7. The Editor Cuts Away

Eventually, as the shooting stops and the director’s interest starts to veer to the editing room, you need to get the film ready for its first screening—the editor’s cut. Although Adam may have already viewed many scenes that Wendy sent to the set on DVD, he can’t really tell how the movie plays without screening the film as a whole.

Usually, the editor’s cut is due for screening anywhere from two days to two weeks after the shooting wraps. This all depends on the budget of the film as well as the complexity of the footage. If you and Wendy are lucky, the biggest, most complex, scenes in the film were not the last ones shot. However, all too often, that is the case, and you are inundated with footage in the last week of shooting. Often, numerous pick-up shots and second-unit photography work all come in during the final days. (Pick-up shots are shots taken after the bulk of a scene is shot; second-unit crews often work at the same time as the main crew, taking pick-up shots.)

Additionally, scenes shot at different locations that need to be cut together—such as two sides of a telephone conversation, or a chase sequence over many locations—cannot be edited until all the parts are available. All these factors, as well as the amount of footage Adam has shot, will influence how long Wendy takes to finish her cut.

At some point, Wendy needs to finish cutting and screen the film for Adam. Some directors simply sit down at the editing machine and watch the output, section by section. But most directors want to watch the movie projected on a screen. Regardless of how Wendy’s cut will be screened, you need to clean up her sequence and prep it for screening. Then, you have to deal with the recutting as a result of the screening.

Perfecting the Sound

In Chapter 5, “Moving on to Editing,” we discussed checking sync and filling the sound track holes after Wendy edits each scene. This works fine on a scene-by-scene basis, but as she starts putting scenes together into longer sequences, she will be creating more complex sound and she will want temp music and sound effects, looking to create a more professional sound track.

If Wendy is following the naming conventions established in Chapter 5, you can take the version marked “v099” from the Outputs bin (or from her Cuts bin) and prepare it for a temp sound job.

Most sound and music work is left until the end of the movie, when a sound editor corrects everything in preparation for the final film mix (or dub). Sometimes there is work to do for earlier screenings (for the editor, producers, distributors, and so on). Then you will have to scratch mix (also called temp dub) the movie.

The process of scratch mixing requires you to understand the process of final film mixing. Basically, you perform a smaller version of the final mix.

When a movie is being shot, the sound behind any piece of dialogue rarely matches the sound behind any other piece of dialogue—even if the second piece is from the reverse angle on the same scene. In a scene of two people talking, if the director covered it in a wide-shot master, a closer two-shot, and close-ups on each of the people talking, the sound quality is likely different in each of them. This is not the fault of the sound recordist; it is the result of varying microphone placements as well as the inability to control the background sound outside camera range (for films shot on location).

When Wendy cuts these angles together, a different background sound is audible every time she cuts one sound to another. In a movie theater, an audience would be distracted by these differences. For the final film mix, a dialogue editor comes in to correct these bumps (as the points where the background changes are called).

The dialogue editor splits the dialogue tracks, which means he or she separates the pieces of dialogue onto two or more synchronously running tracks. Then, each sound can be controlled separately, with a separate volume control and equalizer. This way, when the tracks are recombined into one, the person doing the dialogue mixing (called, oddly enough, the dialogue mixer) can even out any disagreeable differences.

Of course, nothing is as easy as all that. The dialogue editor must do a lot of trickery with these tracks to prepare them properly for the dialogue mixer. But that is much too complicated a subject for us to deal with here and now. I’ll leave that for another book (which, hopefully, someone else will write).

However, you will almost never have a separate dialogue editor at this stage of the film editing process. At this point, the task is almost always left to you.

Working from a Copy

First, make a copy of Wendy’s sequence to work with. You should never work with Wendy’s timeline. At some point during your screening preparation, you are likely to accidentally change something Wendy did, and you’ll need to find your way back to her edit. You might inadvertently throw something out of sync from the location she positioned it, or you might accidentally delete a piece of audio. If you’re working with her original timeline, there is no way to go back to see what she did. But if you’re working with a copy, then you can simply go back and look at her timeline.

