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MillimeterWalter Murch on His Nonlinear Leap of Faith
 Bottom: Walter Murch works on Cold Mountain's edit using Final Cut Pro. Murch is once again collaborating with director Anthony Minghella (top), who he teamed with on The English Patient in 1996, winning the first editing Oscar for a film edited digitally. |
I was working on Moviolas, Steenbecks, and Kems back then, but I knew digital editing was the way things would go, Murch told Millimeter during a rare break from finishing up the final sound mix in London on Minghella's Miramax release, Cold Mountain. Francis and I used to talk about it all the time. We presented this paper to Paramount, telling them how they could cut the Godfather using a digital system. There was a company back then whose name I don't remember that had a system that a few people were using on commercials. It could only handle about four minutes of material at a time, but we came up with a fancy workflow that we outlined in our paper. Paramount never did anything with the proposal, of course.
Murch's point was, and is, that he has always viewed the nonlinear editing boom of the last decade-plus, largely anchored by Avid technology, as an organic discipline, meant to continually evolve.
The next phase in that evolution, he suggests, has arrived with the maturation of Apple's Final Cut Pro as a feature film editing platform. Murch is in a position to know about such things, having recently completed the entire Cold Mountain edit with a Final Cut Pro system (version 3.0). While Cold Mountain, a Civil War-era drama, is not the first studio feature film to be cut in Final Cut Pro, it is the first studio project to set up a sophisticated Final Cut Pro editing infrastructure on behalf of a legendary editor at a distant location Bucharest for a large-budget movie.
(Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal and Roger Avery's The Rules of Attraction were cut on FCP. The first major studio feature release cut with FCP, however, was the Coen Brothers' Intolerable Cruelty this year, just ahead of Cold Mountain. See story on page 60.)
 John Seale's camera crew films Renee Zellweger during production. |
I've never been picky about the methods or system, says Murch. I've edited on every type of system available. I like the challenge of switching platforms, and I think it's good that, in the nonlinear world, there is now competition and a variety of options. I think that will make everyone's tools better and give editors more choices. But Final Cut Pro does represent a wonderful 100
Still, Murch's embrace of Final Cut Pro required the longtime Avid enthusiast and his editing team first assistant editor Sean Cullen; assistant editor Dei Reynolds; Murch's son, also named Walter Murch, as another assistant editor; and Susanna Reid as apprentice editor to learn a new user interface and technical approach that differs significantly from what they were used to. According to Cullen, this transition began when Murch and Cullen took classes before production got underway at Digital Film Tree, West Hollywood. (Digital Film Tree was later hired to build the Cold Mountain editing system.)
We've gotten some abuse from our brethren suggesting that we're hurting jobs by talking about Final Cut Pro since so many editors and assistants have built their careers as Avid editors and have perfected their technique on that interface, says Cullen. But what we discovered is that the only real adjustment was in the way of thinking about the tools you use to edit. For instance, it's been suggested that an Avid editor would hate the fact that you can't customize the Final Cut Pro keyboard, and that was a pain, at first, because things just weren't where we were used to them being. But we found out that once you do get used to the keyboard, it's actually easier, and now that we understand the Final Cut keyboard layout, we'll never go back. Avid's keyboard is one layer deep, whereas Final Cut's keyboard is four levels deep. Every key is used for one tool at the top level, but then, by holding down the shift key and that same tool key, we could get another tool, and so on. Once we got used to that way of working, it was actually more efficient, and this type of clarity is pervasive in all aspects of Final Cut Pro.
 A typical, epic-style battle scene from the film. Over 600,000 feet of film were digitized during the course of Murch's editing work on the movie. |
That configuration consisted of four Apple Power Mac G4 dual-gigahertz workstations running Final Cut Pro 3.0.2, including Apple's Cinema Tools and DVD Studio Pro software. All four systems ran on Aurora Video Systems' IgniterRT 311 video capture/edit cards. Both Murch and Cullen say the Aurora cards were important tools because their MPJEG-A codec permitted editors to perform realtime telecine and reverse telecine to efficiently digitize clips and create 24fps QuickTimes without having to work in the DV realm, waiting to render clips. This made the whole process more transparent, says Cullen.
Final Cut's DVD capabilities were also put to good use as the editing team burned DVD dailies to deliver to producers around the world each day. One workstation was used solely for Murch's editing work, a second was devoted exclusively to Cullen's work, a third was used as a digitizing station, and a fourth to export media, with two of the computers also used to burn DVD dailies.
Although his team was getting expert technical support and a state-of-the-art infrastructure, Murch was, after all, editing on a less mature version of Final Cut (3.0) than the currently available 4.0, and his team was using it in Romania, of all places. Murch calls the location the first challenge of the job.
We were jumping into several unknown areas, and we were doing it in Romania, he says. None of us had edited a film in Romania before, let alone on a new system none of us had used before. There were several areas we were concerned about if something went wrong, how would we get around it in a place where help was not readily available?
Issues and AnswersThe editing team set up shop on a floor of the same building as Kodak Cinelabs in Bucharest, and all the film was printed and telecined in that same building, with clips telecined to the Beta-SP format. (The Kodak Cinelab) is a little pocket lab one of several Kodak has been quietly dropping into niche markets around the world in places like Bucharest, says Murch. That made it a lot easier to quickly digitize elements and move into the editing phase.
