Posts filed under 'Editing'
Computer software tends to create partisans. You have your Mac people and your PC people. Internet Explorer people and Firefox people. Avid people and Final Cut people. Well I think they’re all crazy. As for the Mac and PC camps, I use them both every day. I have to use Macs because the creative world is swamped with them. I use a PC I built at home because a comparable Mac would be double the price. And now, thanks to Apple’s switch to Intel and some very clever people, my PC is also a Mac. I like them both. They both work just fine for me and I never have trouble doing the things I want to do in either system. The exception that led me to install OS X on my PC is Final Cut Studio, because Apple doesn’t make a Windows version.
FCP and Cinema Tools are two really fantastic programs. Xpress Pro is also great, but these days a freelance editor needs a Final Cut Pro system. And there is a certain flexibility and openness that Avid’s media management doesn’t allow. Obviously that can be a curse if you’re not careful. Avid keeps track of your media for you, which is great but it means everything you do with your media has to be done through Avid. With FCP you can fiddle around with your media in other programs and FCP will re-connect with a minimum of fuss. But really, it’s 6 of one half a dozen of the other. In the end I see no reason to edit in one system over the other. I lean towards Xpress Pro these days because it’s still annoying to have to reboot into OS X just for FCP.
But Cinema Tools and Compressor bring me over to the OS X part of my computer sometimes because they’re by far the best software I’ve seen for QuickTime encoding. Compressor’s batch features are great and really simple to use. And I haven’t found any software aside from Cinema Tools that can change a QuickTime file’s frame rate with one click and no waiting.
February 10th, 2007
Against my better judgment, in addition to the picture editing (see earlier post) I agreed to do the sound editing for Fay Grim under Hal Hartley’s direction. Sound editing is not my first love. I have some ability with it, but it doesn’t get me as excited as picture editing. Usually it makes me bored and crazy. But I got a lot more money out of the whole thing as a result, so that was nice.
As we were editing the picture I kept thinking about how we would make the switch to sound editing. We had an old 1st generation MBox so we could get Pro Tools for $75. But there’s a built-in limitation in all hardware-based sound playback. You can only get X number of sound tracks out of the thing before you have to do a mixdown. In the case of the MBox, that’s 24 tracks. Since we were working with a lot of stereo effects and ambiences, that brought us down to about 14 or so distinct sounds. That’s not enough. I also had problems with stuttering sound and overloaded CPUs, which seemed strange considering we had a top-of-the-line (at the time) dual processor G5 and the MBox was several years old.
So I started looking at software-based solutions. I tried Soundtrack Pro, which came with Final Cut Studio. It seemed like a perfectly capable multitrack sound editor, but it had big problem. It doesn’t export OMFs. Soundtrack Pro was a dead end, unless you brought it back into Final Cut and exported the OMFs from there. More of a cul-de-sac I guess. I didn’t like that idea. It was too cumbersome. I like simple things.
The simplest thing I could think of was doing the sound editing in Final Cut Pro. I thought about it. And thought some more. And the only thing I could come up with that would make that worse than any audio-specific editing system is that it can only edit whole frames, you can’t make those real precise subframe edits. But frankly, that didn’t bother me one bit. And it never came up. And all the filtering and manipulation of sound would be done in the mix, so the only thing we needed to do was put the sounds on the right frames.
The big advantage to sound editing in FCP is that we never had to lock the picture. The picture editing could last for as long as the sound editing and there was no transferring back and forth between programs and no need to worry about making mistakes in the process. With a nice powerful processor, I could play the majority of our sounds without rendering because even if I had 72 tracks (I believe that was the final number) I was never playing 72 sounds at the same time. And when I did need to render, it took only a few seconds.
Finally I exported OMFs. I did two for each reel thanks to that pesky 2 GB file size limit, one with the first 36 tracks and one with the second 36. Then I combined the OMFs in Pro Tools and brought Pro Tools sessions to the mix.
