The Kanashimi post-production workflow is very much based on the traditional pre-digital film-centric way of doing things. For example, we shot with a separate digital sound recorder and used an old-fashioned slate and clapper board to sync the sound later. It was not even a digital slate with time code that goes "beep". It was just a regular old dry-erase slate with the black-and-white hinged sticks at the top. Stone-age!
But I like that. Simple == reliable. A non-digital slate does not need batteries or cables. It won't crash because of a bug in the firmware. Lining up the sticks and the "snap" in Adobe Premiere works exactly the same way it did on a Steenbeck or a Moviola (conceptually, at least). Also, it feels more like I'm making a film.
Other aspects of the work flow are film-like, too. For example, we've transcoded the good takes to Apple ProRes proxy, a full-resolution, low bit-rate format that is very resource friendly for a smoother, faster cutting experience. This is the equivalent of printing the takes you like with standard printing lights in a more-or-less disposable form for cutting, taping, ripping apart, marking up with grease pencils, and so on. For the grading and effects, the plan is to transcode just those parts we need to the ProRes 4444 format (which is much more disk-hungry, but is nearly lossless in quality). This is something like making fine-grained dupe negatives or interpositives for detailed opticals and color work. For heavy-duty stuff (and there will be some), we'll go for lossless PNG image sequences, which hold up through an indefinite number of generations. This is sort of like blowing up the negative to 70mm low-contrast fine-grain stock so the multipass optical effects don't degrade the quality as quickly.
In the olden days, the goal of all this film manipulation was to preserve the negative so that the highest-quality prints could be struck from it for distribution to theaters. In the digital age, we could theoretically work from a perfect copy of the "negative" throughout the whole process. Some do. But we just don't have the money for huge disk arrays and extremely beefy video cards. So we're borrowing the techniques of filmmakers past and using digital equivalents to keep our resources manageable for more modest equipment.
I suspect many readers of this blog who are also independent or hobbyist filmmakers will find themselves in the same boat, trying to decide whether the limited budget they have is better spent on food, locations, actors, and logistics, or on renting or purchasing a more robust editing system that allows them to work faster with fewer resource constraints. We've tried to find the "sweet spot", but - frankly - these are untested waters for us, er - me. As you can probably tell, despite my working in computer technology, my filmmaking chops (such as they are) were cut on more, shall we say, analog technology. More often video than film, too, for economic reasons. In fact, there are analog video equivalents for this workflow schema, too - the use of small-format dubs with the time code "burned in" for offline editing, for example, followed by the output of an EDL (Edit Decision List) for final assembly on a more expensive online system with the precious master tapes at stake (instead of the camera negative).
So I'm taking the somewhat unusual step of actually "finishing" the first four minutes of the film before moving on to the rest. Soup to nuts - fine cutting, effects, grading, and sound. Even the score if I can get David to start working on it. Why? So I can shake out the process and make improvements to streamline it before going all-in. It might even make a good promo piece for YouTube.
I'll let you know how it goes - what problems crop up, and whatever solutions we find. If you have suggestions or comments please leave them. I look forward to reading what you have to say.
Stay tuned!
No comments:
Post a Comment