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Last season, the post production team on Scrubs did their offline editing on Avid Media Composer v.7 but did their online with Final Cut Pro. This season, however, editors Rick Blue and John Michel decided to use Final Cut Pro 4 for their offline work as well. With the support of post-production supervisor Nicola Scaramuzzo and assistant editors Daniel S. Russ and Tim Serda, Blue and Michel have found that so far, FCP4 has become the backbone of a very efficient workflow — and has also brought some unexpected benefits in terms of mobility and lifestyle. Early this season, the Scrubs crew, joined by Ramy Katrib of DigitalFilm Tree, who designed the offline/online workflow for the season and oversaw the show’s transition to FCP4, gathered in their editing room — located in the same defunct hospital where the series shoots — and discussed why they decided to go this route and what they have experienced so far. Rick Blue: We hooked up with Final Cut Pro because we were in a terrible deadline crunch last season. We were throwing shows at NBC on Thursday, and we air on Thursday. It was that tight. The suggestion came across the table that if we could have our shows assembled in Final Cut Pro, we could work more efficiently for a variety of reasons, and we would be able to meet our deadlines. So we began onlining with Final Cut Pro. As it went on, John and I got curious, and the next question was, “What if we could offline with it?” John Michel: Final Cut Pro could not match our Avid work exactly, the way the Symphony would, so effects like tracking had to be recreated, frame by frame.
Blue: But FCP3 wasn’t ready for primetime. It wasn’t ready to take the pounding. The audio wasn’t anywhere near where it needed to be. You couldn’t trim. And 90 percent of the war is waged in trim mode. DigitalFilm Tree was beta-testing the new version, and Ramy told us, “You might be interested in FCP4, but that’s all I can tell you.” We finished our last online of the season, and Ramy and I went directly to NAB to see Apple’s big rollout of FCP4. There were so many features in it that held promise that I called John right away and told him I thought we should look into it. But we were wrapped for the season, and FCP4 wasn’t coming out till August, so the next step was to get cleared as beta testers.
Michel: I brought dailies with me to Rhode Island, where I was spending our hiatus, and Rick had a set in Massachusetts. And we got the beta copy of Version 4 and started banging out scenes, over and over. Blue: We only had a three-week window to make a decision, because Nick Scaramuzzo, our post production supervisor, needed to know how we were proceeding. And we had to have a total consensus. If John wasn’t happy, then we couldn’t do it, and if I wasn’t happy, then we couldn’t do it. Michel: I was fairly comfortable editing after a week or so of cutting dailies on FCP4. I had been playing with the program since version 2.
Blue: John and I, we’re two different editors. We have different styles but, of course, we have to give the show a unified look. And there was enough in FCP4 for both of us to come to the same conclusion: “Yeah, okay, we’ll try it.” But I think what scares editors about Final Cut Pro is support — Apple is a big company, and this is just another product for them. What’s nice about Avid is that they service what they give you. We had to design our workflow so that even without help from Apple, we would be able to stay afloat. And two essential things happened: first, we entered into a more formal arrangement with DigitalFilm Tree, where they would help us with support — that meant we had a place all the third-party vendors could go to, and they had the gear and could test it. And then we got two new assistants — Dan Russ, who came over from Curb Your Enthusiasm, is a great assistant who’s been in the trenches for a long time. Then Tim Serda became available at the eleventh hour, and this was the last piece of the puzzle. Tim has a deep background with Final Cut Pro — he was on the original Final Cut development team at Macromedia, and when Apple bought the application, he went over to Apple, where he tested third-party hardware. Later, he was a partner at DigitalFilm Tree — if we were going to call tech support, this was who they would have sent over. And now he’s here. Luckily, Tim wanted to get into the hands-on post end of it again, so we now have two guys merging their assistant abilities, and both help us in different areas. But we had some challenges right off the bat. Michel: The first was that outputting over FireWire caused a delay between the computer display and the NTSC monitor. For us, it was too distracting to cut that way, so we decided to use an Aurora Igniter X video card in the computer. [When outputting a DV signal through a FireWire device such as a deck, camera or breakout box, there is a delay between the computer display and the video monitor. The delay can be eliminated through the use of a PCI video card.] Ramy Katrib: With Final Cut Pro systems, there’s always a twist and a turn, because there are so many variables due to all the third-party products. There are probably 50 ways you can set up a system. That’s a wonderful thing, but for some people, it’s challenging. Michel: When I started editing the first episode, I came across a problem in the trim window, which locked up the system.
