Magless Dailies
by Tom
Costain
In the last few years, most of the materials in the film cutting room have been converted to digital form. The last holdout, it seems, is the magnetic film used for screenings on most feature films. Mag may sound great but it’s an antiquated, costly, and wasteful element that seems redundant in a modern cutting room.
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Eliminating the use of mag is valuable for several reasons. First, it allows us to cut with sound that hasn’t lost quality by being repeatedly transferred. Second, it means never waiting for transfers and never ordering takes that weren’t circled by the sound mixer. Third, it produces a significant cost savings for the production – typically $30,000 or more for mag stock and transfers on a feature. Finally, eliminating mag drastically reduces the landfill waste that the cutting room generates.
History
Several techniques have been tried over the years to sync and screen dailies without mag. Anyone who has browsed the Guild’s online discussion area will see how much interest there is in this technology. A system called Daily Disc, developed by Howell Gibbens and others, employs a digital squawk box and allows for traditional-style syncing on a bench. It’s been in the works for years and has not yet been released, but it should be available soon. Another system, developed by Steve Cohen, employs equipment from the French company Aaton and is based on film timecode applied in the camera. Used successfully on the films '15 Minutes' and 'Jurassic Park III', it allows for fully automatic syncing on the fly with a KEM. But because of a patent held by Daily Disc, its release is currently blocked in this country. Also, Walter Murch has used a process he calls NoMag, that is similar to my approach, but employs a Pro Tools station in the cutting room.
The system I’ll describe here is simple and immediately available. I use a digital dubber made by Akai called the DD8. It is designed to read OMF files and ProTools sessions from a removable hard drive (I had ours fitted with a Jaz drive). I used one in the cutting room and one in the screening room. The dubber stays in sync with picture by locking up to the biphase pulse emitted from KEMs and projectors. The DD8 has been used extensively in Europe and New York and is finally starting to show up in Los Angeles.
The Process
The process I employed works as follows: I start my day by digitizing all of the previous day’s dailies from DAT. I set the Avid to "Digitize Across Timecode Breaks" (in the Digitize Settings window). The Avid will then create a new master clip at every timecode break. This allows you to start digitizing the DAT and walk away from the computer. I load from the DAT digitally (select ‘digital input’ in the Audio Settings window). The beauty of loading sound this way is that no levels need to be set on the mixing board. The transfer is like a file copy – the quality and level on
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to sync feature dailies without mag film means better sound at lower cost. |
The workprint, meanwhile, is sent to telecine. When the telecined film returns to the editing room I load it and sync via clappers, using the Avid’s autosync feature. Autosync works well, but it has a couple of limitations compared to syncing with mag. An autosynced clip must contain continuous picture and track with no internal cuts. This means that the synced clip is truncated, head and tail, to the shortest element. If sound cuts early you’ll lose the picture after the cut. To get around this you’ll have to make a separate picture clip for the MOS portion. Also, Autosync is only accurate to the nearest frame, so I perfect the sync by displaying a waveform and using the ‘slip by perfs’ function, which is accurate to a quarter of a frame.
Once syncing is complete, I create an audio sequence by selecting all the autosynced subclips from the same daily roll and use the Avid’s Autosequence feature. This automatically creates a sequence that matches the picture roll. I then export the audio from the sequence as an OMF file. The steps are as follows: highlight the sequence and select "Export" from the File menu. Select OMF compositions and "Standard AIFC". Finally, choose "Audio Only," "With Media" and "OMF 1.0." The sequence is now ready to play on the DD8.
Other Considerations
This process works very well, but its success is dependant on fast telecine. You need to prepare your picture, get it to transfer, telecine it, load it into the Avid, sync all the clips, export via OMF, and get to the theater for your dailies screening. If you have a lot of film and an early screening you may not make it. On days where time was tight I had the assistant logging the film take note of the exact footage for each clapper close on the picture. With this information I created an audio-only sequence cut to match the daily roll. This was then exported via OMF and checked using the DD8 connected to the KEM. If something was out of sync I fixed the problem in the Avid and then re-exported the sequence. Akai sells a controller that allows for sync adjustments in the DD8 but this didn’t seem useful to me since the sync problem would still exist in the Avid.
Regardless of whether I autosynced or built an audio-only sequence that was checked on the KEM, the result was an audio-only OMF composition for every daily roll. These sequences are then transferred to a narrow removable hard drive or, in my case, to a Jaz disk, and taken with the film to the screening room. To run dailies, the projectionist simply threads the picture to the start mark, selects the appropriate OMF file on the DD8 and pushes a button to lock them together. Voila, digital sound is ready to roll! The Akai locks to the projector quickly and remains locked at any speed, forward or reverse.
We only used one DD8 for projection. In some rooms we wired it to a single projector and there was a pause between reels while the projectionist rethreaded. In other rooms we were able to use two projectors connected to the dubber through a switchbox. This meant that we could go faster, but there was still a brief pause between reels while the projectionist threw the switch. Had we used two dubbers, we would have been able to do changeover screenings.
The film I was on ('The Animal') had daily screenings all over town, which meant moving the digital dubber frequently. This was easier than it sounds because the DD8 is about the size of a Beta deck and quite portable. Because it is relatively new to LA, I often got hesitant reactions from engineers who didn’t think they could run it in their rooms. Most were surprised at just how easy it was to set up and operate.
Conclusions
After completing a film using digital dubbers it’s hard to understand why mag is still being used for dailies. Digital dailies are clean, fast, simple, and inexpensive. In fact, the cost for the producers to purchase two DD8s for my cutting room was half of what they had budgeted for mag stock and transfers. The editor was happy to be cutting with digital sound, the crew was happy to be listening to digital audio in the screening room, the producer was happy to be saving money, and the earth was happy to be receiving less garbage. Why are you still using mag?
Tom Costain is an assistant editor.
He can be reached via email
Please post your questions or comments about this
process in the Guild online discussion area
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Magazine
Vol. 22, No. 3 - July/August 2001
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