Cullen digitized those tapes into the G4s through a Beta-SP deck, automatically performing reverse telecine in real-time via the Aurora cards, moving the video clips back to 24fps for editing.
 Below: Assistant editor Sean Cullen served as Murch's "primary filter," in his words, in keeping track of all the elements during the editing phase. |
Our first worry was, could Final Cut Pro really absorb and manipulate 600,000 feet of film? Cullen recalls. As it turned out, our advance work with Digital Film Tree and its partners really paid off, and what we set up was more than adequate. We had 1.2 terabytes of storage (on Seagate drives) through our (Galaxy 60 fiber-channel SAN from Rorke Data). The (Rorke StudioNet) fiber sharing system worked great. We had a workflow that took in the film, telecined it, digitized it, re-exported it to individual clips, and transferred it to Walter's workstation, all within a day or so, with very few crashes, despite the volume of material we were sending through the system each day.
The second area of concern was whether the system would be able to generate change lists. Since Cold Mountain was being edited on Final Cut 3.0, Apple's change list solution, on its way with version 4.0, was not part of the original package.
We knew we could do assemble lists with Cinema Tools, but there was no guarantee going in that Apple would have the change list software ready in time, says Cullen. We talked about different alternatives in case they failed to provide a solution in time. We came up with three alternatives. One was to have people take the assembly lists and create change lists by hand. That wasn't too attractive, but it would have let us finish if no other solution presented itself. Another possibility was to use FileMaker (a workgroup database software solution) to write our own change list program, and the third was to work with Digital Film Tree and a third-party software developer that could write a solution for us. So we knew we could generate change lists one way or another. As it turned out, Apple came through and delivered the change list tools we needed in Final Cut Pro version 4.0, and thus, that problem was avoided.
The final concern, however, was not rectified by the time postproduction got underway. That concern was how best to convey sequence information to the sound department. At the time, Final Cut 3.0 only permitted filmmakers to generate media-imbedded OMF files, not composition OMF files, as the editors were used to from the Avid world. For a project that required numerous cuts and versions to travel back and forth on the way to the locked edit, this was a significant concern. The editors also faced the problem of how to convert Final Cut 3.0's 16-bit media files into 24-bit files for the sound department. (This limitation has since been addressed in version 4.0 of Final Cut Pro.)
To solve that problem, editors transferred the first assembly to the sound department using a third-party audio asset-management tool called MetaFlow, from Gallery Software, London. Using MetaFlow and what Cullen calls a good deal of elbow grease, the sound department built 24-bit sound files that mirrored the original 16-bit files. We could then deliver the initial cut using EDLs, Cullen adds.
 Cold Mountain was shot in the mountains of Romania, with a color palette that Murch helped establish during the edit, heading into a digital intermediate at Framestore CFC, London. |
How to bring that EDL information into Pro Tools was the problem, however. The solution came in the form of an automated Pro Tools plug-in for conforming audio files called Titan, made by a British company called Synchro Arts. Titan is designed to build Pro Tools sessions out of EDLs.
Now, of course, Apple is delivering a solution for exporting sequence information in the form of XML files, so this won't be a problem in the future, but we were dealing with an early version of Final Cut Pro, so we had to design our own solution, and it worked just fine, says Cullen. We got through 600,000 feet of film and 113 shooting days this way, all to Walter's satisfaction.
Creative ImpactAt the end of the day, Murch says the use of the FCP system indirectly affected his creative work on the Cold Mountain edit.
Fundamentally, this would probably be the same movie overall if I edited it on an Avid, says Murch. But there are some particular areas where I might have gotten something different by doing things this way. We used the DVD authoring capabilities in Final Cut Pro, for instance, a lot, and that allowed us to look at the material more often, in different settings, sharing it with more people, and so on. That impacted some of what we did on certain shots. The fact that we had four online stations drawing images from the same set of hard disks, and outrigger edit stations on laptops, also equipped with Final Cut, traveling around with the director on location, had a similar effect. At one point, we had potentially eight different stations where this film could be edited simultaneously our four stations in Bucharest, and four more laptops. There are cuts in this movie that were created on a laptop at a remote location and then brought back and incorporated with the other media. This capability also compensated for the fact that we were working in a country that did not have a developed infrastructure for working on films of this magnitude. All of that had an impact on how this film got put together.
Initially, Murch was also hoping to use Final Cut Pro to help the launch of the digital intermediate finishing process. At press-time, the DI was just starting at Framestore CFC, London. Preparing for the DI shortly before press-time, Murch and Cullen expected Final Cut Pro's open XML export capability to let them provide the colorist with not only the sequence information, rather than a cut negative and corresponding cut list, but also Murch's color-timing settings, as well. Cullen says the DI began before they were able to pull this off, however, because Apple's final version of its XML export tool was not ready yet. But he and Murch expect to do this routinely for future shows that will finish as digital intermediates, with the use of XML giving editors what Cullen calls a far more powerful method of providing assembly lists and color information to the finishing colorist, rather than having to provide multiple lists, QuickTimes, and other data.
Eventually, Murch adds, he fully expects to be doing the finish himself. Keeping with his theory that nonlinear editing tools and processes will continue to evolve, Murch thinks the notions of offline and online edits will become moot.
Processor power will improve, removing resolution limitations for working in realtime, Murch says. That means, eventually, I can provide a finished cut right out of the edit. What will come out of the edit room will be the finished product no answer prints. You'll turn in a finished version of the film and copies will be cloned and distributed, and that will be your film.
