CHAPTER 6

A Quick Look at Picture Editing

 

When editing the dialogue you learn a lot about actors' voices, acoustics, feelings. You can go and search the dailies, looking for noises or backgrounds that may be very useful in the build of the narrative sound track. This bird sang, this dog barked far away, this motorbike passed by, and it was during the shooting. It happened only once. It can be troubling and useless, but it can also be magic and poetical.

Cécile Chagnaud, film editor/sound editor/sound designer
Un coupable ideal; Boxes

More than any other sound editor, the dialogue editor needs to know what happens in the picture department. When we remain ignorant of “that picture stuff,” things go wrong and we don't know why. If we don't understand the way picture editors think, we can't understand the tracks they give us. And without a decent grasp of the picture cutting process and the issues facing picture editors, we don't know if we're being snowed or if it really is impossible to give us what we need.

The film editor and the picture department assistants have huge responsibilities. At one level they must organize, absorb, and edit the vast collection of shots from the filming in order tell a story, develop characters, and create sequences that are more than the sum of their parts. At the same time, they must wrangle a huge database of picture and audio information so that their storytelling dreams can come to life. Keep in mind this unlikely balance between wizard/artist and bean counter/IT administrator when you're having a tough time relating to your picture editor.

A Picture Editing Primer (Digital Cinema Version)

This is an example of a modern picture editing workflow.1 As in Chapter 3, here we're using an Avid Symphony to edit a film shot with a RED ONE camera, but the process is very similar when editing on FCP or Adobe Premiere Pro. Same goes for cameras; even though the workflows of Arri and Sony camera projects differ slightly, these differences are uninteresting to us, the dialogue folks. Our broad-brush example is about process, not detail. Refer to Chapter 3 for the technical details of the DP workflow. Studying this model won't make a film editor out of you, but it should give you an idea of what happens in a modern picture editing room. Pay attention to the organization, methodology, procedures, and issues involved, and you'll be better equipped to communicate with picture editors and more likely to get what you need from them.

Ingest

Since this movie involves no film, we save the headache of a telecine transfer from film negative to video. Instead, the assistant film editor copies the picture files for editing in the Avid.2 Since the original RED R3D files are astonishingly big, it's necessary to create smaller editing files in order to have a manageable amount of data from which to edit. Every NLE has its own way of doing this, and its own pet codec. No point getting into the details. If you ever find yourself needing to do this, there will be a way to learn it.

With the picture files come considerable metadata—far more than on hybrid projects. This requires a standardized naming convention that provides information useful to picture and editing departments alike. Here's a typical Digital Cinema camera filename:

A001_C001_122804_ABCDEF

Here's what it means:

    A Unit (camera) number in multi-camera shoots.
    001 Magazine or memory card number.
    C001 File or clip number within the magazine.
    122804 Date.
    ABCDEF Random code assigned to the specific camera.

Oddly, this metadata may not include scene/shot/take information, in which case it must be added manually by the assistant cameraman or the assistant picture editor. This helps explain why file names from picture aren't necessarily the same as those from sound.

These picture, sound, and whatever other metadata are the ingredients of a rich database of sound and image information—Avid Log Exchange (ALE) —that will be used when the original R3D files are conformed to match the edit, and then undergo color correction. Next come the multichannel BFW original sound recordings and their metadata. Since the camera and sound recorder shared common timecode during the shoot, syncing ought to be a snap. However, occasionally things do go wrong, and timecodes don't match or some other production snafu clobbers the coordination between sound and picture. You'll be left with nothing but the clapperboard to sync sound to picture—if the production bothered to use one. Digital Cinema hasn't been around very long, but I already hear “We don't need a slate anymore.” This scares me. If the film editing department has any clout with the production (and they usually do), they need to convince the producer that the ten seconds per shot spent slating could pay off handsomely in post.

Picture and sound, once married, are now known as the “dailies” or “rushes.”

Organizing the Material

Before blessing the editing material and passing it to the editor, the assistant organizes the dailies into bins (Avidspeak for folders; FCP calls them “logging bins”), arranged however is most comfortable for her. Typically, bins are organized by scene. To make editing easier, you can add text descriptions.

The First Assembly

The picture editor screens and logs the shots. He then selects the shots that best serve each moment of the scene to construct an assembly.3 This first edit is often numbingly long, but it allows editor and director to see for the first time how the shots interact. Nonlinear picture editing workstations allow endless versions of scenes, so editors can easily play with the story, saving different interpretations to present to the director. Such flexibility comes at a cost; unmanaged, this wildly growing collection of versions becomes unwieldy. To combat this disarray, editors and assistants apply standardized naming schemes to the files.4 So, for example, a file including the editor's first cut of scenes 33 and 34 may be called 033–034 v100. The second editor's cut would be 033–034 v101. The v101 tells you which screening the version relates to. Typically, 100 denotes the editor's cuts; 200, the director's cuts; and 300, later studio or public screening edits. Other editors rely on dates to keep track of versions, since the Avid's bin view is easily sorted by date. The specifics of version codes vary by production, but there must always be a means of knowing what the edit refers to.5

Sound Enters the Picture

As the editor and director work to find the story and eliminate narrative dead ends, doing their best to hide bad acting and feature the good stuff, many versions are created, all of which are logically (hopefully) logged and saved. Often, an editor will add temp music and temp SFX to the Avid cut. Temp music will almost never survive to the final soundtrack, since few small-budget films can afford John Williams or Led Zeppelin. It's there to provide mood and rhythm and to give a screening audience (as well as the director and editor) a clue as to how the scene will work. When the composer gets involved, he'll likely be told to use the temp music track as an inspiration, to “make it just like this, but different.”

