'The Anniversary Party'
A Technical Perspective
by Suzanne
Spangler
Suzanne Spangler co-edited The Anniversary Party with Carol Littleton. Here she offers some thoughts about the technical hurdles that the post-production team encountered. (For more about the film, see 'DV Filmmaking')
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with Carol Littleton. |
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Carol and I wanted to figure out the best way to organize the cutting room efficiently and to get from DV to our final answer print. I’d had some problems with the stability of DV in the past, so we had the transfer house (3rd Level Post) make Digibeta clones from our camera originals and these became our masters. They also made Beta SP copies for us to digitize into the Avid. We didn’t get traditional ALE files. Instead, we logged the Beta tapes by hand, creating our own database. We digitized all takes, not just the circled ones. We had two Avids and with Carol and I cutting, the assistant, Charise Angone, had to log and digitize at night. With DV, producers think they are saving money on telecine but, as with many other recent technical changes, those of us in the cutting room end up doing work that had previously been done more efficiently by others.
We were shooting in PAL so we had to get everything and everyone working that way: transfer house, Avid equipment, sound editors, music editor, composer, mixing stage and screening rooms. Many
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challenge was the speed change from PAL to film. |
Our location mixer recorded up to seven discrete tracks and one mixed track onto a Tascam DA-88. We wanted camera and sound to use the same timecode, so we could have the DA-88 chase the video deck while digitizing. We decided to have sound jam the camera with time-of-day code. For perfect sync, we ended up needing a one-frame offset on the DA-88. We wanted to cut with the mixed track only, but have the discrete tracks readily available, so after digitizing, we subclipped each take, taking only the mixed track. This way, with two clicks, we could access all the tracks.
Once we were locked and color-corrected we converted one reel to film as an experiment. We found that field blending helped obscure the video halo effect and made the quality of the transfer better than we had originally expected. Going to film adds grain, and we discovered that using Kodak Vision Premier print stock enhanced the contrast and apparent focus. Working at EFilm in Hollywood was a big
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and everyone working in PAL: transfer house, Avid, sound and music editors, composer mixing stage and screening rooms. |
Our biggest technical challenge turned out to be the speed change from 25 to 24-fps. Editors and mixers on some other DV projects had left everything at the original pitch, which meant that it sounded slow after conversion to film. Though it had the same number of frames, when converted to 24-fps the show was almost five minutes longer than at its original speed. We decided to screen it with an audience right away. Luckily, even though we could instantly see and feel the difference, the audience reaction did not change significantly.
The new Pro Tools plug in, Pitch ‘n Time (from Serato in New Zealand) had just come to the attention of our music editor Paul Rabjohns. We used it to pitch-correct the music and the dialog. If too many tracks were converted, we began to hear artifacts. We mixed in PAL, then took two days to pitch-correct the chosen tracks, so that we would have stems and our print master in the normal format.
Even though the movie was shot on DV, it retained its film discipline. On a lower budget show with a short schedule it would have been easy to let things slide. Our production crew was thoroughly professional. The camera department didn’t get sloppy with slates or paperwork. This was very important to us. With the short schedule there wasn’t a lot of time to try and figure out what was what.
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Magazine
Vol. 22, No. 3 - July/August 2001
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