Race to the Finish

A compelling new documentary traces history, mile after excruciating mile, of one of the world's most infamous road races across Mexico, The Baja 1000, and the human toll it takes. The film, Dust to Glory braks new ground in a number of ways. It is the first time the world's longest point-to-point race has been profiled in such detail, and it's also a first for Adobe's PC-based Premiere Pro nonlinear editing software, which was used to cut and finish the entire full-length feature and print it to film.

Shooting the independent film project-which began in 2003 and took more than a year, 55 cameras and miles of video and film footage to capture-was only half the story. For online editor and independent filmmaker Jacob Rosenberg, the four-month edit (including color correction and titling) for the documentary was as grueling as the race itself.

Privately financed by BronWa Pictures and distributed by Independent Film Channel (IFC) Films, Dust to Glory will be released nationally in theaters in April 2005 and on cable TV’s IFC thereafter. The finished film print and the 4:3 TV master were both created solely from the digital HD data files edited on Premiere Pro.

Early last summer, original material, cut offline by writer/director/editor Dana Brown (Step Into Liquid) and producer/editor Scott Waugh (Step Into Liquid, Release), was delivered to Rosenberg on 20-minute FireWire drives that hold about five minutes of standard-definition (25 Mb/s DV) footage, each consisting of an EDL and a guide track with time code. This footage was then upconverted using a Teranex format converter to produce a 4:3 and 16:9 pan-and-scan version for final distribution.

Setting up his production base for the production at Laser Pacific, in Los Angeles, Rosenberg used an off-the-shelf PC workstation from Boxx Technologies. He started with 55 different camera sources, representing the MiniDV ( Panasonic DVX100s) and HDCAM ( Sony’s F900 HD camcorder) formats, as well as Super 16 ( Arri SR3 Super 16 high-speed and Photosonics Super 16 IVN cameras) and 35mm film. The film cameras were used mainly for capturing, in slow-motion, cars traveling at speeds of over 100 miles per hour.

Dust to Glory used a crew of more than 80 and cameras mounted in a variety of locations, including on top of and inside the race cars, on helicopters and motorcycles, and even as part of a four-passenger buggy camera car. Always one to try new technology when it makes sense, Brown wanted to shoot in HD, at a time when there was only one other film production, Star Wars, shooting in HD. The gritty close-ups and sweeping wide-angle shots, together with expansive landscape scenes make up the heart and soul of Dust to Glory, a film as much about the race as the individual stories of the people driven to be a part of it.

Being a fan of Adobe products, Rosenberg recommended Premiere to Brown, due to its flexibility. He says about 50 percent of the film was shot in HD, 25 percent in SD and the remaining 25 percent in film, so it didn’t make much sense to cut the film negative optically. "It made the most sense, both creatively and financially, to finish it digitally," he says.

The raw HD footage was digitized directly into a CineForm codec from the output of a Sony HDCAM SDI deck and into Premiere. The film footage was telecined into a digital format using a QuViz server and Qubit drive. The resulting Qubit -formatted material was streamed into Premiere at 1920 x 1080, 10-bit 4:2:2.

An HDCAM view of a not-so-easy rider: In this scene, seven-time champion Johnny Campbell has just passed his Honda bike to partner, Steve Hengeveld, who will ride the last 350 miles of the race to the finish line.

Two Panasonic DVX100s were used to capture audio, which were later synched to the video via time code. This eliminated the need for large boom mics in the field, which would get in the way of covering the storied race across Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. Once Brown and Waugh completed the offline edit, audio files were converted to OMF files and then mixed and finished for the Dolby surround-sound environment on a Digidesign Pro Tools system at a different location.

Working at Laser Pacific, where the film out was produced, was also a big plus: It meant Rosenberg could check his work as he went along to ensure a high-quality result. It also saved him a lot of time and heartache during post.

Rosenberg used Adobe Premiere Pro, v. 1.5., in conjunction with CineForm’s Prospect HD plug-in, to encode an HD signal as a compressed video stream into Premiere and maintain all the resolution and image quality of the original material. This kept the amount of storage to a manageable level and saved lots of time in the edit suite. For the entire Dust to Glory project Rosenberg used a 1.5 TB storage array, capable of holding about 30-50 hours of compressed HD.