Adding Sound Effects

The sound editor also adds sound effects to the sound track. To have the utmost control of the dialogue sections in both the editing and the mixing, dialogue is shot with as few extra noises as possible. Phones ringing, radios playing, guns shooting, and so on, are all left out during the shooting and added into the final mix. Those sounds, however, can help a story along. So, before some screenings, Wendy and Adam may want to add those sounds to the screenings for a rough idea how the film plays.

In fact, even if Adam doesn’t ask for it, it is good practice to create a smooth sound mix every time someone is going to watch the film, in a screening room or on a DVD. Sound can help tell a story—for example, most audiences are confused if a phone doesn’t ring before a character answers it.

Often, at this point, there is no sound editor on the film. You, Wendy, and Philip need to prepare the mix. Since this mix is intended only to give everyone a general idea of the film, you should create it quickly, without much detail, and with sound added primarily to tell the story. This is why it is often called a rough, or temp mix, or dub. Dialogue is almost never split in these mixes. Another purpose of the mix is adding sound effects to make the film more intelligible and trying out some sample music.

Go through the film, using your continuity and your NLE, and note the sound effects and music cues you need for each scene. As you scroll through the timeline, note the effects and music that Wendy has already cut in. Also, note the areas she wants you to work on. She may have specifically told you, for instance, that one of the on-set scenes needs some fake gun clicks, but that she is otherwise happy with her effects work. It is always a good idea to review the scene, make a note to order gun clicks, see if she may have forgotten anything else, and order those items as well.

Music is usually lifted from existing albums or CDs. If you are lucky, a composer might be working on the film already and you might actually have temp music to use (either recorded for Silent Night, Silent Cowboy, or from the composer’s library).

Sound effects are available from sound houses and sound effects CDs. If you contact a sound house and say something like, “I need a very loud door slam, two different types of horse hoof beats, a series of gunshots, and a few modern phone rings,” it can usually deliver all those sound files via email, web site download, or CD. When you get the temp music or sound, digitize or import it into your project and then place it in the appropriate bins or folders, as covered in Chapter 5.

Sound Editing 101

Once you have the sound files, you need to do a little sound editing. Many editors like performing a sound edit themselves, so watch closely to see how they do it. In case the editor doesn’t want to do it, here is a brief explanation.

1. Load your copy of the v099 sequence into your Canvas or Record Monitor.

2. Roll down to the point where you want the sound effect to sync.

3. Put a mark or a locator at that point.

4. If the sound file needs to be adjusted, do that now. In the sample in Figure 7.1, you are cutting in the sound of glass breaking. The effect, as you received it from the sound effects house, has a bit of a pause at the top of the sound, before the glass breaks. You need to overwrite that effect onto the proper tracks (in the example here, you used both tracks of this stereo effect, and put them on channels 3 and 4).

5. Make sure the effect’s waveform (the visual representation of the volume level of the sound) is turned on. You’ll notice that the effect begins with virtually no volume level, but then you can see where the glass break sound begins. This is called the first modulation of the sound and, in this case, it is the point that you want to line up with the mark you’ve placed on the timeline.

At times, you may not want the first modulation of sound as your sync point. If you are cutting in a car-by, where a car approaches a camera and then exits, you might want the loudest portion of the car-by to come at a specific point on the picture. So that is the sound you would find (both by listening to it, and looking at your waveform) and sync it up with the mark on your timeline.

After editing the effect into your tracks, make sure it is at the proper sound level in relation to the dialogue and music tracks that may be running at the same time. You can set the volume level for each clip individually. Using key frames, you also can adjust the volume within a clip, allowing the sound to get louder or softer automatically.

Figure 7.1 Line up the mark where you want the sound effect to fall with the crucial part of the sound effect (in this case, the first modulation of the glass breaking sound on the lower two tracks.)

You need to align the sound and prepare the music for every scene in your film. This takes some time, so it’s better if you take the time to accumulate the sound effects and music cues during the individual scene editing. If Wendy doesn’t mind, you can also edit the sound into the individual scenes as you go so there is less work to do right before a screening.

