Compatibility in Digital Turnover
From Picture to Sound
OMF Eliminates Many Turnover Headaches
by Frank Smathers
Once upon a time there was an editor in Hollywood who edited his film and his track on a clattery green machine called a Moviola. When he was finished, dupes of his picture and track were made and turned over to the sound department. The dupes could be played back on a Steenbeck in England, a Kem in Tibet or any Moviola in the world. The editor's assistant would turn over handwritten change notes that were concise, accurate and easy to use.
Today, this sounds like a fairytale and
yet there was a time when the turnover of picture and sound
information was completely interchangeable, and universally
compatible! The advent of digital editing systems changed
everything and now we find that "turnover" has been morphed
into a fire-breathing digital dragon. At the recent Editor's
Guild caucus on the problems of turnover from picture to
sound, there was a very spirited and sometimes
confrontational debate on the process of transferring
digital information from the picture editor's system into
the sound editor's system. Turnover problems seem to arise
primarily from the fact that there are many different
systems and they are almost all information incompatible.
Digital picture cannot be transferred to the sound system so
we end up making tapes with three or four different formats
for all the different systems working on the same show.
Digital sound information, which has already been loaded and
synced for the picture system, must be re-loaded and
resynced for the sound systems. And change notes, due to the
complexities of computer data management, are at best a
crude approximation of the hand-written change notes we made
in the fairytale days of film editing. And to top it all
off, we are being forced to deal with these
incompatibilities on schedules that seem to compress us
until we feel like Luke Skywalker trapped in a garbage
compactor deep in the innards of the Death Star.
This incompatibility is doubly irritating when we realize that every digital machine, regardless of manufacture, stores picture, sound, and edit information as zeros and ones. With this basic fact in mind, every sound editor in the Editor's Guild should now pick up the phone, call their system manufacturer and say (or demand!) "Why can't my system read the zeros and ones from the picture editor's system? If I were able to do that, the transfer of information from picture to sound would once again be transparent and most of the turnover problems I'm dealing with now would simply vanish!"
Of course, there is no fairy godmother who will wave her magic software and make all editing machines instantly compatible. Such software can be written, but many manufacturers are reluctant to spend the bucks necessary to make it so. Others cling to the myopic notion that their box will one day be the dominant system in Hollywood so there is no need for them to develop compatibility software. However, if Microsoft and Intel cannot dominate the computer industry, it is unlikely that any manufacturer will be able to monopolize the film industry in the way Moviola once did. We have to prepare for a future in which digital systems of different manufacture talk to each other.
Although there is no fairy godmother, there is a software "toolkit" called OMFI (Open Media Framework Interchange). The key word here is INTERCHANGE! This software toolkit was created by Avid Technology and is available to any manufacturer who wants to create software that will make data interchange possible between his system and any other editing system or digital dubber that has similar OMF software. Avid itself has used OMF to make data interchange possible between Media Composer, Film Composer, Audiovision and Pro Tools.
Data interchange is the solution to our current turnover problems and it is not a fairy tale. It is here now. We have used OMF on three pictures, 'Virtuosity', 'Dusk Till Dawn', and 'Alaska' and are preparing to use it on 'Spawn'. Yes, there are special guidelines to follow when using OMF but when these are followed correctly, OMF works flawlessly and eliminates many turnover headaches. For instance, one of the biggest problems in turnover is the picture editor's cut worktracks. In most cases, these worktracks are transferred to DATs or DA88's from the picture system and then re-transferred into the dialogue editor's system. When the tracks are brought up on the screen they appear as ten minute long sound regions with no identifying markings other than the label created when they were loaded, something like "R5 WK TRK 2." The sound editor has no clue as to what takes are used in the track. He or she cannot identify the cut points or the dialogue takes used. And if dialogue has been intercut with temp music, temp sound effects, and temp ADR, the task becomes even more formidable.
When OMF is used, all the sound files from the picture system hard drives are duplicated onto the sound editor's hard drives in the same way that any computer file is duplicated - drag and drop. The only other thing necessary is to export (using OMF) a file containing the picture editor's edit information. This takes about three minutes. When this file is opened on the sound editor's system (which takes another 3 minutes) all the picture editor's tracks appear on the screen. But instead of having an unidentified 10 minute blob of sound, we have tracks with all the picture editors cuts and fades, all the identification tags, and even the volume adjustments the picture editor made. And all tracks are in sync to the sample! There is no need for "auto-assembly" or "phasing." The editor is immediately ready to start splitting tracks, extending handles, and searching for alternates. As of this writing, it is still necessary to transfer the picture to the sound system by videotape but soon it will be possible to transfer the picture digitally from Avid picture systems to Avid sound systems, thereby eliminating another turnover headache.
One thing everyone agreed on at the Editor's Guild caucus is that the picture and sound departments need to communicate effectively. This is important but it is just as important for our computer editing systems to communicate effectively. If your system does not have OMF capability, call up your manufacturer and bang on his cage! If you work at a studio, hammer on the engineers and the head of post-production! Tell them that you want your system to talk to other systems. Suggest that they only purchase systems with interchange capability. The manufacturers will jump all over each other trying to climb on the OMF bandwagon as soon as they realize that they are going to lose sales if they don't. All the systems that are currently available are good editing systems but that is no longer enough. Any system that wants to continue to be a part of the film post-production chain will be required to share data with systems from other manufacturers. The sooner it happens, the sooner we will be rid of our current turnover nightmares.
Avid's OMF HOTLINE: 1-800-949-OMFI
Avid's OMF WEBSITE (from which you can peruse and download mass quantities of OMF info):
http://www.avid.com/omf/
Frank Smathers is currently cutting temp effects on the feature 'Titanic'.
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter
Vol. 18, No. 1 - Jan/Feb 1997