Using E-mail in the Cutting Room By Asim Matin It seems as though almost every assistant editor requests a modem line when they are setting up their cutting rooms. But I am surprised how few actually put e-mail to use as part of the workflow. I have found it an invaluable tool when working on a digital show. My first experience using e-mail in my day-to-day activities was when I was working on the TV movie "Life of the Party". The schedule was short, there was one Avid, and I was assisting an editor who had the quickest hands in the west. He was always up to camera. A consequence of his speed was that he was itching to get to work on new dailies the moment they came through the door. It would take me a few minutes to prepare the tape for digitizing and print the editor's dailies logs for notes. We would then watch dailies while batch-digitizing to save time. Next, I would take a few minutes on the Avid to prepare the bins for cutting. But every moment I was on the Avid was time the editor wasn't cutting. He would just be sitting behind me with his leg jumping. There had to be a better way. I realized there are two parts to my dailies. First there is the videotape, which creates the media. Second there is the flex file and paperwork, which is used to create the clips and bins. As the Avid assistant, it's my job to manage this information, called metadata. All the work for preparing dailies revolved around this data; I only needed the tape for digitizing. I called the telecine house and requested that they e-mail the flex file to me when they finished the transfer. I asked the production office to fax the script supervisor's notes and paperwork before the hard copies arrived with the tape. In the absence of my own Avid, I was going to turn my laptop into as much of an assistant's station as possible. And the best way to approach that was to copy Avid Log Exchange (ALE) and MediaLog onto my hard drive. Now, every morning I could download the flex file, convert it into an .ALE file and import it into MediaLog, which would create the tape bin. Then I would type the descriptions from the script supervisor's notes into a custom field in the bin and verify that we received all the circled takes. Next, I would check for split tracks in the sound reports and use the Modify command in MediaLog to assign audio channels accordingly. When this task was completed, I exported the bin as a tab-delimited text file, later importing it into my FileMaker Pro database, from which I would print editor's dailies notes. Finally, I would divide the tape bin into scene bins, which I would copy onto a Zip disk for transfer into the Avid. All of this work was done on my laptop before the dailies arrived, and while the editor was cutting on the Avid. When the tape arrived, I would pop it in the deck, hand the sheets to the editor and click Batch Digitize. After watching dailies, the only work I had to do on the Avid was assign key frames and group-clip multiple camera setups (MediaLog doesn't support these two commands). Now, in reality, this work only freed up the Avid for about half an hour, but when you've got an editor itching to cut, every little bit helps. The truly beautiful thing was that all my work involving dailies was done by the time the tapes arrived. That allowed me to quickly spot errors or tell the editor, "We're missing a take from this setup" or "We're going to see dailies for Scene 32, but they haven't finished shooting it," etc. The immediacy of e-mail was helpful on the other end of the production as well. When the editor finished his cut, I was able to e-mail the EDL to our post house on the other side of town. This allowed the online editor to start the auto-assembly while I was outputting the tapes and printing the lists, which were messengered a few hours later. The methods I used on that show are appropriate when your dailies are being sunk in telecine and there are no film elements. I used our modem line differently when I was the Avid assistant on the feature Any Given Sunday. We were on location in Miami and our telecine was being done at Magno Sound and Video in New York. After the film assistant, Yvonne Valdez, logged the film into FileMaker Pro with all the pertinent info (dailies roll, camera roll, date shot, etc.), we exported this data as a tab-delimited text file and e-mailed it to the telecine operator, Martin Zeichner, at Magno. He was able to import the file directly into his Media Station telecine to create the ALE file. Because Martin didn't have to retype anything, there were several benefits: 1) Time was saved in telecine; 2) The possibility for errors was reduced, since the information was typed only once; 3) We in the cutting room maintained control over the information that went into the Avid. The beauty of e-mail is that it is instant. We all know that digital editing is slashing post schedules, which gives producers an excuse to slash the budget as well. And while the toll of this trend is mainly on the editor, we, as assistants, have a responsibility to help our editors get as much editing done as possible. We also have an obligation to the post supervisor to keep the costs within the budget. The speed of e-mail is an asset I have found that helps me accomplish both goals.   Asim Matin is an assistant editor who longs to splice film again.   Reprinted from The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter Vol. 20, No. 6 - Sep/Oct 1999   Guild Home | Newsletter Home | Top of Page   Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved by The Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 700