Don't be surprised to hear “temporary” sound effects added during the offline. Sometimes you really do need to hear a sound effect to understand the feel of a scene. The endlessly ringing phone, the crying baby in the next room, the downstairs neighbors who won't give us any peace … these sorts of things must be heard for the scenes to make sense. Moreover, as focus groups become ever more common as a means of making a film as marketable as possible, directors feel that their unfinished films must sound as “finished” as possible. Right or wrong, filmmakers assume that a public audience (or even an audience of studio executives) can't appreciate an unfinished work.

As a result, offline edits are becoming more and more loaded with temp SFX, temp ADR, temp music, and temp Foley. An entire industry has grown from this mess. Significant chunks of a sound budget now go to temporary mixes, and supervising sound editors are often brought aboard during the picture editing process for the sole purpose of preparing and nursing countless temp mixes. The dialogue editor may or may not become involved with the temp mixes, depending on the size of the production.

As the dialogue editor, you take what comes out of the picture editing room and make sense of it. However, if the picture department loads sounds into the Avid without timecode, you have no access to them except through the OMF.6 And if (God forbid) these cutting room gems are distorted or otherwise unacceptable, you're up a creek. Even though the sound department will theoretically replace any Avid-loaded SFX, Foley, dialogue, ADR, or music, you must be able to access what they did in picture, just in case the director falls in love with his cutting room ADR and you're forced to use it.

Even while the film is still under the knife, the supervising sound editor and the composer provide ideas and sketches. The supervising sound editor periodically sequesters himself with the director to come up with an overall sound story idea, as well as ideas for specific scenes.

Screenings, Recuts, Completion, and Music

The film now undergoes a series of public and private screenings, revisions, and restructurings. At this time, the composer has come up with themes and musical sketches. These are synchronized with the picture, discussed, and fought over. New musical sketches appear, and the process continues until the score is more or less set. It's likely that as the music solidifies and the editing nears completion, some of the composer's MIDI sketches will show up in screenings.

When director, editor, producer, and whoever else matters have blessed the edit, the film is “locked” and cut into 2000 ft reels for sound post. This is a good time for the supervising sound editor to lend a hand, to ensure that reel changes occur in sound-friendly places (away from music, high-density dialogue, anticipated complex low-frequency backgrounds, etc.).

Finishing the Picture and Packaging the Sound

After the film is locked and broken into reels, a good deal of work still remains for the picture people. The DI lab will need a QuickTime file of each reel, along with a picture AAF and/or EDL, plus the ALE. This information is used to selectively “pull” the material from the shoot for use in the online. (This process is almost identical to the old-fashioned film negative cutting procedure—only without the scissors.) Picture is conformed, visual effects created, and image is color corrected. From all this comes a beautiful DCP or film print for all to enjoy.

The sound department (you) will need a 24 fps QuickTime file, including a timecode burn-in and an audio guide track. Of course, the assistant will provide EDLs, both video and audio.

Throughout the picture editing process, the location mixer's mono or two-track mix has told the story. But now it's time to conform the original, isolated multitrack recordings to the picture cut so that you will have all the material you need to make the most of the location sound (much more on that matter in Chapter 7).

This is when you come by to pick up the picture, OMF/AAF, original sound and associated sound reports, lined script, list of characters, and whatever else you can grab. If for some reason the original sound recordings aren't available to you (in this day and age, it's very hard to imagine how this can happen) then ask the assistant to give you the soundfiles from the Avid's bins, or (less convenient) to create a series of OMFs from the bins containing all of the original takes. From this you can create sessions and then extract soundfiles. It's a bit of a hassle to work this way, but if it's all you can manage, smile and move on.

_______________

1. In this example the frame rate is 23.976 fps with audio at 47.952 kHz, but there are many other possibilities, so check with the picture department long before it's time to start.

2. R3D files are uncompressed, unprocessed data dumps directly from the image sensor. These files must be processed in post to achieve appropriate quality images (see “RED Camera Workflow Basics,” www.hdhead.com).

3. Don't confuse this “assembly” with the process of re-conforming original sound recordings to match the picture editor's cut (see Chapter 7).

4. This is the naming scheme discussed in Norman Hollyn The Film Editing Room Handbook, Third Edition (Los Angeles: Lone Eagle Press, 1999, pp. 167–68).

5. Learn from this file-coding system. When you save versions of your work, apply a meaningful name that refers to the tape version, the sequence number of your work, and/or the date of the last edit. More about this in Chapter 7.

6. More about OMFs and AAFs in Chapter 7.

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