Blue: That was a scary thing, when John said, “Uh-oh, I’m trimming and I’m crashing,” and we’re on day three. But Tim and DigitalFilm Tree got in touch with Mike Stroven at Aurora in Michigan, and he immediately started working on a fix. Michel: He stayed up all night and made a patch for it, and sent it back the next day, which was pretty impressive. Blue: It reminded me of the time, a decade ago, when these systems were just being developed and everybody was anxious to succeed. In Boston, I had a boutique editorial company, and this guy came into my office and said, “We’re computer guys, and we don’t know anything about how you make films, so we want to talk to you. But we think the way you do it sucks.” It was Bill Warner, and he had this little company called Avid, and it was also flying in the face of what was tried and true. Working in Final Cut Pro excited me in the same way, and I think John felt it, too. I know it’s a romantic notion, but I thought, “Why can’t lightening strike again?” Walter Murch, who can edit on anything he wants, was taking a chance, so we weren’t being totally silly. It has been used on other shows, although to my knowledge, it hadn’t been used on a hard-core, 22-episode, top-ten, crank-it-out show. Michel: We should explain the workflow.
Katrib: Scrubs shoots on Super-16. It’s telecined to a DigiBeta master, along with DVCAM copies for off-line editing, with timecode, address track, audio and keycode window burns. Those DVCAM tapes are digitized, and a Final Cut Pro project and Cinema Tools database are generated. All of that is then copied to FireWire drives. Tim and Dan then copy the files onto a drive for John or Rick, depending on who’s editing the episode. The media files are also backed up to DVD-R. They offline at 29.97 fps rather than at 24 fps, because their primary delivery is a DigiBeta tape, which is also 29.97. Both fields are digitized so motion in FCP4 is smooth. This season, Scrubs was originally going to shoot on Super-16 and deliver on 24P, but NBC decided against it. However, the show is required to deliver film lists in case the production company later wants to cut negative. Blue: We’re working in DV, which is what most of Apple’s work has gone into. For the types of things we do, we have to render almost nothing. Katrib: They’re using dual 1.42GHz G4s. There was a chance they could use the G5 dual 2.0s, but those machines weren’t shipping at the time they started. There’s a natural law that any high-profile show will never be able to access the highest power system, because it always comes out a week after you start. Blue: Plus there’s the third-party factor — are all the cards made with those new computers in mind, or is there going to be some anomaly that comes up? Katrib: These G4s have 130 Gb of additional storage on an ATA drive, and each system is connected to its own Apple Xserve RAID via a FibreChannel card.
Blue: The Xserve RAIDs can eventually be networked together so that we can share media, but until we’re sure that there’s a shared media solution that will work for us, we’re just using our Gigabit Ethernet network to copy the media back and forth between our systems. Katrib: These systems that Rick and John have are, for lack of a better term, Symphony-like. The rate at which things are changing is really mind-bending. The quality of the offline is a lot better than it was before, and if the cost of drives keeps coming down, then next year, or maybe the year after, the editors could work at online quality from beginning to end. That would take several terabytes of storage, but that’s the way things are going. Blue: It’s not all pie-in-the-sky. As editors, we all wear the filter of, “This is how I do it.” We inevitably put on our Avid glasses and try to translate it through that. And in some ways, that philosophy sets you up to become frustrated immediately, because your mind isn’t open to, “What can I do?” It’s, “What can’t I do?” You’ll find that some things will work better than others, but you have to accept that there are going to be bumps. After the first two weeks, John and I looked at each other and said, “It’s going too well. Something horrible is about to happen.” Because it went smoother than we thought it was going to. Michel: We’ve basically found a way to do everything that we want to do.
