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MillimeterHD Previewing
Feb 27, 2006 11:38 AM, By Michael Goldman
Black Snake Moan
Veteran editor Billy Fox recently paused while cutting Craig Brewer’s upcoming Paramount film Black Snake Moan to tell Millimeter about his joy at jumping on the HD dailies bandwagon for the project. He says he was particularly pleased in the context of being able to work in a tapeless environment following telecine, while producing screening and preview versions of the movie more efficiently, without sacrificing crucial editorial time to conform picture or temp dub sound. Specifically, Fox says he was ecstatic about the results following a preview screening at Paramount a couple of weeks ago in which the latest HD version of his cut was played through a digital projector off a hard drive, just 24 hours after he finished the cut.
“You can cut and screen without losing several days of editorial time to do a conform first doing it this way,” Fox says. “That’s a process you don’t have to deal with anymore for previews, and [losing editorial time] is something [Brewer] and I are not willing to sacrifice. Previously, we had to shut down [the editorial operation] for a week or two before a major screening to assemble everything correctly. [For the Paramount screening], we were instead able to cut right up to the screening. I gave them a finished version of the movie from top to bottom, with open and close credits, logos, and so forth. It had my color correction in it, and it looked excellent digitally projected onto a big screen.
"On the audio side, I was able to do a full mix out of the box, running with 20 tracks of audio, and it sounded like a high-quality temp dub. And that was after editing the movie late the previous afternoon. We used a similar workflow on Hustle & Flow (using Avid Xpress Pro), and frankly, I can’t imagine any reason to go back to working with film dailies.”
Fox had other reasons for adopting this workflow, and for adapting it within the Final Cut Pro universe. Fox says the suite of tools available in Final Cut Studio and the variety of support tools provided by Apple (such as having a .Mac account and using iSight remote collaboration technology) made this workflow far more efficient in virtually every respect.
Basically, for Black Snake Moan, Fox says filmmakers transferred 35mm negative to D5 tape at FotoKem, Burbank. The tapes were digitized to the DVCPRO HD 720 codec using a Final Cut Pro system, and Fox was able to start building his cut almost immediately.
“We are also talking to Apple about eliminating that final step of having to digitize files into Final Cut Pro after telecine, and instead being able to have a digitizing station directly in telecine,” Fox adds. “Even with that step, though, I would get dailies at about 2 p.m. on a hard drive, and about an hour’s worth of material would copy across into my Final Cut Pro system in about 15 to 20 minutes.”
