Digital Video - August 2008 - (Page 31)

are shooting an MOS (without sound) shot, you can just shoot a few frames of the slate, cut the camera and then shoot the scene. It saves on film/tape and often makes things go quicker because you can slate beforehand while the shot is still being prepped. In the P2 world this is no longer the case. If you bump the slate, there is no direct association with that slate and the next clip — and that causes some confusion. We did receive an early tip to always start rolling the camera while aimed at the slate — and that was a great tip. That made all of the automatic P2 thumbnails actually be the slates and made the footage consistent for organizing later. One of the rude awakenings for me was learning how Final Cut Pro would handle the footage. Although FCP can work natively with DVCPRO HD footage, with the P2 DVCPRO HD MXF files, they have to be encoded with a QuickTime wrapper in order to work in Final Cut. This required not only a render time of anywhere from two to three hours for every one hour of footage, but it also created an entirely new set of files, which meant that we needed a fourth set of drives (12TB total). This was kind of a crushing blow to our budget both monetarily and time wise. We hadn’t anticipated this problem – one of the reasons we didn’t shoot in the AVC-I format was to avoid this issue — and it was a problem we weren’t even aware of it until near the end of the first week of shooting when Jamie Neese, the film’s director, asked to see “dailies” (by this time they were “weeklies”). We had already shot nearly 20 hours of footage, and it was absolutely impossible to render out all 20 hours to see on the weekend. Matt wound up rendering out random shots from each day and each location for the director and producers to see and that served as our dailies. When we got into postproduction, we were rescued by an extraordinary gesture from Dulce Systems, which loaned us a Dulce Pro DQ 8TB fiber-channel RAID array for use on the production. To this RAID we rendered all the P2 footage into QuickTime files for Final Cut Pro and editor Meredith Young. The more we looked into the creation of “dailies,” the bigger the problem became. Without spending any more money (a local dub house quoted me $30,000 to create DV dailies of all our footage for us), we were trying to get the director NTSC DVD copies of the footage to view. To do that, it required rendering the QuickTime file, down-converting the 1920x1080 DVCPRO HD footage to 720x480 NTSC and then burning it to DVD. That process, not inclusive of organizing the footage and making sure it was all there, was estimated to take about eight to 10 hours for every one. So for 45 hours of footage, that would be about 360 to 450 hours of work — or 36 to 45 days of full time work to get the director dailies. That was a single system of resources doing all the work during normal working hours. In a setup where multiple systems are employed working around the clock, the time would be cut down considerably, and it would have helped for us www.dv.com DIT and camera assistant Matthew Kuborn sits at his workstation on location downloading footage. Looking on are (left to right) producer/cinematographer Jay Holben, cinematographer Jayson Crothers and (far right) producer Jason Robinson. to have someone working on dailies as we were shooting with only four hours of footage a day to deal with. It was a problem for which we never found a solution. I was handling the renders and pre-flight prep before we had chosen Meredith as our editor. At the time, I was working with Final Cut Pro Studio HD, not yet FCP Studio 2. The Log and Capture function wasn’t quite as sophisticated as Studio 2 and required a little babysitting. I could render the data from one P2 card at a time, but I couldn’t preview it. I selected one card, told FCP to import all and let it do its thing. The files were rendered to one big folder on the RAID array which, in hindsight, was a mistake. I should have kept the files organized by shooting day and camera roll — it would have made finding files later on a much easier task. DV Follow Jay’s project further into post with an extended version of this story. Visit DV online. Complete Teleprompting Systems from $899 Complete System Models for all Cameras MiniDV to Broadcast Presidential models also available FloLight Fluorescent and LED lights from 50-2500 watts LED 500 Light $449 NEW! 500 Ultra Bright 5600K LED’s Runs on 12v or 100-240AC Draws just 50w 500w output Dimmable High CRI (408) 866-9100 www.prompterpeople.com http://www.dv.com http://www.prompterpeople.com http://www.dv.com http://www.prompterpeople.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Digital Video - August 2008

Digital Video - August 2008 Contents DV Update My Studio Close-Up Wristshot HV30 Camcorder Tiffen DFX Bench Test PCM-D50 & R-09HR Recorders Camera Cradle Instant Expert My Passport Elite High School Confidential The Ultimate DIY Raid DV101 Click to Play Production Diary

Digital Video - August 2008

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