Digital Video - December 2007 - (Page 29) Murch mixes Youth Without Youth at Coppola’s Digidesign ICON console. ASSEMBLY LINE EDITOR WALTER MURCH DELVES INTO DIGITAL WORKFLOWS WITH FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA’S YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH. BY OLIVER PETERS I t was 1968 when fellow film student George Lucas first introduced Walter Murch to Francis Ford Coppola. The trio was later invited to a demo of CBS and Memorex’s then-new CMX-600 nonlinear editing system. This early computer workstation was one precursor to modern NLEs, but could only store and handle several minutes worth of black-and-white footage at a time. In spite of that limitation, they boldly predicted this device would sweep the industry within five years. That prediction proved to be off the mark, of course. Nevertheless, this meeting led Coppola to give Murch his start in feature film editing, first as a sound editor and mixer on The Rain People and later as a picture editor for The Conversation. Fast forward nearly 40 years to find Coppola and Murch reunited on Youth Without Youth—the director’s first film in 10 years and his first shot digitally. Coppola wrote, produced and directed Youth Without Youth, adapting the screenplay from a novella by Romanian author Mircea Eliade. The film stars Tim Roth as Dominic Matei, an elderly professor whose mysterious rejuvenation heightens his intelligence and whose apparent immortality makes him a target for the Nazis in this World War II-era parable. Coppola characterized the film as “a love story wrapped in a mystery.” Sony Pictures Classics has picked up distribution for fall, so pre-release information is tight—but Murch is willing to add, “It’s a little bit of Faust meets Dorian Gray. Murch spoke on the project’s unique workflow at this year’s NAB Final Cut Pro Users Group SuperMeet and was kind enough to elaborate more about it with me recently. When you think of Coppola or Murch and the big-budget films they’ve done together or separately, such as The Godfather series, Apocalypse Now, Cold Mountain or Jarhead, it’s hard to fathom that the approach taken on Youth Without Youth provides a perfect roadmap for the indie filmmaker determined to use desktop tools to tell the story. Youth Without Youth is an almost total digital production. Certain material was captured on 35mm for various reasons— such as speed variation and three-camera setups—but it appears that working digitally turned out to be so creatively and technically satisfying that the director has vowed never to shoot a motion picture on film stock again. Coppola financed the production himself for a limited budget—under $10 million—so it became important to own or control as much of the process as possible. The digital parts of Youth Without Youth were shot with Coppola’s two Sony F900 CineAlta camcorders, which in turn were fed to an HDCAM-SR field recorder. The onboard HDCAM recorders of the F900 cameras actually record the 1920x1080 HD signal with a sampling of 1440x1080 pixels in 3:1:1 color space. By sending the uncompressed, full raster 4:2:2 signal from the camera to the SR recorder, the team was able to preserve more of the camera’s inherent image quality. In addition, the SR deck features the unique ability to record dv december 2007 www.dv.com 29 http://www.dv.com
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