Adding Audio Effects

As you build the dialogue and effects, you and Wendy will find many instances where the sound quality isn’t exactly what you want. A voice may need to sound like it’s coming through a radio, or a sound may need to seem like it’s coming through a door. Or, you might want a sound to echo.

You can add all these audio effects to the sound effect and control it very tightly. For instance, using the audio effects in most NLE applications, you can control the amount of echo on a sound so it appears to be in a large or small room.

Another useful effect is changing the equalization of a sound. EQ, as it is called, is the volume of the individual frequencies of a sound, like treble and bass on a typical sound amplifier. The EQ settings in most NLEs give you much greater control, allowing you to adjust the volume across seven or eight bands of audio frequencies as well as how broad a spectrum is affected. Using these controls, you can easily make a voice sound like it is coming through a phone (by lowering all the frequencies except for the mid-range) or from the other side of a wall (by boosting the low frequencies and minimizing the higher ones).

When adjusting every sound effect, in both volume and equalization, be sure to test it against all the other sounds running at the same time.

Color Correction

Color correction is a tricky business. Unless perfect color is absolutely necessary to tell your story, it is generally unwise to do too much color correction in the editing room.

For one thing, good color correction (or color grading, as it is called in the United Kingdom) requires precisely adjusted monitors. It is always unwise to color correct on computer monitors, since they don’t accurately represent the colors as they look in projection. In addition, to get true color reproduction, the lighting in the editing room—as well as the colors of the walls, furniture, and even your shirt—needs to be precisely controlled so it won’t affect your adjustments.

In my experience, virtually no editing rooms are set up that way. As a result, any color correction you do is not going to look the same when you screen in a theater with Adam or an audience.

Still, there are times when changing the color of a shot is helpful. You may want to adjust the way a flashback or a dream sequence looks so the audience can tell the difference between it and the scenes that represent reality. You might also find that shots from one particular scene taken across several days look so wildly different that they would confuse the audience.

You can perform varying levels of color correction on a shot. The simplest is a color effect, where you adjust a small number of parameters to change the overall color or brightness of a scene.

For more control over the look of a shot, all NLEs have more sophisticated 3-way color correction modes that allow much more sophisticated changes. Figure 7.2 shows the 3-way color correction window arrangement in Final Cut Pro, complete with a series of visual controls (at right) that let you determine exactly what visual frequencies exist in the shot in the center of the screen.

More sophisticated color correction plug-ins and programs let you give the image an entirely different look and feel, such as Apple Color or Magic Bullet Looks. These programs are more complex to use, and are subject to problems with the lighting in your editing room.

Figure 7.2 The 3-way color correction mode in Final Cut Pro. The series of four screens at right are meant to duplicate expensive electronic scopes to accurately measure the physics of the color in the center frame.

Creating Outputs

Until recent improvements in compression technology, the image quality Wendy edited within the NLE was not good enough to screen with in a large theater. The compression would cause annoying blockiness or motion artifacts in the images. With compression getting better by the year, you can now screen output from your NLE. It is still possible, however, for Adam or your producers will want an even higher-resolution version for your public previews.

Screening from an NLE

Some screening rooms let you bring your hard drives into the projection room and connect them to an existing Avid or Final Cut station. You can then project directly from your files, as if you were looking at the film in your own editing room.

To make this work, create a copy of your project file and bring it to the screening room on a FireWire drive. The project files store all the information that points to the footage on your material drives and tells the NLE when to cut from one shot to another. For this screening, make sure you’ve copied the latest version of the project folders before you unhook the media drives from Wendy’s or your system. Then, it’s a simple matter of copying the project folders over to the screening room’s system.

Of course, you do need the media drives to make this work and there are several ways to do this. One way is to take the editor’s media drives to the screening. Most editors, understandably, prefer that you not remove their drives but rather make a copy of the media for screening. In the Avid, for instance, use the Consolidate command to do this. The Consolidate command lets you copy only the material used in the edit to an external FireWire drive.

