The Mothman Prophecies

A No-Compromise Cutting Room Without Film

by Brian Berdan

I’m almost sick and tired of trying to keep up with the latest and greatest technology in our ever-changing field — if only it weren’t so much fun. What I’d like to share with you here is how we were able to avoid printing work picture and mag on my latest job, yet still keep Fred Murphy, the director of photography, happy. Sound impossible? Read on.

The movie, The Mothman Prophecies, stars Richard Gere and Laura Linney and was directed by Mark Pellington (Arlington Road). It is ostensibly based on some creepy events that

By shooting on film and transferring to high-definition 24 frame-per-second video, the production was able to set up a flexible feature cutting room without printed dailies.

occurred in West Virginia in the late 1960s, when people saw and heard an assortment of strange phenomena. Gere plays a reporter who gets pulled into this vortex while investigating.

Dailies

The decision to go without film dailies was based, as usual, on economics. But rather than suffer through the usual shortcomings and pitfalls of seeing dailies only in NTSC, we transferred to HD video. The bottom line was that the process would save tens of thousands of dollars compared with the film dailies route. The key was getting a package deal in which Laser Pacific, our video house, would stay involved with us all the way through previews.

The process began with telecine, where we used a Philips Spirit to transfer our Super-35 dailies to the 1080/24P HDCAM format, a LaserPacific/Sony creation that preserves film’s 24 fps rate. This was then dubbed to the 1080i Digital-VHS (D-VHS) format for viewing, as well as to BetaSP for the Avid. We tested other mastering formats, mainly 1080i, but the 24P format avoids 3:2 pull-down artifacts, which in side-by-side comparisons were apparent in scenes with a lot of motion. Even though our viewing tapes were 30 fps, we preferred to have the masters at 24 for the previews. Sound was transferred to the Beta and also cloned to a DAT, which we digitized so that we would be able to turn over the sound later via OMF.

Berdan cuts on a laptop beside the Sony G-90 projector used in the production’s temporary screening room in Pittsburgh. High-definition video dailies were projected onto the 12-foot screen.

We were guided through the entire process, including preview screenings, by Steven B. Cohen of Cohen Communications [no relation to the publisher of this magazine]. Along with Lakeshore’s post supervisor James McQuaide, he conducted numerous tests to come up with a system that satisfied everyone.

During our winter shoot in Pittsburgh, Cohen set up a screening room in a fairly large space (around 25 by 60 feet) in our warehouse-turned-production-office. Projecting onto a twelve-foot screen, our dailies, fed from a high-definition Panasonic D-VHS deck, looked fantastic. In fact, every crew member who walked into the room would look around for the film projector. They’d eventually find a hefty Sony G-90 video projector hidden inside a sound baffle box in the middle of the room.

We had tested several projectors. The smaller, lighter, semi-portable systems using Texas Instruments’ Digital Light Processing micro-mirror chip (DLP) were enticing with their ease of setup, but the image quality and brightness of the Sony, a large-venue, cathode ray tube (CRT) projector, were head and shoulders above the others. (There are larger DLP projectors,

The DLP projector, deck and other equipment used for a preview screening in Chicago.

which we used in our preview screenings, but I’ll get to that later.) The only limitations to this projection system were slightly crushed blacks and the inability to do high-speed searches through the tape. Newer versions of the deck, which looks and functions like a consumer VCR, have the shuttle capability that ours lacked.

What struck me about the image was its rock-solid steadiness. Another advantage that I found was that there was never a question of whether a problem was in the negative or the workprint — it was either in the negative or was of a visibly electronic nature (brief, pixilated, digital dropouts). As far as my confidence in viewing dailies and knowing that I’ve experienced them as I should, I believe this process was better than film, because I could easily load up the D-VHS any time to check a shot. The DP was always working with the colorist, so we were assured that the video represented the negative as accurately as possible, without too many color-correction tricks that could not be recreated during film timing. Only a few sequences, involving infrared and reversal stock, needed more manipulation than we could get on film, and we ultimately turned those over to Cinesite for digital color correction.

During the first week of shooting, I was on location, cutting with Apple’s Final Cut Pro on my laptop. Using footage from VHS viewing tapes, I basically did selects, which my assistants, David Reale and Peter Kwong, then manually recreated in the Avid from a printed EDL. (Sorry, guys.) I was also able to plug my computer into the Sony projector, and it was great fun working off a laptop and seeing the video image projected on the twelve-foot screen. At one point, the DP walked in and for a moment thought he was seeing the HD!

