Making The Avid Transparent In The Cutting-room by Todd Busch The computer was brought into the cutting room to make our lives easier. Assistants working in features today not only must know all the ins-and-outs of running the cutting room, but they must be familiar with everything from telecine to current operating systems to fibre channel networks. One software innovation, engineered by the people at Avid, is Open Media Framework Interchange, or OMFI, which has begun to make the communication between digital systems more seamless. I have been using OMFI for exchanging digital sound media across Avid, Pro Tools, and AudioVision platforms over the past four years. This means that once picture locks reels, an OMFI document can be exported from the Avid, imported directly into a digital audio workstation, and a new session created within seconds. Delivered along with a videotape work picture, a reel can be opened by a dialogue editor in less than a minute. A Problem With The New 7.0 Software by Michael Brandt There is a new feature in the Avid 7.0 which allows users to see how long they have been working on various aspects of a specific project. Unfortunately, for this feature to work, it must create a "Statistics" folder in the project folder on the Mac. When this folder gets large (50 or more items), the system slows down tremendously. It can get huge on a film project that you work on everyday. Throwing away the folder will get everything back up to speed. A new one will automatically be created, and should be thrown away every couple of days. You won't be able to check your time in the project, but will move around much faster. Avid is planning a fix. The downside of this process in the past has been that to obtain audio tracks in the Avid of the quality necessary for a dub stage the assistant had to digitize the sound from the production DAT or 1/4" into the Avid, and sync it to digital picture. This is a catch-22 for the picture assistant who winds up doing the work that the sound assistant normally does. So the ongoing debate has been, "How to utilize OMFI without adding to the picture assistant's daily workload." When 'The Rocket Boys' was getting started this past February, sound supervisor Howell Gibbens of Weddington Sound approached me about using OMFI. The problems I faced, like most shows, were two-fold: time and manpower. The production was on location in Tennessee while the cutting rooms stayed at Universal. Two assistants and I spent the mornings synching dailies on film, screening them for the editor, Robert Dalva, and having it all telecined across town at Sony Studios before shipping it back to Tennessee to be screened by production the following morning. There was physically no time available to sync dailies in the Avid. Sync work-picture was telecined to hard disk at Sony Digital Pictures via Avid's Media Recorder, which saved me the time of importing a floppy disk file, and batch digitizing my dailies each day. Howell suggested using a Dolby SR (Spectral Recording) encoded mag track for dailies, and forwarding that to telecine. Dolby SR provides greater noise reduction and permits recording at a wider frequency range, particularly at high signal levels. It's not the same as D:D, but compatibility tests done on a dub stage have found little if any difference in audio values. To cover our bases, we transferred the production 1/4" to 35mm three-stripe mag., with channel 1 for normal audio, to be used for synching and screening; 2 for the Dolby encoded sound, which would be transferred in telecine; and 3 for production timecode. We ran several tests with the production sound mixer prior to principle photography, including a sync test, and variable tones which we sent through the telecine process to the Avid and into a Pro Tools at Weddington Sound. We continued recording the tones throughout the production to keep a handle on the Dolby SR path. The only additional work in this process includes cloning the audio media files from the Avid to a 1GB Jaz cartridge, and exporting an OMFI sequence of each day's dailies, which I sent to Weddington on a regular basis. This served two purposes: first, as a back-up for the audio media which we could use to restore our sound in the event that a drive went down (picture could be redigitized from the Beta SP telecine masters), and second, it allowed sound to prepare their dailies prior to turn over. Once we locked our reels, all I had to do was send the sound editors an OMFI document of each reel on a floppy disc or via e-mail. The digital age continues to yield products that help us edit films more quickly, more dynamically, and above all more collaboratively, but rarely is there a product or a tool that takes into consideration the time and labor spent preparing the materials. There are ways to simplify the assistant editor's job and not just redistribute the chain of events for others to take care of down the road. OMFI is one such tool. For more information about OMFI check out their web sight, or call their tollfree number (800) 949-OMFI. OMFI is an evolving technology. Some assistants have had good experiences with it, some not so good. We welcome your comments. Write to your Newsletter.   Todd Busch is the first assistant on 'The Rocket Boys'.   Reprinted from The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter Vol. 19, No. 4 - July/August 1998   Guild Home | Newsletter Home | Top of Page   Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved by The Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 776