Screening from an Output

If you’re not screening from your NLE files, then you have a number of choices. The first one is to determine in what format you’ll be screening. It is possible to screen on tape or from a computer using a QuickTime or some other movie file.

It is important to check with the screening room to see what formats they can screen. It won’t do you any good to show up with a great HDV/DVCam tape, only to be told that they only run HDCam.

Balancing Reels

If you are screening from a QuickTime or a Blu-ray disc created from that QuickTime, you can probably screen the entire sequence without stopping to change tapes. However, if you will be screening from a tape, then you need to be aware that all tape formats have a limit on time length. If your project is too long to fit on one tape, you need to split the entire timeline into two or more sequences and let the projectionist change from one to the other during the screening. If you use a reputable screening room, they will likely have two tape machines to play back from, so the switch from one to the other will be almost seamless.

The art of splitting the movie into individual parts for separate tapes is called reel balancing. Generally, you want to make the split at a point in the film with no continuous music or sound, since the projectionist can rarely line up the last frame of the outgoing reel with the first frame of the incoming reel (in which case, the audience hears the music bump).

Choose a point with a clear change in the sound, normally at a scene change without music. Make sure the reel is not so short as to make it difficult for the projectionist to load and set up the next reel.

It is also smart to confirm that there are no duplicate time codes between reels. I like to keep my reels under one hour and set the time codes so the first reel begins at 1:00:00:00, the second reel at 2:00:00:00, and so on.

Setting Up Reels

Every production is a little different, but I generally set up my sequences in the following way (for the first reel):

The slate should include the name of the film along with a lot of other information (see Figure 7.3). List the total running time of the film on that tape.

Figure 7.3 This is the slate for a film that needs to be cut into three pieces for output to DVD or tape with a one-hour maximum. If you output to a tape that is long enough for the entire film, you can leave out the “Reel 1 of 3” line.

At the tail of the program, add the Academy tail leader, which has a one-frame pop sound at exactly two seconds after the last frame of picture (called LFOA, for Last Frame of Action).

Performing Playouts, Digital Cuts, and Prints to Tape

After you clean up the picture and track, balance the reels, and set up the head and tail elements, you can output to a tape. You can output to a number of formats—ranging from HDV/DVCam tape all the way up to high-definition digital tape. The process of outputting your sequence onto a tape has different names, depending on the NLE you are using. Some of the most common are playout, digital cut, and print to tape.

Once again, you need to know what formats your screening room accepts, but there is an additional wrinkle here. Since you are creating the tape, you need a videotape recorder capable of generating that tape. That means to screen HDCam tapes, for instance, you need to have an HDCam recorder in your editing room.

These high-end tape machines are not cheap to buy or rent, so many editing rooms do not have them. Therefore, you need to rent and install an HDCam deck for the day of the output. This is not as easy as it sounds, depending on how your system was set up. If you anticipate outputting to a one-day rental machine during the course of a production, tell the equipment rental house to set you up at the start of your editing process so installing the deck is easy. Otherwise, you may find yourself crawling behind the NLEs and plugging and unplugging a host of video and audio cables into the patch bay, mixer, and NLE.

It is then a simple matter to output directly to the tape from your NLE. You can send the video and audio directly to a free-running tape (by starting to record and then pressing “Play” on your NLE). But this creates problems if something happens with the output from your NLE, such as a frozen frame or a too-loud sound. You would have to stop, correct the problem, and then start the playout again from the beginning to provide a seamless output.

A far better idea is to output to a pre-striped tape, where the tape already has a time code recorded onto it that matches the time code of your sequence. In this way, you can insert edit the remainder of your sequence. If you encounter a problem, you can stop and correct it and then start recording again just a little bit before the problem occurred. To do this, you usually place an In mark at that point, so the NLE starts inserting the new recording exactly at that frame and not before.

Make sure the tapes you are recording on are pre-striped with the correct time code (if you are editing in non-drop frame, then the tapes should also be in non-drop) at the appropriate hour.

