CUT PRINT
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Scaling 'Cold Mountain'
review by Ray Zone
How Walter Murch Edited Cold Mountain Using Apple’s Final Cut Pro and What This Means for Cinema
By Charles Koppelman
New Riders
348 pages, paperbound, $39.99
ISBN 0-7357-1426-6
Charles Koppelman has written a highly absorbing book about the editing and sound mixing of Cold Mountain by Academy Award-winning film and sound editor Walter Murch. “Frequently, Koppelman’s account reads like a thriller as he foregrounds the massive experiment that was going on just inside my peripheral vision,” observes Anthony Minghella, director of the film, in a foreword to the book. “Almost unremarked, there has been an astonishing revolution in cinema and Behind the Seen invites us to pay attention to it.”
It’s a tremendous help that Murch contributed over 2,100 pages of e-mail and his personal journal kept over a period of 18 months to Koppleman. These contributions, interspersed throughout the narrative, lend a documentary feel and compelling immediacy to the events as they unfold. The reader feels as if present on the scene and the picture of filmmaking and post-production that emerges is as highly detailed as we are ever likely to see in print.
Murch is one of the few people in the world who handles both the editing and sound mixing of feature films. The author recounts Murch’s process of discovery during post-production on The Conversation in 1974, the first film that he edited. Koppleman characterizes Murch as “a co-pilot capable of flying the plane when the director needs to focus attention elsewhere…a navigator finding added meaning and poetry that were never fully spelled out in the flight plan.”
For 20 years after making The Conversation, Murch would switch back and forth for editing between the KEM system and the Moviola. By 1994 he was editing with the Avid system but was keeping his eye on developments in the digital editing world. Always a fan of the Apple computer, Murch in 2002 had his assistant editor Sean Cullen find out more about using Final Cut Pro (FCP) to edit the $80 million dollar Miramax production of Cold Mountain.
The first issue to be addressed was reverse telecine. “Walter needed to be able to have the record monitor and the TV both play back in real time, simultaneously,” observes Cullen. In addition, the computer image was found to be compromised and contained artifacts due to the low data rate by which media was sent over. The data rate was eventually customized to alleviate this problem. An even bigger problem was the fact that FCP 3 could not track subsequent changes to the initial Edit Decision List (EDL). This function for FCP 4 was in the works at Apple, however; but Apple refused to be involved in supporting the endeavor to edit Cold Mountain using FCP.
That didn’t stop Murch, who subsequently e-mailed Apple CEO Steve Jobs directly, and set up a meeting. By this time Murch had already decided to move forward with editing Cold Mountain on FCP, sure that his team could make it work. They would move forward with editing using Apple’s OS 9 despite the fact that the company refused to support the older operating system and was throwing all their promotional efforts behind OS X. OS X, however, would not work with a shared area network (SAN) and it was Murch’s intention to work with four computer stations sharing audio and video from one central storage bank via a fiber channel. Third-party solutions to this problem with OS X were shortly to become available.
Four FCP editorial stations, along with 1.2 terabytes of storage, a Rorke Data SAN, hard drives and accessories were shipped off to Romania, where filming of Cold Mountain was to start in July 2002. At the Kodak Cinelabs in Bucharest, Murch set up his editing rooms on the second floor of the facility with timely access to telecine transfers and film dailies. He set up color-coded scene cards and this time, ironically, he made them by hand instead of using Filemaker Pro on his laptop computer. As film dailies became available, Murch assembled picture boards with “postcards” from the film as another tool to see the movie.
To get film clips into FCP, the team found they had to work from “bite-sized” clips of shots to speed up the process, otherwise FCP could not digest the large file. By the time photography was complete after 113 shooting days, there were 597,000 feet of dailies.
The editing team moved in December 2002 to the Old Chapel Studio in London to begin the final phase of work and on February 18, 2003 Murch screened the first assembly, running slightly longer than four hours, from an FCP output. No technical glitches had taken place other than the fact that the assembly had to be screened in two 2-1/2 hour parts since FCP could not playback anything longer than four hours. By this time as well, the team was running on OS X. Murch informed Apple via e-mail of the successful first assembly and was promised a beta copy of Cinema Tools software, which included preliminary change list support.
By October 2003 Cold Mountain was “locked” at 2:29. The film had been screened repeatedly with digital projection from FCP. “Harvey [Weinstein] signed off on the film looking at it on Final Cut Pro,” wrote Murch in his journal. “One of those milestones that will go unremarked but is actually a tremendous achievement. That the image and sound presentation was more than adequate for the head of a studio to make such a fateful decision on such an expensive film.”
Ray Zone can be contacted at r3dzone@earthlink.net.