I thought I would just outline our post production process so far, for those who are interested.

We shot 35mm, which was processed overnight at Bucks labs, and then shipped in the morning to central London where Midnight Transfer did the 35mm telecine to DVCam, with all the relevant information such as lab roll, timecodes and keycodes. Remember, this is an offline cut, not the master conform and grade. For that we will go back to the 35mm and re-transfer at full 2k res.

This DVCam tape was then digitised onto an Avid Media Composer (on a laptop, software only) and the rushes were sunk with the production sound which came in from sound recordist Ro Heap on DVD, recorded in 24bit (24bit, opposed to 16bit, for extra on set headroom) and 48khz sample rate. Accordingly, the Avid project was setup in 24bit.

Once the rushes were sunk, we could do the edit, which Eddie Hamilton did.

Tonight I am planning to do the final edit, integrating the new material we shot last Friday. Once that is done we will have one last test screening to make sure there are no gaffs. I am also going to do some ADR with Bill Patterson to help the story along and clean up some location dialogue.

Once all that is in place, we will begin the final mastering stages of sound and picture.

So for now, Eddie has all the data on his laptop, and I have a cloned Firewire drive of all the media and the project, so I can view edits should Eddie make any changes while I am not present (he can just email me the project as I have the media already).

Broadly, we hope that Videosonics will do the audio mix and Midnight Transfer are going to do the picture grade. I will outline just how all that works when we get closer to the time.

One last thought, I do plan to make a BueRay or HD-DVD version of the film, simply to go through the process and learn the pitfalls and advantages of these new formats. I am looking forward very much to this as it will be a good real world test of the process and technology, and of the results possible. If it’s as good as both the HD-DVD and BluRay camps claim, I suspect festivals in the future will start to accept BluRay and HD-DVD disks for submission.

Onward and upward!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com