After dailies, the cutting process returned to standard Avid procedure, except that I had a smaller projector hooked up to the Avid. I had always wanted to have a KEM that projected its image onto a wall screen, having once seen a flatbed like this in France. Now that storage is cheap, and video quality is high, I have been using a small Epson LCD projector to display the image from my NTSC monitor while I cut. This setup gives the director and me the impression that we’re actually working on a movie, rather than a TV show. We can also screen for a larger audience than is usually possible in the cutting room. The image is very accurate color-wise, especially when compared with a television. Blacks and contrast suffer most, but newer models are better. Fan noise has also been suppressed in recent versions. The only disadvantage is that we have to reduce light levels in the editing room.

Previews

When we arrived at preview time, the existence of a high-definition master of the dailies eliminated the need for us to print selected takes and conform work picture. The Avid project was opened in a Symphony so that we could derive a proper 24 fps EDL for online. (You can now create good 24 fps lists from both Version 7 and 10 Avids.) The Avid offline output was bumped up to HD, and the online was assembled over it in 2,000-foot film reel format. When we projected our high-def tape on a 45-foot screen at previews in Orange County and

High-definition video was projected for dailies. Preview audiences later saw a big-screen image that looked like film — but without scratches and dirt.

Chicago, it provided a film experience that I think rivaled and sometimes surpassed what I saw on the other screens of the multiplex. At each preview, I checked out many other films, and I was appalled at the range of print quality. Our videotape, however, was always pristine, without splices, dirt, or picture weave.

The problems with this preview process are the need to constantly check the quality of the HD tape and the increased complexity involved in setting up the theater. In our case, the set-up was done by Steven B. Cohen with projectors provided by American Hi Definition. A 200-pound projector and HD deck had to be installed and adjusted, rather than just a mag dubber. Sound was in the LCRS format (HD can also support 5.1). For the first preview, a two-day tape-to-tape color correction session with the DP and director was done at Laser Pacific, utilizing the same projector that we would use at the preview. The color-correction process was simpler for subsequent previews. We used the original master as much as possible, and where new material was inserted, we only used the limited color-correction equipment available in the edit bay itself.

Visual Effects

All the normal opticals (fades, dissolves and the like) were done in online. Visual effects, created by Cinesite, were recorded out to film negative stock, then telecined to HD. Main titles and several “experimental” visual effects (i.e. the ones our post supervisor hadn’t yet found money for) were created in the cutting room on an Apple PowerBook using Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects, then converted from QuickTime (1920x1080 pixels) to HDCAM by Laser Pacific on an HD Final Cut Pro system. I created the titles in After Effects on my laptop, then rendered them as a QuickTime file for supering over the onlined

HD video made it possible to create temporary visual effects in the cutting room with excellent quality. A frame of Richard Gere was treated with a combination of filters in After Effects and then recreated by Cinesite at 2K.

textless background. I can’t stress how great it’s been learning After Effects in order to shape visual effects and get immediate feedback from the director, rather than having to give comments to an effects facility and then wait several days to see changes. The drawback, of course, is that the more editors can do, the more we have to do.

We also created many temp insert shots in the cutting room, using DV and Hi-8 video cameras. The video was up-converted to HD, and used in our previews. Surprisingly, these shots were of a high enough quality not to distract. (When I was an assistant, I once created a temp insert by animating, frame by frame, with a Sharpie on painted leader — I think we’ve improved some things.)

We needed a full week between previews to make changes — usually hundreds of cuts — and to do a two-day temp dub, online, optical/titling session and quality-control session. But onlining rather than conforming film meant that the turnaround was still several days faster than it would have been for this amount of work. And because of the ease with which we could change opticals and visual effects, the quality of the end product was far superior.

Answer Print

Our theatrical trailers were actually created from our HD dailies, but we never seriously considered using the HD for the final answer print, because the resolution just isn’t good enough. We did, however, seriously investigate using Cinesite’s digital film mastering service, in which all final color correction and opticals are done in the computer, then recorded out to film. This “digital answer print” is based on 2K scans of the negative, which have more information than the HD dailies. We did extensive testing to compare answer and release prints of both the regular film process and the digital process. Because we shot Super-35, the final release print requires an optical squeeze to get it into the anamorphic format. This step really degrades the image, and we hoped that by going digital and performing the squeeze in the computer, we could get an image as good as or better than the regular lab output. It was a close call, but in the end we had to admit that the straight film process gave us more resolution and black detail. Nevertheless, I think the digital intermediate quality was very high, and given the choice, I personally would have preferred that method for the greater control over color it affords, and to avoid opticals that bump. About 2,000 feet of the film, including credits, visual effects and opticals, were created and timed digitally.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter what technical path we select to complete a project, as long as we get there with our psyches intact. I did enjoy listening to and smelling the coding machine from the show down the hall, but I certainly didn’t miss carrying the work picture around. And the fantastic commissaries at these video facilities will really bring me back next time!