Exporting Movie Files

As more screening rooms become able to screen from computers, you may find that the best way to screen is from a QuickTime or similar movie file, such as AVI or MPEG. The important thing to remember is to avoid compressing the data, so that the quality Adam sees is the same as what Wendy is editing.

QuickTime movies come in many flavors, most of which add compression and should be avoided. Use a .mov format that is the same quality as the source material; Avid, for example, has a QuickTime export setting called “Same As Source.”

Create a “self-contained” QuickTime movie in the same aspect ratio as your project settings. If you use the alternative (a “reference” QuickTime), then the movie will not play on anyone else’s system because it will try to reference the material on Wendy’s material drives.

Be sure your screening room has the same QuickTime codec (the file that assists QuickTime in compressing and decompressing the moving images) as you do, or the file will not play.

Remember, not all QuickTime files are alike, so plan ahead. In fact, it’s a good idea to send a short test file to the screening room as soon as you book the room. That way, they can make sure it plays in the room. I prefer to have my assistants bring the file to the room themselves so they can watch it and make sure it looks correct. In addition, if my assistant accompanies the file, it decreases the chance of piracy.

Programs such as Apple Compressor or Sorenson Squeeze can create movie files for the screening for you. While they let you compress files in any number of formats and compression rates, be sure to choose an uncompressed setting. Create this movie file on an external hard drive that you can transport it to the screening room. As a safety precaution, you might want to bring a second copy on a second drive.

If you choose to view your movie in a digital file format, you do not need to break the project into reels. It’s just as easy to screen a 10-minute scene as a 4-hour movie from digital files.

Outputting to a Blu-ray DVD

With the advent of cheaper Blu-ray recordable DVDs and the disc burners to create them, some productions are beginning to take a high-resolution QuickTime and make Blu-ray discs in Adobe Encore, Ulead’s MovieFactory/Disc Creator, or Final Cut Pro.

It is also relatively easy to output directly from your NLE onto a Blu-ray disc, just as you play out to a tape without time code.

In both cases, of course, the screening room must be able to play back Blu-ray discs.

Conforming to HD

For certain screenings, such as large audience previews, your producers may decide the video resolution in your NLE is not good enough. In that case, they might want you to take your NLE material and create a matching sequence at a higher resolution. To do this, you need to uprez (up-resolution) the material and conform (that is, precisely match) it to your NLE sequence.

Every NLE works a little differently, but they can all take a sequence that was edited at one resolution, unlink it from its media while preserving all the edit instructions, and then relink it to higher-resolution media. Of course, this requires you to have the higher-resolution media, which you can get from several sources.

Cameras such as the RED will record at multiple resolutions at the same time, allowing you to edit at a lower resolution and easily link back to the original 2K or 4K R3D files the camera created. (The lower-resolution files are often called proxies.)

It is also possible for you to create higher resolution files from within your NLE, in a process called transcoding, either through programs such as Compressor, Red Rushes, or Sony Clip Browser, or directly on import, using your NLE’s import settings. Different systems create these proxies in different ways, and the trick is in preserving the metadata that lets the uprez work correctly.

A third possibility is to ask the telecine house to create a high-resolution tape, such as an HDCam format, when they create the dailies. They can then create an HDV/DVCam tape with matching time codes for you to edit with. (This process reduces the resolution and is often called down resolution or downrezzing.) When you create the HD screening tape, you can go back to the high-quality HDCam masters and input just the sections you need in the sequence into your NLE from an HDCam deck. Because of the high cost of these decks, you can either rent them for the day or take your entire project to a facility that has the decks and a compatible NLE.

The process for creating this type of uprez is fairly simple. Most digital editing machines can consolidate footage. Start by creating a bin that contains a copy of Wendy’s v099 file. Then, ask the NLE to go through every cut in the film and create a list of only the material in that sequence. This process creates a new series of clips that include only the video material that exists in the sequence.

