Digital Video - December 2007 - (Page 30) CLOSE-UP WALTER MURCH lose some major parts of the film. “Francis is a process-oriented director. He has a powerful overall vision of what he wants, but welcomes experimentation and collaboration and loves to see the film continue to reveal itself through all stages of the filmmaking process. So he encouraged us to try dropping scenes and rearranging the structure where it seemed appropriate.” One of the advantages that Murch found to the digital image was a greater ability to manipulate it when compared with film. “Film has grain that’s fixed in size at the molecular level, but pixels are different. When you magnify a digitally-sourced image, pixels are recalculated and averaged mathematically, so the image stays sharper longer. You don’t have grain getting in the way and shots can be blown up far more than with film. “The rule of thumb with 35mm is that the grain starts to become obvious when the image is blown up more than 20 percent. Some shots in Youth Without Youth, however, were resized more than 120 percent with no visible artifacts. Arranging shots along a timeline would be considered horizontal editing, so I guess you could call this vertical editing: editing the image within the frame.” Murch notes that Coppola deliberately shot most of the film with lockedoff cameras, limiting camera movement to specific moments for maximum impact. “So sometimes, I would need to adjust a shot for headroom, but we also modified framing in cinematically playful ways. About a third of the shots had something done to them in post as part of the storytelling language. I was slightly apprehensive before I started doing this, thinking that it might become a time-suck, but it was quickly obvious that Final Cut Pro could handle this kind of work effortlessly, and it became second-nature.” DV Oliver Peters is a contributing editor to DV sister publication, Videography. Coppola rented a villa in Bucharest to serve as production offices, post facility and lodging for crew, offering a home base for the initial editing process during production. The film’s striking imagery (inset) suggests an almost hallucinogenic visual experience. two simultaneous 4:2:2 A- and B-camera inputs onto a single tape. These recordings became the equivalent of the film negative and were used for the final digital intermediate. The onboard HDCAM tapes were used as back-up tapes for reviewing footage and to create DVCAM copies for ingest into the Final Cut Pro editing station. Production started in Bucharest in October of 2005, with the Coppola team working out of a rented Romanian villa that served as a combination of production offices, post facility and living quarters. At the time, Murch was wrapping up the mix on Jarhead, so the initial assembly of Youth Without Youth was handled by Romanian editor Corina Stavila and her assistant, Andrei Dascalescu, working on a single Final Cut Pro station with media in the DVCAM format. Coppola shot a total of 162 hours—the equivalent of nearly 900,000 feet of 35mm film—so the first assembly came in at about 210 minutes. Stavila and Coppola’s next cut brought that down to 170 minutes. Murch joined the team in April 2006, along with Sean Cullen (long-time first assistant and associate editor), Kevin Bailey (a postproduction intern) and Pete Horner (sound designer and rerecording mixer, with whom Murch had worked on Apocalypse Now Redux). The crew screened an HDCAM version on a Christie 2K digital cinema projector, and breathed a collective sigh of relief at the sight of the crisp and striking images on the 50-inch screen. Over the next few months, Murch set about the task of reviewing the dailies and recutting the film. His initial version trimmed a further 30 minutes (including restoring ten minutes of scenes that had been cut); however, the target was to bring in the film at two hours. “I have found you can only cut out about 30 percent from a first assembly by tightening,” Murch offers. “If that gets you down to the target length, then every scene in the assembly is going to be in the finished film. But if the film has to be even shorter, you can’t just use ‘dieting and exercise.’ You have to start making more drastic surgical changes and “THE NATURE OF FILM IS ABUNDANCE—ON YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH, OUR SHOOT-TO-FINAL-FILM RATIO WAS 80:1.” 30 dv december 2007 www.dv.com http://www.dv.com
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