Blue: You’ve got JKL trimming. You can do a lot more remapping of the system: you can throw buttons up underneath the windows, and you can customize the keyboard eight ways to Sunday. John is already remapping everything to single keystrokes instead of Shift this or that. But FCP4 can’t do multi-cam, and if we were cutting a sitcom, it wouldn’t be an option. The other thing that scared me is that Avid editors often take a full sequence or part of a sequence, then cut it into another sequence with all the edits visible, and at first, I didn’t see a way to do that with FCP4. But it turns out that you can, and it’s really quick — you just Command-drag the sequence out of the Browser and drop it into the Timeline. I do still have some issues with the audio: I love to use a mixer when I make an output, because I think my brain can track what needs to go up and down better. But with our current hardware, we can’t get more than two discrete tracks of audio out, so we’re mixing in the box with Final Cut. At first, I was wearing that Avid filter, and I was disappointed. But actually, the audio in Final Cut has a few features that are really nice. You can mix it on the fly: anytime I’m in my sequence, I can hit the Play button, tell it to start recording keyframes, and then pull the on-screen fader up and down. And then if I go back a second time and grab the fader again, it’ll rewrite what it did, and when I let go, it’ll connect the last point A to the next Point B with an arc. It’s different, but I’m finding that it’s cool and convenient, because I don’t have to leave the mixing window to do any of this, as I had to in my Avid. Mixing in the box works because we’re not doing outputs to tape as much. We’re exporting our sequences as QuickTime movies and burning them to DVDs. Bill Lawrence, our executive producer, loves it. Michel: Everybody’s very thrilled with the burn process. Dailies are going to the DP on DVDs, and he can actually see what he’s shooting now, instead of looking at a poor-quality VHS tape.
Blue: And we love the idea that we can be mobile. Yesterday, John didn’t come in. He said, “I’ve got my dailies. I’m going to stay home.” We both live on the Westside, and depending on the traffic, there’s a good hour and a half invested in that trip. But if you stay home a little longer and cut two scenes there, you can wait until rush hour ends, then get here in 18 minutes instead of 45. When I get to work, I go into iChat and bring the two computers up — the laptop and this one — and drag the project over. Since it’s a little file, it comes over right away. And because I’ve renamed my portable hard drive the same as the one on my desktop machine, I don’t even have to relink the media. Katrib: It sounds like we’re cheering them on: “Go home and edit!” It’s not like that — it started happening naturally. We’re just as stunned as anybody else. Blue: Someone told me, “So you’re working more than before, because you’re going home and working — are you sure this is what you want?” But really, you can balance where you are, and you can split your day up a little. I think it makes you feel more human than being locked in a dark room. And we manage our hours. Michel: We’re putting
in our normal day there,
instead of being
here.
Blue: Most editors are curious. The reaction I usually get is, “Oh, cool.” And then the next question is, “Can you cut on a laptop?” Some people say, “Final Cut? Good luck.” But most people have genuine questions: “How’s it work? Can you beat it up? Can you trim?” The upside is if it does take hold, you’ve got your foot in another technology. It doesn’t mean that I’d never cut on an Avid again. But right now, it’s looking good. We’re moving quickly — John got his cut done faster than we thought. Michel: We’re finding that some things happen more quickly on this system, as far as throwing things into the timeline, marking and deleting a section and closing it up. The only thing that really held me back was re-digitizing all the audio and sound effects we’d captured into the Media Composer, because Final Cut Pro can’t use those files. Blue: Avid’s a great interface. They’ve had a good amount of time to perfect it. So it would be naïve to think that this $1,000 off-the-shelf software is just going to match every feature of it. But I can’t help but pinch myself occasionally and say, “This is a $1,000 off-the-shelf piece of software!” Avid is starting to offer solutions that are cheaper, too, but I own an Avid and stopped upgrading mine because it got very expensive. I couldn’t compete with the high-volume rental companies. Since I do documentaries as well, I’m looking into buying my own Final Cut Pro system. I could start shooting a documentary and not have to wait for a grant to get the post money. Katrib: We don’t try to convince people that one is better than the other. Editors will make up their own minds. We just had a very high-profile client who cut on Final Cut for over two months, then quit. He was really affected by how different it was from Avid. Blue: On this show, I think we’ve all suffered from phantom hand syndrome, where your hand goes up to the Avid keys. But it’s fun to be versatile, see how much space there is in your brain. And I hope that we can inspire Apple to open an ear to what editors are looking at, and try to accommodate what is going to work best. Engineering claims they want our feedback and they’re going to possibly make revisions based on how this is working. We’re keeping very careful logs. And we’ll see. But we’re doing serious work on it, and we’re on schedule with our first two shows. I can’t comment on how well Final Cut Pro 4 works in 24 fps or on features, but I know the workflow we have is working really well. Episodic is a really good test. It’s not one set of dailies — it’s a wave that comes in, every week. We’ve been working for two years on Scrubs and we had the total backing of the producers, so it was a very good environment to try this out. The best news was when John was on the first episode, he looked at me and said, “I think we can do this.” And he smiled and said, “It’s kind of fun, in the third season, to have a new challenge.” It reenergizes everything. I knew as soon as John was feeling that level of comfort, we had a good shot at making it work.
