live to hard disk, increasing the resolution from the SD live camera up to 720p. This allows the team, during or after the show, to export clips via Adobe Premiere Pro for last-minute editing before being saved to disk, uploaded directly to Madonna’s website, or sent to television channels for upload.

“When Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears performed at the Los Angeles show, Madonna’s management asked for the clip on disk so they could upload it for TV that night, but they needed it before the show ended,” says Harvey. “We simply copied the files to another system and exported them using Adobe Premiere Pro, all while we were still running the show live.”

Sometimes animations are added using Adobe Flash Professional software. The footage is then encoded and uploaded for playback on Madonna’s website—often before the show is over.

High-end production, little time
Madonna’s tours are renowned for their exceptional visual effects; however, the Sticky & Sweet Tour ups the ante in several ways. First, the entire show is produced in HD, enabled by beefed up processor speeds and faster rendering times. On the set, Harvey and Lamb are equipped with a high-end Apple Mac Pro workstation with an AJA KONA card and ATTO host adapters to help manage massive amounts of digital content, plus two personal computers, including HP’s multi-processor xw8600 workstation with a MediaVault 4210 storage system, ATTO 42 ES Fibre Channel Host Adapter, and AJA XENA and KONA capture cards. The cross-platform compatibility of Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium enables Harvey and Lamb to seamlessly swap files, or render on one machine while color correcting on another, without worrying about file translation or other issues. For playout, Harvey uses two MBox Extreme Media Servers.

Second, none of the footage ever went to tape. With a completely tapeless workflow and non-linear editing from start to finish using Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium software, Harvey decreased production time substantially. The night before the opening performance when a last-minute change was needed to one of the videos, Harvey downloaded chunks of footage from an FTP site, re-edited them and recomposited the piece into the show using Adobe Premiere Pro, finishing just 25 minutes before the show began.

“With a two-hour show featuring 24 songs with slightly different versions for every venue, ingesting tape and then digitizing it isn’t practical,” says Harvey. “That’s why it’s so great that Adobe is leading the way in supporting high-end tapeless workflows and multiple camera formats like Panasonic P2, Sony XDCAM EX and HD, and now—in Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium—RED and AVCHD.”

Delivering when it counts
In an environment as fast-paced as live entertainment, the people putting the show together have to find reliable technology to make sure the spectacle mesmerizes audiences and comes off without a hitch. For the artists working on the Madonna Sticky & Sweet Tour, Adobe software is the workhorse technology they need.

“With a performer as discerning as Madonna, we have to have plenty of ways to show her work in progress and make changes in minutes—and everything has to be flawless,” says Harvey. “That’s where Adobe software really shines.”

---

Do you have a story you would like to share? Join the Adobe Customer Reference Program.