I also spent a week making a program that would generate cue sheets from Final Cut Pro timeline. Hal likes cue sheets, and I was used to them from my student films which were mixed on dubbers like in the old days. The limit of my programming knowledge is using PHP to generate web pages, so I made a PHP script that could parse FCP XML files into cue sheets. It’s not perfect, and it only works in Safari (try printing it with Firefox and you’ll see). Once we got to the mix we realized it was completely useless because everyone could see the Pro Tools layout, and I had laid out the tracks in an intuitive way so we always knew where everything was. Anyway, if you have any need for FCP-generated cue sheets, let me know.
January 12th, 2007
This is the first in a series of posts I’m planning to write about some things I’ve learned while editing Fay Grim. The process so far has been wonderfully simple and enjoyable and I want to write down the specifics to remind myself how to do it, and maybe to help some other people who stumble across this website.
Today I want to talk about keeping things simple. Fay Grim is a feature film which will be released in theaters, DVD, and on HDNet all at the same time. It cost a few million dollars, it stars Parker Posey and Jeff Goldblum and it’s the sequel to Henry Fool, a fairly well-known and well-liked film. That is to say, it’s not my last movie, which cost $2,000 and was shown at the Coney Island Film Festival. But in both cases I found that I had nearly complete access to everything I needed to make the movie without ever leaving the office, and without hiring dozens of support staff.
For Fay Grim, the Soho Apple Store generously gave us a dual-processor G5, a 30″ Cinema Display, and a copy of Final Cut Studio.
Because of some unfortunate delays with our shipping company, that system didn’t make it to Berlin in time for the start of production. So the German Apple Store lent us a G5 iMac and another copy of Final Cut Studio, finally appeasing the grudge I’ve held against Apple since I was 10 years old and they abandoned my beloved Apple IIc in favor of the Macintosh.
So I started this project with a lowly iMac. And it gave me no trouble at all. The whole offline edit could have been done on the thing if I was a more patient person than I am. Luckily the tower arrived a few weeks later and it ran quite a bit faster.
The movie was shot on HDCAM at 23.98 using the Sony F900, but I saw no reason to introduce complexity or expense by attempting to edit in anything other than DVCAM. 
Sure, there are dozens of options for editing something with higher quality, but I’ve yet to hear a persuasive argument for any of them. FCP edits DVCAM with absolutely no difficulty. And a DSR-11 only costs $1500. Those are very persuasive arguments.
The HDCAM footage was downconverted to NTSC DVCAM at a post-production facility in Berlin with original and pulldown timecode burned in.
I did a batch reverse telecine in Cinema Tools once it was captured so we were able to edit at 23.98, the same speed and frame rate as the original tapes. It was very imporant to make sure the clips had no timecode breaks becase just one would mess up the cadence and make the reverse telecine screw up. I found timecode breaks were common whenever the camera’s power was interrupted. They weren’t big enough for the camera to start from 0, but there was usually a visual artifact to go along with it. Luckily it becomes really clear if there was a problem when you play the 24p footage on an interlaced monitor because the whole thing stutters like crazy.
The audio was recorded on an Aaton Cantar, which records up to 6 separate audio tracks to a hard-drive. The sound recordist gave me DVD-Rs at the end of the day that had separate 24-bit Broadcast Wave Files for each track of each take. Unfortunately Final Cut Pro doesn’t recognize the metadata (including timecode) that is embedded in BWF files, but there’s a lovely program called BWF2XML that converts the BWF files to MOVs and creates an XML wrapper to read in the clips with the scene and take information that was embedded during recording. It even combines multi-track recordings with separate files into single multi-track QuickTime files (requires OS 10.4). It made things very simple.
The timecode on the picture wasn’t synced with the timecode on the audio but since I was trained with those ancient sync block and Steenbeck devices, I didn’t mind syncing up the audio and video using a slate. And it’s fantastically easy with FCP. You just find your slate on the audio and video clips, mark an in point on each one, select both clips, and hit “merge clips” and now you’ve got a new clip with the audio and video in sync. This also provided me with an extra chance to catch clips that weren’t properly reverse telecined. While I was syncing up I always checked the timecode value of the slate against the burned-in timecode. It’s a lot easier to solve problems at this stage than during the online when you discover your EDL is all messed up.
That’s all for this post. I’ll write more about the process of actually editing the film later.
July 6th, 2006
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