According to Mitchell Gettleman, supervising sound editor and sound designer for Scrubs at Todd-AO Radford, the picture department’s shift to Final Cut Pro 4 has had some beneficial effects on the audio workflow for the show. The production audio, recorded on a Deva, is synched with picture in telecine and recorded onto DVCAM tape, which is then digitized into Final Cut Pro. Once the picture editors have finished a cut, they export it as a low-resolution (320x240) QuickTime movie with Photo-JPEG compression, then copy that to a CD or DVD-R disk and deliver it to sound. “It’s easy to take those QuickTime movies into Pro Tools,” said Gettleman. “Instead of having to take a 3/4-inch tape and make copies, I drag and drop the QuickTime video files onto our server, so that there’s a copy all of my editors and foley folks can access.” In addition to the QuickTime movie, the picture editing department gives Gettleman an EDL and an OMF sequence. But while the OMF contains the production audio used in the cut, Gettleman prefers to have those tracks reassembled using the EDL. “I don’t typically like to use OMF from picture-outs, because I don’t have any quality control at the point of telecine,” said Gettleman. “In addition, we’re not necessarily getting all the audio that’s been recorded on set: when they’re making the transfers from the Deva to DVCAM at telecine, they’re only using the first two of the Deva’s four available channels.” It is still early in the season, though, and he acknowledged that he might reconsider the workflow. “It still might be worthwhile to use the two tracks on the DVCAM, then just go to the other Deva tracks if a specific audio issue comes up.” However, Gettleman is able to use the sound effects portion of the OMF. At the beginning of the season, he provides the picture editors with a library of sound effects to use in their cuts. These are loaded into Final Cut Pro digitally, so that there is no generation loss. The editors’ OMF contains those effects, cut into the show, and Gettleman finds that he can generally keep them through the mix. “While I usually cut in additional elements to sweeten these effects, this saves me a step of having to rebuild something that they’ve already cut,” he explained. One key element of the series is the voiceover narration by the lead character, Dr. John “J.D.” Dorian, played by Zach Braff. This is recorded to picture in the hospital where the series is shot, using an ADR stage that was originally an X-Ray room. The ADR mixer records the voiceover directly into Pro Tools as Broadcast Wave Format (BWF) files, which are then uploaded to the Todd-AO server. Because these tracks are essential to the story, they are cut in by the picture editors. Last season, Gettleman wanted the picture editors to import the digital files directly into their Avids, but this created some unforeseen problems. “They could get the voiceover in, but it wouldn’t carry any timecode information,” Gettleman explained. “I want an EDL that goes back to the original source timecodes, and they were having to digitize BetaSP backup copies so that I could have that EDL information.” This season, however, the editors have been able to use the timecode stamp in the BWF files by converting them into QuickTimes using the freeware Sebsky Tools. (Sebsky Tools consists of five utilities that help move projects back and forth between Avid Media Composer and Final Cut Pro —www.dharmafilm.com/sebskytools.) Gettleman has his own copy of Final Cut Pro on his home computer, and he is hoping that he can take home the picture department’s QuickTime video and prep cue sheets for loop group and principal ADR there. “That would be a really nice feature for me as a supervisor,” he said. “It would also open up my editing room for other editors and save me a commute one day a week, which would be delightful. If I had a laptop, I could do it anywhere.” |
