Black & White

So yesterday was day 4 of "The Turing Enigma" shoot and today we have the day off (so a chance to recuperate after going till 4am last night). Now we have changed tic-tacs (or tactics), we are keeping up with production pretty well. I have edited 11 scenes of the 12 they have shot (number 12 wasn't finished till 4 so I'll be editing that tomorrow) and there are some amazing looking scenes coming out. The longer scenes especially are seeming really slick. Some screenshots after the break.

Crafting a Scene

Yesterday was day 3 of "The Turing Enigma" shoot. After spending the night before retranscoding the rushes from day 1, it occurred to me that we had been wasting a lot of our time on day 1 and 2, watching the blue transcoding bar creep across the screen. So we decided to leave leave transcoding unless there was time for it and focus on syncing so I could start editing. As it happens, the crew were working on some fairly complex scenes and so footage came in fairly slowly, but from now on, we will likely leave transcoding and just set it going after the day is over.

Make Your Mistakes Early

Day 2 on "The Turing Enigma" has just finished. At the beginning of the day we caught a mistake that has meant a little setback in the editorial dept. Inside Avid Media Composer 5 there is an option for how you want to deal with AMA linked files called "Reformat". Unfortunately this option does not come up when you first link to a folder of R3D clips. You have to add it in the Bin -> Columns setting. This fact, combined with some confusion over what Quicktime player was doing when we played back the proxies (cropping the top with the quicktime bar) led to us transcoding the first days footage in DNxHD with the left and right of the image severely cropped into a 2:1 aspect ratio instead of the 2.4:1 that we should have had. So everything has to be retranscoded correctly, with Reformat set to "Pillarbox/Letterbox". A lengthy process to say the least, but it will be done by tomorrow. If we had noticed the mistake later, then we would have pushed ourselves so far behind we would have been catching up all the way through the shoot. And I would likely not have got much actual editing done. So make mistakes, but make them early on. Some wisdom we should all be able to take something away from.

Keeping Up With Production

Its Day 1 of "The Turing Enigma" shoot. The morning started slowly but as production kicked into gear, we have had to work hard to keep up. We are holed up in our own room, backing up and transcoding footage as it is being shot. We have networked 2 macbook pro's together, one is reading the CF cards from the Red One, through an expresscard reader, the other is connected via eSATA to a GSpeed Q and it has become a juggling match between transferring data and transcoding inside Avid to DNxHD 36. The first scene (only 2 shots) is cut and the master of the next scene has been finished. As the medium shots and closeups come through, a third ball will enter our juggling trick. Should make for an interesting afternoon.