Next, highlight all the new clips and batch digitize them at the higher resolution. This process allows you to re-digitize the material without entering new information into your NLE or creating new bins and folders. You need to sit by the HDCam deck and, periodically, insert a new tape, but the digitizing occurs automatically. As each tape is finished, you can actually see the newly digitized footage showing up in your timeline.

When the machine is finished, you have a new edit with the higher-quality images inserted in place of the ones Wendy originally edited with.

Because of the higher quality, more data is moving back and forth between the hard drives. As a result, the image may appear jerky in some places with faster cutting. This stuttering normally occurs when the computer is trying to shuttle the hard drive’s head over the drive faster than it is capable of moving. In this case you’ll need to output the material to an HD tape, which will not stutter on projection.

When the consolidation is completed, you can then output to a fresh, pre-striped HDCam tape, as described earlier.

Conforming to Film

In rare cases, your producers or director might want you to conform to a 35mm or 16mm film print instead of high-definition video. Note, however, that you cannot screen Super 16mm film, so if you’ve shot in this format you won’t be able to screen with it.

The first thing you need to do is balance the reels into sizes a normal projection room can handle. In most cases, and because of the editing room equipment limitations, you should balance the film into 20-minute reels. You will then need to get a number of film-specific pieces of equipment and supplies, as you can see in Figure 7.4.

At the telecine session, you may remember the colorist/telecine operator created a FLEx file with all the video information as well as whatever film information was available at the time. If you telecined directly from the negative, this includes the camera roll and the latent edge key numbers. When you digitized the dailies using this log, this information should have been attached to every take you put into your machine.

Now it is time to use this information.

Any system that allows you to cut in 24 fps mode should be able to generate a series of Film Cut Lists. Quite simply, these lists take Wendy’s digital cut and translate the video numbers shown onscreen into the matching film numbers. If the time code 04:02:13:12 on dailies tape A52 matches up with the code number KI 4827913956+15, the computer translates any cut occurring at that time code into a cut at that exact key code number.

Figure 7.4 A film editing bench.

The software command for making this translation varies depending on your system. However, no matter what it’s called, a number of options will be available. You can choose from a number of Film Cut Lists. The two most important are the Pull Lists (see Figure 7.5 on next page), which help you to tell the lab which pieces of film negative to make prints from, and the Assemble Lists (see Figure 7.6 on page 107), which tell you how to take the film prints the lab makes for you and assemble them into a spliced film that matches every edit Wendy made with her NLE.

Figure 7.5 A Pull List, which lists every piece of film needed to conform Wendy’s NLE edit into 35mm film.

Figure 7.6 An Assemble List, which organizes the pieces you’ve pulled using the Pull List in Figure 7.5 into the order in which they will appear in the cut film.

Adding Changeovers

When you balance reels, another term to know is changeover. These are cues that let the projectionist know exactly when to make the changeover from the reel on one projector to the reel on the other (projection rooms have two projectors). The cues are two sets of circles shown onscreen. The sets of circles appear to be a single circle, but to make them visible to the human eye, they actually consist of a series of circles that appear in the same spot on four succeeding frames. The first set cues the projectionist to begin running the other projector, although not to turn on its light and sound. It is called the motor cue because it cues the starting of the second projector’s motor. The second set, called the changeover cue, signals the projectionist to turn the picture and sound off on the first projector at the exact moment that he or she turns on the picture and sound on the second projector, which contains the new reel.

Some assistants use a grease pencil to make a slash mark that extends from the upper-right corner of the frame a short way into the frame itself (see Figure 7.7, film strip sample A). Others like to use a single hole-puncher to punch out little dots from a roll of paper tape (see Figure 7.7, film strip sample B). Always make sure that your marks extend far enough into the frame to be seen, even if you are projecting in a 1.85 screen ratio.

Whatever kind of changeover marks you use, there is a standard for where they go on the film (see Figure 7.8).

Providing Sound Track for Screenings

This takes care of the picture for a film screening, but where does the sound come from?

You can choose from a number of formats for outputting the sound track. To assure the best quality, be sure the original sound was digitized at 48Khz and output onto a good quality tape, such as a DA-88. This tape supports a stereo sound track, with a time code that matches your sequence. In this way, the screening room can sync up the separate picture and sound elements.

