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Fairlight Tips & Tricks #7 |
Rebalancing,
Change Notes
and Macros
by Andy Somers
Hello again and welcome to another collection of Fairlight tips. In the last column we discussed the basics of conforming to picture changes. In this issue we'll get into rebalancing, how to create your own change notes, and using macros to change several projects quickly.
One of the very useful features of the Fairlight is the ability to merge sections of two or more projects together using the BLUE IMPORT command. This makes rebalancing a snap. Basically, just open the project you want to rebalance INTO, clear a space for the new material, and finally, import it from the project you're rebalancing FROM.
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Some tips:
- To place the cursor exactly at the
beginning or end of a range, hold down the BLUE key while
pressing the JUMP keys. BLUE JUMP LEFT places the cursor
at the head of the range.
- Remember that whenever you import,
it's always relative to the cursors in both projects.
- Make sure you use BORROW when
importing sections of cut material. If you use KEEP, you
won't import any handles should you need to further
change the material.
- When you use BORROW, don't forget to use KEEP BORROWED in the SPACE menu before finishing the project, or your sounds may not play back when you move your hard drives around to another system!
One of the issues that sometimes crops up, especially with today's compressed post-production schedules (and when digital editorial systems are used) is incorrect (or nonexistent) picture and track change notes. Fortunately, there's a tried and true method for creating your own change notes in the Fairlight, using the guide tracks from the video or the one-to-one.
To make this work, load the guide tracks for the versions you're going from and to. Make sure you load each as a single continuous clip, with no breaks in it. Now, play the two guide tracks against each other until they drop out of sync, and press SPLIT under the LEVEL menu to split the old guide track. Now, sync up the later portion of the old track and continue to the next point where it falls out of sync. As you can see in Figure 1, it is then a simple matter to measure the amount of each change, using the edit points of the old guide track.
Tips:
- If you set a range between edit
points, you can use the RANGE indicator to tell you the
size, but be careful; the indicator does not display
subframes, and may cause you to round down the actual
number of frames by one.
- When the old track has to be advanced, move it to an adjacent track so that you can more easily measure the amount of deletion.
Finally, on a recent film we were faced with a larger than normal workload of changes from the picture department. These changes affected around 20 24-track projects per reel. To streamline the process we wrote a macro as we did a set of changes, then simply ran the macro on the other projects for that reel, allowing us to rapidly conform literally hundreds of tracks in just a few minutes. Jayme Parker first put this concept forth, and it's proved to be a great time-saver. In particular, if one editor creates a macro for conforming a particular reel, that macro can be saved and given to other editors working on different projects for the same reel, greatly reducing the amount of time it takes to bring things up to the current version.
When using macros to conform a reel, there are a few things to keep in mind:
- There is a limit of 400-500
keystrokes per macro, and the Fairlight will beep to
indicate when a macro is full. When this happens, simply
start a new macro exactly where you left off. For
example, start the macro on F1 and fill it up, then
continue writing on F2. Later, press F1 and F2 in
sequence.
- To save keystrokes, turn subframes
off and set an offset, as discussed in the September/
October 1998 issue. Do this before you begin writing the
macro.
- Make sure that subframes are off
and the correct offset is entered before running the
macro. Important: Remember to tell this to any editor you
give your macro to, otherwise it'll make mincemeat of
their project!
- Macros do not remember any moves
made with the jog wheel, so make all your moves using
GOTO TIME.
- In some projects you may not want to conform all tracks, so don't make track selection a part of the macro - just make sure you have the needed tracks selected before running the macro.
That's it for this issue. Next time I'll cover a better way to perform a lift+hold and get more into writing effective macros. As always, if you have any questions you'd like me to address in this column, send me email. Happy cutting!
Andy Somers is a member of the Guild,
and in addition to picture and sound editing,
provides training and consultation
on the Fairlight MFX series of workstations
for union editors and signatory facilities.
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter
Vol. 20, No. 1 - Jan/Feb 1999
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Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved by The Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 700