{"id":354,"date":"2012-04-14T11:25:28","date_gmt":"2012-04-14T18:25:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/?p=354"},"modified":"2012-05-04T10:06:38","modified_gmt":"2012-05-04T17:06:38","slug":"editing-act-of-valor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/2012\/04\/14\/editing-act-of-valor\/","title":{"rendered":"Editing Act of Valor"},"content":{"rendered":"

When we\u00c2\u00a0first started out, we had no idea how much footage we would be shooting for the movie, because the\u00c2\u00a05D<\/a> lends itself to a different type of shooting style than traditional filmmaking, and we had a lot of cameras available on set.\u00c2\u00a0 So preparing for a worst case scenario, we setup our Avid<\/a> system with a huge 16TB<\/a> external array.\u00c2\u00a0 Since we were using DNxHD36 files for the offline, our nearly 200 hours of source material ended up being less that 3TB of Avid media.\u00c2\u00a0 So once we were finished with principal shooting, I replaced that oversized solution with a basic internal array of four 2TB drives, which met our needs for the rest of the project.
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\nSince there was no way to automate the syncing process between the different cameras and separately recorded audio, that became a labor intensive process for our assistant editors, spearheaded by Siobhan Prior.\u00c2\u00a0 While Scott Waugh was out directing the shoots, this work was done on the main Avid system.\u00c2\u00a0 Once he finished shooting and was editing full time, it became clear that we would need more than one system.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead of using a Unity<\/a> to share the project with an assistant editing station, we just duplicated the media to a second array, and manually synced the project bins on a daily basis.\u00c2\u00a0 This worked reasonably well, and we have continued to use that process on the Avid based commercials we have made since then.\u00c2\u00a0 Hard drives are cheap, shared storage solutions are not, (especially Avid<\/a> ones) so we just make duplicate copies of everything.<\/p>\n

As scenes were finished, the post team would get lists of the\u00c2\u00a0Canon source files, and start queuing up the necessary Twixtor<\/a> conversions in After Effects CS4.\u00c2\u00a0 Travis Schoen and Lance Holte helped me setup hundreds of these AE renders, and run them every night, on\u00c2\u00a0each workstation once our operators had gone home for the evening.\u00c2\u00a0 These conversions were rendered to 24p Cineform<\/a> HD .AVI files.\u00c2\u00a0 We were originally required to convert entire source files in order for the online process to linkup to the new files automatically.\u00c2\u00a0 But once a file was converted, it would automatically work in any revised edit we got from the Avid.<\/p>\n

When CS5<\/a> was released, it handled native 5D .MOV files much better, and more accurately, than going through Quicktime, the way CS4 did.\u00c2\u00a0 This resulted in files being decoded into the “correct<\/a>” color space, which looked different than it had in CS4.\u00c2\u00a0 We had already “burned in” the old CS4 color space into all of the Twixtor conversions that we had made up to that point, so we decided to systematically replace all of those encodes when we had time.\u00c2\u00a0 The good new was that CS5 and the new version of Twixtor processed twice as fast.\u00c2\u00a0 The bad news was that there was no Cineform export plug-in for After Effects CS5 at that point, so all of the conversion compositions had to be imported into Adobe Media Encoder in order to render them to that codec properly.<\/p>\n

The edit was reasonably “locked” at this point, so we developed a faster and more efficient way to process the clips that needed to be Twixtored.\u00c2\u00a0 Linking directly to the 30p Canon .MOVs in Premiere Pro gave us reasonable playback, now that we had CS5 with the CUDA<\/a> accelerated Mercury engine.\u00c2\u00a0 Once we had a segment exactly the way we wanted it, we would copy the clips on the timeline, and paste them into After Effects.\u00c2\u00a0 This would create a comp with all of the clips we needed, and only the segments we were using, which was much faster to render, and saved space as well.\u00c2\u00a0 The disadvantage was it flattened that part of the edit into a single file with no handles.\u00c2\u00a0 This would have been a major problem\u00c2\u00a0at the earlier stages of the prrocess, but by the time we were doing the CS4 to CS5 color space replacement, the individual scenes were pretty solid.<\/p>\n

At that point it was decided that we wanted to rescan the segments of film for the online at 2K<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 We were able to use Avid’s film toolset to determine what to scan, but the resulting DPXs<\/a> had to be cut into the online by hand, because there was no way to automate that in Premiere.\u00c2\u00a0 Miles Michaud spent a couple of long days manually building those sequences in Premiere, and that is one workflow issue that even since then, I still have not been able to develop an efficient solution to.<\/p>\n

We would then scale the Canon footage to 2K to match the film scans.\u00c2\u00a0 Only having a 40Mb compressed HD image to start with meant that we had to be very careful how we processed it.\u00c2\u00a0 After doing many tests, we settled on using Cinnafilm’s<\/a> Dark Energy<\/a> to do the upres-scaling, as the directors liked the resulting look the best.\u00c2\u00a0 Travis Schoen managed to find a way to script this aspect of the process, since every time we made a change we had to rescale the modified clips.\u00c2\u00a0 This would eventually lead to us using that application (Cinnafilm Dark Energy) to de-noise and re-grain the non-film sections of the movie as well.<\/p>\n

This process resulted in a full pass of the entire movie in 2K DPX files.\u00c2\u00a0 The work was all done with a software 235<\/a> preview matte, but we processed the entire 16×9 image for future flexibility.\u00c2\u00a0 We delivered the whole movie to our colorist as 2048×1152 DPX files.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When we\u00c2\u00a0first started out, we had no idea how much footage we would be shooting for the movie, because the\u00c2\u00a05D lends itself to a different type of shooting style than traditional filmmaking, and we had a lot of cameras available on set.\u00c2\u00a0 So preparing for a worst case scenario, we setup our Avid system with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[16,48,43,46,44,15,24,45],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":393,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions\/393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}