CineForm’s Prospect HD uses a wavelet-based compression scheme, which, while very efficient, frame accurate and completely scalable, employs different transfer data rates on the fly, depending upon the size of the file to be digitized. Unlike other MPEG frame-based compression systems, the Prospect HD uses a two-frame group of pictures (GOP) structure, which some call "short-GOP," that can be easily edited without image-degrading file translation within Premiere.

"The fact that I could fit an entire feature film on a single PC hard drive is pretty impressive," Rosenberg says, adding the he also used a Sony professional broadcast monitor and a Tektronix waveform monitor/vectorscope.

Using the CineForm codec, which gave him access to three streams in real time, Rosenberg captured the footage into his workstation at 13 Mb/s while still maintaining 1920 x 1080 10-bit 4:2:2 resolution.

Richard Townhill, senior group product manager for Adobe’s Digital Video Products and a technical consultant for the project, says the "extremely high quality of the compression and the seamless data flow between the various Adobe products accessed under a single user interface, were key to making the whole project work. We were quite certain that Premiere could be used for an entire feature film, but it had never been tried before. This project validated our R&D efforts in new features that come standard with Premiere Pro 1.5."

Using the Adobe Video Collection in HD mode let Rosenberg easily exchange edit decision list (EDL) data between Premiere and After Effects, two programs that saw heavy use during post on the documentary. He was able to take the rough EDL from Brown and Waugh, color correct, add transitions, montage and overlay effects and animated titles, and output the finished scenes directly to 35mm film for distribution."Using Premiere for feature-film production is unusual," says Townhill. "You’re editing in an offline environment, recapturing data constantly from the original source material for color timing and beefing up select frames. With so many sources, this could have been an extremely difficult project to complete, but with lots of preplanning and the workflow that Jacob and Dana developed, they managed it all quite well."

Because of all the different source material, Rosenberg wanted to digitize footage once and then edit and color time it in one process. With Premiere Pro’s new timeline-based editing features and common GUI, he says he was able to assemble scenes relatively quickly, make changes constantly and preview them instantly. "Premiere Pro’s tight integration with the CineForm codec, real-time processing, its ability to handle all of the different formats, the fact that we could easily bring an offline SD format and SD EDL into an HD project, made for a very efficient way of working," he says.

Editor Jacob Rosenberg’s souped-up desktop kit includes: Adobe Video Collection 2.5 ( Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, After Effects Pro, After Effects 6.5, PhotoShop CS, Encore DVD 1.5, Audition 1.5); AJA Video Zena HD; Boxx Technologies HD Pro bundle; CineForm Prospect HD; Digidesign Pro Tools; Qubit drive; QuViz server; Sony HDCAM SDI deck; Sony broadcast monitor; Tektronix vectorscope; and Teranex format converter.

Rosenberg says the footage finished in Premiere Pro was so compelling, that there were times when Brown and Waugh, looking at it projected on a large screen, could not tell the difference between the original film and finished digital-video scenes edited on Premiere. An HD SDI output from the Premiere workstation was fed to a 2K projector at Laser Pacific’s in-house theater to preview the scenes as they were finished.

"We’re playing material out of a desktop PC through a small SDI cable to a 2K projector and you have no idea that there’s not a film projector behind you," Rosenberg says. "I was amazed how well the grain structure remains intact, even when comparing it to film material that’s been telecined to HD."

To online the documentary Rosenberg used a single Boxx Technologies HD Pro bundle workstation running an AJA Video Zena HD card and the complete Adobe Video Collection 2.5.

Because Rosenberg wasn’t working in a $500 -per-hour edit bay-and because of Premiere’s intuitive interface and the affordability of the equipment itself-he estimates he saved the project more than $1 million in post-production costs, avoiding expensive optical fees altogether. Without the time and money pressures, he adds that he was able to spend more time with the edits and be more creative. "Using an off-the-shelf PC workstation, we did have some limitations in terms of real-time processing," he says, "but as far as [limitations to creativity,] there were none."

For Rosenberg, Dust to Glory has become a rallying cry for a new approach to independent filmmaking, no longer just a euphemism for a low-budget production. "The point is to do it for the best value," he says. "I was lucky to be working with a very forward-thinking director [Dana Brown] who pushed me to think differently and find new ways to complete the job in the most efficient way," he says. In the end, he adds, seeing the final project on the screen made all of the late nights and triple espressos well worth it.

A long-time Premiere user who has cut a variety of commercials and training videos, Rosenberg was eager to prove that the software could be used for feature film production. With Dust to Glory, which he finished entirely on a standard PC, he got that wish.