Figure 7.7 Two examples of changeover marks on film.

Figure 7.8 The placement of changeover cues in 35mm film. The motor cue begins 12’08 (which is 12 feet and 8 frames) before the LFOA. The changeover cue comes 1’08 (one second) before it.

Preparing the Paperwork

At this point, create a list for the projectionist that shows every reel in the film, along with the ending time code or footage (if it’s being projected on film). This gives the projectionist another cue for when to make the changeover from one reel to the next.

On recent films, I used a continuity like the one shown in Figure 7.9. Scenes removed from the film during the recutting (such as Scene A19) are listed in italics. Reel breaks are noted with thick lines between the scenes where the reel changes.

You’ll notice that I included a crucial piece of information at the top of the continuity—the TRT, or total running time. The TRT is one of the first pieces of information Adam will want to know. If you are working on television, it is even more crucial. As you screen later versions of Silent Night, Silent Cowboy, everyone will want to know how much running time has been lost (or gained) since the last version, so keep a record of that as well.

The best way to determine the running time is to go back to Wendy’s v099 cut (which should include all reels). Mark an In point at the first frame of picture (do not include the bars and tone, slate, or Academy Leader), and an Out point at the LFOA. Most NLEs report the duration of the selected material. Or, you can look at the last time code number of your sequence before the tail leader. If you set the time code numbers properly—and compute the time in drop-frame time code, rather than non-drop—then the time code at the LFOA should show the duration.

Figure 7.9 This type of continuity helps the directors and producers discuss the film after the screening.

First-cut screenings are always very tense for everyone involved in the film-editing process. Directors often get very insecure or irritable. Editors begin to worry about minutiae (like the number of people coming to the screening and whether the film has been rewound properly). Usually, no one wants the producer around because the film’s worst faults are all too visible at this point. Studio personnel are almost never invited to these screenings; they usually see the film only after the director has completed his or her contractually guaranteed cut.

You can minimize some of this craziness by ensuring that your film is ready for screening. Take a few hours to screen the videotape, DVD, or NLE sequence prepared for the screening room to make sure that everything is correct. Arrive at the screening as early as possible, so you can run a test of your material. Bring along several copies of your continuity as well.

After the Screening

After the screening, Adam and Wendy are bound to meet. During the meeting, you should listen to what everyone believes are the film’s major strengths and weaknesses. Take careful notes regarding proposed changes, including:

• Which scenes to drop from the film

• Which alternative takes to use

• Which scenes to move to different places in the film

• Which sequences need major recutting

Handling all these changes and the host of other suggestions that come up requires prep work from you. Be sure you understand what the director and editor want done and when they want it. Create copies of the film to be distributed as well. Producers, writers, the director, and studio executives (when they finally see the film) need a copy of the film to refer to when taking notes. Keep track of where all the copies go as there is always fear that someone will distribute copies to the public.

In general, send the screening tape or DVD to a duplication house for copies. On the tape request order, ask for a burn-in that identifies the tapes as “Property of Big Time Picture Company.” Different studios want different things burned in; some even require that the initials of the recipients are burned in. Visual obstructions like these make the tape less attractive to bootleggers and decrease the chances of copies of the movie showing up for sale in Hollywood or Times Square.

You may want to list the name of the cut (“Editor’s First Cut,” for example) and burn in either the time code or footage to help Adam identify frames for his notes. If the original film was transferred in 1.85 format, you can use the black space (called letterboxing) at the top and bottom of the picture to burn in this information. If the picture is full frame, place the burn-in so that it covers up the least important area of the picture. The very bottom of the screen is the best place, although you can place some information at the top as well.

Write all this information on the tape request order. It is also a good idea to talk to someone at the tape dub house to make sure the employees are aware of your needs. The better the communication, the fewer the errors.

Finally, once you’ve sent the film out for duplication and organized your notes from the after-screening meeting, you can go home and get some well-deserved rest.