Algunos conceptos aplicables

… Paul Penczner (American Intern 2010)

I was anticipating a diffi cult day where I would have to carefully maneuver as an intern in the cutting room of the fi rst feature fi lm that I had ever been involved with. I had been running through a few notes of advice I had been given; don’t be too loud, don’t be too small, ask laterally, be honest, avoid triangulation! But, as I stepped into the editing suites for the fi rst time, all of those thoughts suddenly fl oated away and were replaced by overwhelming excitement.

The feature fi lm is currently in production day 52 out of 70 shooting days.

Many people were out of the offi ce today. This meant I got to ease into things and spend a lot of time with the assistant editor as he broke down the new Red Camera work fl ow that they are developing for this fi lm. I will try to quickly go over here some of the things I learned today in as much as I can understand it so far. The editing staff is currently four people. The fi rst assistant is in charge of syncing the transcoded video foot- age to the raw audio, managing the fi nal cut project fi le, and preparing sequences for edit and review. The second assistant is in charge of ingesting the material, managing the server, creating LTO tapes for archive, maintaining the digital database that combines all of the information from the paperwork from the set with the metadata from the footage, watching all of the dailies for quality control, and reformatting and preparing

Chapter 9: First Day Observations in the Editing Room

the drives and CF cards to be delivered back to the set to be shot on again. The post PA is in charge of mov- ing the media back and forth and manually logging script notes, camera reports, and sound reports.

Dailies come in to the facility in a variety of media. Video comes in on CF cards, Red SSD, or Red HDD. The preference is to shoot most video on 16 GB CF cards because there is less risk of losing data if a single card fails because you can fi t fewer takes onto it. The failure of a large hard drive with many more takes would mean a much greater loss. Audio comes in separately on a portable Lacie HDD.

The fi rst thing we do is run a checksum program that copies source material from our media onto the server. After all the fi les are written, the checksum reads through all of the data to look for any potential discrepan- cies between the fi les sitting on the drive or card and the server. Now that they are sitting on the server we can access the R3Ds for transcode. Before we run the transcode, the fi rst assistant fi rst consults the script supervisor notes for takes that the director has asked to be deleted for one reason or another. The remaining takes are for print and are then transcoded to Apple Pro Res LT for the second assistant to start organizing. The fi rst assistant then plays each clip that comes in to see if there are any irregularities in the footage. Simultaneously , the fi rst assistant will be entering the footage data into a digital database created through FileMaker Pro. This database automates a variety of fi elds of information that are derived from the metadata coming from the camera. Additionally, through a terminal command, the assistant automates frame grabs from the QuickTime proxy fi les by building a line of code that extracts a single frame from the centermost frame in a clip. For example, in a clip of 24 frames, the code would know to grab frame 12 and place it in a fi eld for that page in the database. This little trick was the fi rst in a series of code lines and terminal commands that the assistant showed me to quickly navigate and automate much of the tasks that would otherwise take too long to do manually as an assistant. The assistant also reviewed scenarios where hard drives have corrupted or are missing directories that would cause hard drives to appear empty when they have been shot on. This can sometimes happen if a hard drive is ejected from the camera without being safely shut down. The data is usually still sitting on the drive, and so we use a command built by the Red company called RedUndead that rebuilds the directory of the fi le sys- tem to allow access to these fi les.

We discussed the conforming process that they are preparing so that when the picture is locked they can send a 2 K sequence to the DI for the online. Through RocketCine-X we can manually look up and load the corresponding R3D fi les that match the ProRes clips in our sequence and then export those R3Ds as DPX sequences made from single frame DPX fi les. But the assistant is building a program that utilizes the EDL with the database that he has been creating to automate that process in RocketCine-X in a way that essen- tially rebuilds a 2 K fi nal cut sequence shot for shot.

I also realize that everything here is not necessarily universal to all feature fi lms. In the world of digital post, tape- less work fl ows are still like the Wild West. Most importantly, I think that I am understanding the depth of con- trol one can have over their machine if they can develop an understanding of the code behind all of the video software. Though most assistants rarely use terminal commands, they are empowering and kind of neat to know. It ’s an exciting challenge for me because I see postproduction as ever changing. The hope is by opening your work fl ow to new ways of thinking and processing fi lm in post, fi lms can really move the ball forward in

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Make the Cut: A Guide to Becoming a Successful Assistant Editor in Film and TV

creating better systems for editing. I can see already that all of us in post are striving for the same things — faster ingestion periods giving more time for the editor to be creative, and easier outputs.