How Gone Baby Gone Switched Horses From 14:1 SD to DNxHD in Mid-Stream
DANIEL MCGILVRAY: Miramax brought us on to the project at the request of the editorial crew. We'd worked with editor Billy Goldenberg and assistant editors Brett Reed and Kevin Hickman on other projects and they felt we were the ones suited to the challenge.
Describe the workflow, and the equipment required to support it. Did you use Avid’s DNxHD codec? And are all the bugs ironed out?
The cutting room was set up with two Symphony Nitris systems, one for Ben and the other for editor Billy Goldenberg, and two HD Adrenaline systems for assistant editors Brett Reed and Kevin Hickman. These systems had 4 GB fibre connections to the Unity server, where all the material was stored on a 24 TB drive array. Modern VideoFilm ingested all the dailies from HDCAM tapes using Avid's DNxHD 175 codec, and then sent FireWire drives over to editorial, which loaded the material onto the Unity. Ben made the decision to go with DNxHD 175 after looking at the other options for DNxHD resolutions. It is the best-quality compressed HD resolution supported by Avid for a film project, and while the storage requirements are high, it was what he wanted to see on the screen in the cutting room.
Once everything was loaded and the project had been migrated into the HD environment, things went fairly smoothly. We only ran into problems once they needed to do downconverted SD outputs from their HD sequences. The Avid systems didn't have a lot of support for going back in that direction, and some of the workarounds were pretty time-consuming, as they involved transcoding the DNxHD to a standard-definition codec before outputting. There were some bugs with this process, and some others related to generating film lists and EDLs. Fortunately, Geoff Hollywood at Avid in Tewksbury, MA, was really responsive and was able to get us code fixes for the list issues very quickly, and though Avid didn't have an immediate fix for the downconvert issues, they have since resolved some of those bugs in later versions of the software.
How difficult was the transition from standard editing to HD?
The transition from standard-def editing to cutting in HD posed some significant technical obstacles, some of which were clear ahead of time. Others became evident once the process was underway. Because the cuts existed on Ben's laptop Xpress Pro system in the SD realm, there were a lot of problems trying to get those SD cuts to link to the newly created HD master clips. Additionally, the existing sound had frame-rate issues with the new HD master clips, so ultimately those initial cuts had to be eye-matched and all of the dailies audio had to be resynced. It ended up being a lot of work, and several times Brett, Kevin, and I had to revise the plan and come up with workarounds so they could make their schedule.
It's always difficult when you have to move platforms or formats in the middle of a project. Lately, we've been getting requests to transition people from Final Cut Pro to Avid mid-stream, and others are trying to head from Avid over to Final Cut. The thing you shoot for is to build the best, most streamlined method possible for that specific project and minimize the amount of work for the editorial crew.
How were digital screenings handled?
One of the clearest benefits of cutting in high-def is the ease with which a cutting room can prepare for a screening. Because the film was already online in the systems at full 1080p HD resolution, there was no conform process prior to doing a preview. Most of the time, editorial was able to output the latest cut of the film directly to an HDCAM or D5 deck and go to projection from there. For more critical screenings, they could output reels from their offline systems to an HD deck, have those color-timed elsewhere, re-ingest them into their editing stations, do the laybacks and then go out to preview.
Why was editing in HD important to the director and editor? And how savvy was Affleck about these issues?
It was Ben's idea to try an HD editorial workflow. For the filmmakers it's a big difference, because now you're making creative decisions based on an image that actually looks much how it will appear when projected in a theater. Ben had done a lot of research himself on possibilities for an HD editorial process, and it was impressive to see a director take such a detailed interest in the editing systems. He wanted to know exactly how the systems were set up, what the Unity server was doing, specific details about software versions, etc. From the start it was clear he had a solid grasp on the technology.
Is HD editorial an expensive proposition for features?
HD editorial for features is quickly getting more affordable. Avid now has full support for the DNxHD 36 codec in their Media Composer systems, which provides full-raster HD resolution at a significantly reduced storage requirement. You no longer have to spend lots of money on your SAN to get HD for your cutting room. On the Final Cut Pro side there are similar workflows available with similar benefits. There are some real cost savings cutting in HD, with not having to go out to a facility or bring in a separate HD system to conform for screenings and previews. Overall, an HD cutting room is probably still more expensive than the traditional SD editing environment, but with the creative and time-saving benefits it provides, this workflow is something we're getting more requests for and ultimately is probably the direction people will go.
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