NEWS
Cut and Drawn An Animated Evening of Editors
by Michael Kunkes
 Virtual Katy screen shot showing a change plan created by comparing two EDLs. |
John McKay, the New Zealand-based sound editor who conceived of and introduced the Virtual Katy (VK) workflow solution to the marketplace, presented a seminar in June at the Guild’s Hollywood headquarters, titled “The Avid/Pro Tools Interface––A Users’ Perspective.”
The evening focused on the difficulties sound editors face today amid the forest of formats and what McKay calls the “endless circle of changes” and multiple versions associated with big studio productions. He described the events and the thinking that led to the creation of Virtual Katy. This was followed by a brief demo of the program’s new VK2 version and a Q&A session for the 20+ attendees.
Several philosophical and practical workflow issues led to the creation of VK, which was born out of the chaos of the post sound process on Fellowship of the Rings and The Two Towers, the first two films from The Lord of the Rings saga. One of those issues was reconciling the project-based nature of the Avid with the session-only interface of ProTools, which is essentially a collection of sessions with no unifying platform.
“You open an Avid project, and you see bins, projects and sequences, but ProTools clearly shows its music background,” McKay explains. “The two don’t really bear a lot of relationship to each other.” Secondly, he related, a good 50 percent of sound editors are not technicians. “Yes, there are a lot of sound editors with a high level of technical skill, but for those of us who are simply using the computer to further what we are trying to achieve, it can be frustrating because we are trying to create a soundtrack, not run computers,” he adds.
 Slide from Virtual Katyâ??s roadshow PowerPoint presentation explaining old and new production workflows. |
Finally, the proliferation of formats and choices had led to a maze of bewilderment. “One of the problems we are always seeing in this interface between Avid and ProTools is figuring out exactly what to ask for and how you can get what you want,” McKay continues. “After several goes at it, you might actually get it right with a format that works––but there always seems to be a problem, and you have to work through a whole queue of output requirements before a project is shipped out.”
However, the central issue for McKay is productivity. “The beautiful thing about the good old days of film was that at a certain point, you knew that the job was finished and producers couldn’t go back and change their minds. Now, of course, that’s all changed,” he says. McKay used the example of a horse chase sequence he cut in Fellowship. “We spent a month working on that sequence, and it was a beautiful, two-and-a-half minute sequence with all these tracks everywhere, and it ended up cut down to 35 seconds,” he relates. “It just shocked everyone; it was shredded to pieces and we couldn’t follow what had been done––and there was no choice except to go and start it all over again.”
McKay’s issues were complicated by use of change notes provided to the sound editors to delineate the changes between versions. “It’s the staple of how people in the States work with sound, but the rest of the world seems baffled by it,” he admits. “Also, a change note only solves part of the problem because it deals mainly with film key code or ink numbers, and that leaves 90 percent of the people to their own devices. And if you look at the concept behind the change note, it’s really just for picture conforming purposes.”
McKay decided to turn all these negatives into a positive and create a situation where the sound people could actually work with the picture people, using a common format. He realized that what was needed was a simple way to compare two versions of a show, update the changes and create a new version, quickly and simply. Rather than use change notes, McKay chose to go back to the days of simple online editing and use old-style picture edit EDLs as the program’s preferred format, which were easy to use.
 John McKay, founder and CEO, Virtual Katy Ltd. |
“That was the beginning of Virtual Katy,” he says. “Change notes are really just band-aids that don’t give you the information you need to trace what’s really going on in a soundtrack. EDLs have been around since the 1970s. They are simple, standardized, and you know they are going to work, which is really important with all these bits of information being passed backwards and forwards.”
McKay found that “by using EDLs to create our change list, we could go from any version to any version at any time, and not lose any of our information. EDL lists take a lot of pressure off picture editors, and anything that can do that is very preferable.” That said, VK can manage a range of formats including EDLs, Avid cut lists and change notes, as well as OMF and AAF files.
“OMF as a form of file interchange has failed spectacularly and is being phased out, simply because it was considered a proprietary system of Avid’s and most manufacturers didn’t want to buy into it,” McKay says. “AAF [which Avid created to supplant OMF] has been around for a while, and we’re finally starting to see it moving more between Avid and ProTools. That’s good to see, because both AAF and MXF [metadata exchange format] offer the prospect of superior data interchange.
