Splice Now

For better or worse, high-end feature films and television still follow an offline/online model, cutting with some kind of lower-res proxy and conforming a higher-res original. The dirty little secret of our new file-based workflows is that despite the many advances we’ve seen, conforming is still a pain in the butt. Why? Because no conforming system can fully conform Avid effects. Sure, cuts and dissolves can be handled easily, but more often than not, effects work has to be painstakingly rebuilt by eye. That seems downright crazy to me — in the wonderful, all-digital, file-based workflow of the future, people are still studying the locked cut, figuring out what the heck was done, and reconstructing it by eye.

Yes, there are exceptions. If you do your offline in Media Composer and finish in Avid Symphony, everything comes across. That’s a wonderful thing and if you work that way, you become dependent on it quickly. But unless you color correct in Symphony, you’re going to have to export, which means baking in a look and accepting a maximum raster size of HD video. On the Final Cut side, the XML export format opens the door to full conforms, but even then, in many DI environments you still don’t get everything.

I had a chat with a product marketing person at one of the DI system manufacturers recently, and I asked him why. His answer surprised me. His view is that we editors don’t care — we expect and have no problem with a by-eye conform. That might have been true once, but not today. Once you start doing complex effects work and see it conformed perfectly with little or no effort, you start wondering why things should work any other way. And you start to chafe at all the behind-the-scenes effort expended by editors and assistants, just trying to get back to something that worked just fine in the offline editing room.

This is a long-standing, Tower-of-Babel problem — there is no standard effects language. And it seems that each manufacturer has their own selfish reasons for not spending the money needed to make really good translations possible. That was tolerable in the days of film and HD, but in the all-digital present, it seems more and more anachronistic to me.

I recently finished a TV movie that was shot on Red and Canon 5D, cut in Media Composer 5, conformed in Smoke, and timed from the original raw R3D files in Lustre. None of that is particularly unusual these days (though timing from the R3Ds is still rare in television). But there seem to be a whole lot of people who are confused about these processes. If you’re among them, then maybe the following will help you make sense of it.

First, the epiphany. You’re shooting with a file-based camera. Okay, that’s not unusual. You’ve been working with film and/or tape for years, going through all kinds of gyrations — is this really so different? But then it hits you. The camera generates files on disk. And from then on, everything is a file. Everything. All you’re going to do is create files, copy files, move files, archive files. That’s terrific, you think, that simplifies everything. But then it hits you — there are way too many file types! And no standards. The list of acronyms is bewildering: r3d, rmd, mxf, omf, mov, dpx, log, linear, log c, aaf, avb, dng, psd, wav, xml, prores, tiff. Soon you begin talking about these things — and people around you start looking at you funny.

The beauty of a file-based workflow is that you can manage most of it with off-the-shelf computer gear. But that’s a curse, too, because now you have a raft of choices to make. Do you do as much as possible in the ‘offline’ editing room? Or do you get adult supervision from a post house? Or both? There’s a massive decision tree to navigate, and every choice influences every other choice.

So let me start with a couple of caveats: First, leave time to figure this stuff out. Don’t wait till production begins. Start early and go through the various permutations, talk to everybody you can, learn as much as you can. Second, remember that nobody knows everything. This has always been true, but in the wild-west science experiment we’re all now engaged in, where things are changing daily, it’s a certainty.

So what are all these choices you’ll have to make? They break down roughly as follows:

1. Production
   Which camera(s) are you using? Which audio recorder?
   What kinds of files are you creating?
   What frame rate, sample rate, timecode rate, raster size are you recording?
2. Dailies
   Who’s doing them? What do you need for editing, review and conforming?
   Who syncs and how will they do it? Who backs up and when?
   How are drives being moved around; where are they stored?
3. Editing
   What system will you use? What kind of drives/raid?
   How will you output cut material for review?
   What are you turning over to sound and music?
4. Conforming
   Will you roll your own or have a post house do it?
   How do you handle visual effects created in your editing room?
   And those created by the vfx team?
   What kinds of files will you use for color correction?
   And for television, a crucial question — when do you convert to HD?

There are some simplifications in this list, to be sure, but it should give you a basic overview of the terrain. Yes, it can seem overwhelming. You aren’t going to come up with a perfect solution, just one that satisfies the needs of your particular production. The more questions you can answer before you roll, the happier you’ll be.