A Second Wind

I must say that it's good to be back to work on our film. The past several months have had me waiting with bated breath, wondering if we were ever going to get there. Coming to set yesterday and seeing all the familiar faces from last fall was truly a joy, and I felt really good to know that the team had enjoyed working with the three of us well enough to make a comeback. Christine kept asking me why this time around seemed less stressful, and I think it's because we all had done a majority of the leg work the first time. To those of you wondering, yes, it really gets easier each time, not harder. Because you get better, aka, more experienced, with each production!

As far as "Love 10 to 1"'s uncharted territory of post: Christine and I are meeting quite a few obstacles in post production, namely our difficulty in finding an editor, 1. who is willing to work for next to nothing since we blew all of our money in production, and 2. an editor who is experienced with the P2 card output. It's amazing how few highly skilled, professional editors know about this new way of capturing footage. My friend Eric has been editing for over ten years on Avid, and when he did my last film (which was shot on the panasonic hvx 200 as well), he had a lot of new ground to cover. I think the entire staff at his post house got in on learning this new format, even going as far as buying books on the subject and studying up. So editing the stuff is not as easy as shooting it.

We did find two editors who were willing to take on the challenge.

But once we found them, there was the absolutely depressing discovery that half of our footage was shot in the wrong format. Not a little bit of the footage. HALF. OF. OUR. FOOTAGE. One of our camera operators neglected to double check their settings on the camera, and now we are stuck with part 23 and part 59. What does that mean? Basically it means that when you try and play the 59 footage, it moves in slow motion. Now before you go banging your head against the wall, or slapping your hand to your forehead or even tearing your hair out, let me just let you know that although yes, this is tragic, it is not a life threatening or fatal issue. We can fix it "in post".

I've noticed a lot of people in indie film production throw around the phrase, "We'll fix it in post." Let me tell you, filmmakers, if anyone tells you that when it comes to YOUR film, DO NOT giggle and make that the running joke on the set like I see so many directors who are shelling out their own money for their life dreams do. Make that person take the extra time to fix it right there on set if they can. Because it'll be a lot less expensive buying a grumpy crew a second meal than it is to pay a post house to convert half of your footage into the right format or to color something that was shot in the wrong color tone, or do adr. All these new cameras and do-hickeys are really nifty and are being marketed as "time savers" and "money savers" but a lot of people are still learning to use them, including your crew. Nobody is coughing up the money to fix it in post except you - and if you're a true indie filmmaker, you've just about coughed up all your money getting the damn thing on film, or on a P2 card, in this case. By the time you get to post, all those people who told you to fix it in post, will be on to some other shoot. And you'll be hanging around some colorist who is shrugging his shoulders saying, "that'll be $500 an HOUR." Post houses are not indie friendly, unless you're sleeping with someone who works at one.

But what do you do when you don't know about these potential problems?

Here was my biggest mistake. Not looking at the footage every single god damed day of the shoot. I put my trust in my
co-workers and that was to my detriment. They are good people, and I adore them. But I should have looked at the footage every single day and I should have had a professional editor looking at it too. I would have caught the problem early on and avoided this mishap. Next time around, I will make sure to have the ability to do that.

So basically I have been sitting on half of my footage which needs to be converted from 59 to 23. Ok, you think, no biggie. Convert it. The problem with that is that it is going to take many, many hours to do so. I think Christine and I figured out that it will take about 16 hours to convert about 2 hours of footage. I have no idea how much I've got to convert because my editor hasn't been able to make the time to convert it, because he's been so busy with his real editing job that it's hard to make time for mine. And who wants to make the time to convert all that? Well, it's come down to me, since I now work as an assistant editor I'm going to step up and do it myself. There's so many steps to this than just pressing a button, forgive me if I get the exact steps wrong in this description. Each clip has to be put into the editing system, then decompressed, and turned into a Quicktime file, that is HUGE. Like a couple of gigs for a five second clip. FIVE SECONDS. Can you imagine? I purposely shot long takes because I wanted it to have this specific flow to the scene. So my takes are like, five minutes or more each. Paul, the editor, demonstrated the way to do it using a five second clip of the media. It took about five minutes to turn a five second clip into a Quicktime file. So let's do the math.

One minute is comprised of 60 seconds. There are 12 five second segments in a minute. That means 12 segments of a minute times 5 minutes per five seconds to quicktime, (Following me?) is...

one hour to convert one minute of footage.

now, because I don't want the big files, I'll down convert it to a lower resolution in Quicktime, just for the cut. That'll be much less gig space, but will take double the time to convert for some bizarre reason. Then when we're ready to "print" - which in HD is transferring to I believe a D-5 tape, I'll bring in the bigger files that have already been specifically selected for the cut.

Needless to say, these major fuckups have gotten me real passionate about a career post production. Lotsa money.

Up next...Justin got a modeling job and had to cut his hair off just in time for Lucy's shoot. Hmmm.

Now how are we going to fix that one in post?