“AAF can gather a lot more information and, as a company dealing with change management, we see it as a way to accurately analyze between versions and provide far greater levels of information than we can currently reflect,” he continues. “So there is a future. I just don’t know when it will actually hit, but it’s up to the manufacturers to make systems that enhance rather than complicate the creative process.”
VK’s first practical use was on The Lord of the Rings, and it paid immediate dividends in workflow improvement. “As soon as a cut was done, the picture department would e-mail me the EDL, and we could generate change lists and update the material before the digitized picture actually arrived,” McKay recalls. “So, instead of waiting for the picture to update everything, we were using what was previously dead time to get ourselves back in sync. What we were really doing was creating productivity.”
One of the other interesting ways to utilize VK, according to McKay, is in the creation of DVD extended cuts. “On the first Rings movies, we recorded all the Foley very early in production and there was about an hour of extra Foley dropped from the movie that came back later in various forms,” he says. “My sound supervisor told me it would be too hard to find the material and utilize it, but by tracing versions 11 through 43, we were able to get all the material back very quickly. And that goes to the core concept of VK, which is that it’s a crime to carry on doing stuff over and over again if you’ve already done it.
“The thing about doing manual conforming is that once you’ve done 20 or 30 of these changes, you’re ready for retirement,” McKay continues with a joke. “Doing these changes manually is a totally different act than what we should be doing, which is creating sound effects and dialogue tracks. That ability to trace material that was dropped but subsequently returned to the cut is one of the program’s key features.”
VK also has especially high potential for television production, which has fewer changes but also radically shorter deadlines. “Producers want a feature-like soundtrack created sometimes in just a few days,” McKay says. “Frankly, I think that’s impossible, but using this type of technology, you can actually start with previous cuts and develop a mix in quite an extended form.”
He recalled an example from a recent TV documentary: “We had only a two-day turnaround time from final lock-off to lay-back. We decided to go four versions back and put in the narration, and by the time we came to those two days we had only about 100 edits to deal with and a full mix that was already established. It took us only one day to complete. And we actually had the luxury of listening to the mix––a novel experience––instead of scrambling to get everything in at the end. A lot less stress, and a lot more productivity.”
McKay spent some time demonstrating and talking about the features of the program’s new release, VK2, which began shipping in April of this year. The major improvement is an exponential increase in the program’s speed, to where it now takes just one second to process over 2,500 edits. In addition, users can simply drag-and-drop groups of lists, which VK will then automatically import. There’s also a version history feature geared for ProTools users and a preview mode which provides users with a visual overview of picture edit changes without neccessitating commitment to the changes. Says McKay, “This allows the sound editor to see what is going to change and provides him the ability to modify the change and get greater control over the conform.”
One of the key concepts of VK is its strength as a recompiler. It will rebuild on a new timeline any information that can be part of a copy-and-paste function, including plug-in information, background tracks and even fades––which can’t be directly copied in ProTools. “Because VK is a recompiler, all of your original session is still intact, so you can refer back and actually use material that was previously dropped and pull it into a newly made-up session,” explains McKay.
In the end, he came back to the basic reason for VK’s creation: “All the engineering and philosophy that has gone into it has been for one purpose—so that sound editors can do their jobs and not spend their time chasing material. The idea was to make the interface as simple and straightforward as possible. It is designed to take two lists and compare them to make a new list. There’s really not that much more to it.”
McKay had strong praise for the upcoming release of ProTools 7.2, which he recently previewed. “The brilliant thing about it is that picture cutting on the ProTools timeline will actually be available for the first time,” he reveals, which indicates a substantial re-working of the video side of ProTools. With VK Conformer, Virtual Katy’s ProTools session conform-only software (now included in with ProTools HD and DV Toolkit purchases), it’s no wonder McKay muses that he is “looking forward to the day when sound can actually influence the cut rather than simply reinforcing it.” And that’s something a lot of other sound editors might be looking forward to as well.
At the end of July, VK announced the release of version 2.1, offering deeper control over the change management process. New features include selective event management, the ability to filter events by source or destination time, event alerts, more precise triggering controls, expanded format support, intuitive EDL management and import support. VK 2.1 carries a suggested retail price of $995.
“The Avid/Pro Tools Interface––A Users Perspective” seminar was videotaped and is available for viewing. Contact training@editorsguild.com for more information.
Michael Kunkes is a freelance editor and writer specializing in animation, production and post-production. He can be reached at writermk@sbcglobal.net.
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