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MillimeterWalter Murch’s HD View
Nov 8, 2005 11:14 AM, By Michael Goldman
Famed editor Walter Murch’s continually evolving approach to editing high-end feature films continued on his latest film, Jarhead. Among the changes he implemented on the project from previous approaches was the decision to cut the piece (on Final Cut Pro 5) relying primarily on HD media in the form of 720p/24fps QuickTimes in the DVCPRO HD format as his dailies source material.
Early in production in Los Angeles, Murch routinely viewed both film dailies and HD images side by side. After his editing room moved to Skywalker Sound near San Francisco a few weeks later, Murch decided for the first time in his career that he would forego using film dailies entirely while cutting the movie. His repeated tests satisfied Murch that 720p HD media clips would be sufficient for achieving the film’s creative needs. So he switched over even as director Sam Mendes continued to view traditional film dailies throughout production in Los Angeles.
“I was in Los Angeles for the first three to four weeks of shooting, and there I was able to view film dailies and HD dailies synched up in projection rooms at Universal,” Murch says. “But when we switched to my cutting room in Marin County, I started watching the material exclusively on a 50-inch plasma screen. The quality and my experience viewing HD dailies and film dailies side by side convinced me to dispense with looking at film dailies, and rely exclusively on HD transfers the rest of the way. That was a big change for me, but the transfers were so good, and I realized that if I am confident in the transfer, I’m perfectly happy to let HD be my first exposure to the material I’m editing.”
In other words, Murch believed the HD dailies compared favorably enough to film dailies that they did not require, as his longtime assistant Sean Cullen explains it, “Any unnatural leaps of imagination during the editing process.”
“There were some color temperature differences, obviously, but nothing that we saw went beyond what Walter was expecting, and he was able to edit as he normally does,” Cullen says.
He explains that the 720p dailies Murch worked with actually came from film to 1080p D5 transfers, created at Technicolor Creative Services of Hollywood.
“But we did not use that (1080p) version of the media in the editing room,” Cullen says. “Basically, Technicolor took the film dailies and did a telecine transfer to 1080p/24fps on D5 tape as the first step. Then they used that media on D5 and the EDL generated in telecine, loaded the ALE file into Final Cut Pro, generated a batch list, and re-captured the media as 720p media, take by take. Those QuickTimes were then sent to us at Skywalker on hard drives each day.”
Murch did take a handful of sequences back to film during this period. “Just to be sure in a few cases where the HD image was significantly different from what he was expecting,” Cullen explains. “Walter wanted to make sure the difference was in the film and not the telecine transfer. But each time it was related to the original print, not the HD transfer, and we never re-telecined any material.
“The thing about the 720p media is that it looks great on a plasma screen in terms of not seeing any compression artifacts and gradation in dark areas, and lots of great color,” Cullen says. “The cost of that, of course, is the size of the files in terms of sending them over the Internet, which is why we shuttled hard drives around. But it’s a very efficient codec for a laptop or desktop, and relatively small compared to other high-def formats--far smaller than uncompressed--and very friendly to us.
"We experimented with high-quality NTSC images during (production on) Cold Mountain a couple of years ago, but that did not have nearly the resolution we needed to check focus of the original film, and we went with film dailies back then. On Jarhead, we only doubled our bandwidth, but got far better resolution and quality. Enough to make decisions at the film level without a need to look at the workprint.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
