MindFlesh: Technology Behind The Scenes

The Setup

The setup that’s presented in the workflow diagram was kinda developed out of necessity because the people working on the post-production don’t all live in the same area:

·          the editor is in Putney (that's like the posh part of London and from Bermonsey takes five transport stages to reach: walking, tube, overground, bus, walking. Next time we're working with an editor closer to home! Just kidding Matt :) ) - he's a Mac lad so he's on Final Cut Pro (G5)

·          the SFX wizard is working at Zen HQ in Bermondsey, he's on the only PC (a blisteringly fast Alienware quad-processor) using Adobe After Effects (in fact the whole Adobe Production Suite)

·          the sound designer is in San Diego, USA (so that means he's also on a different time zone!)

·          the music composer is in Edingburgh, UK - which is also in a different time zone: about 1894 ;) Just kidding.

We have a private FTP site (based in San Francisco) for sharing project files between us all - EDLs, music and video clips etc

Workflow

Our workflow is presented in this workflow diagram.

All the footage shot with Z1 was capture d in Final Cut Pro (FCP) on the Mac and edited. An edit decision list (EDL) is sent to the SFX guy who imports  it into Premiere on the PC and conforms the picture (e.g. only the shots used in the film are transferred from the original HDV tapes). This did present a few compatibility problems: seems that the "reverse" instruction to run clips backwards doesn't translate correctly between platforms and neither does "change speed". Oh, it comes across in the EDL but seems that Premiere interprets it differently to FCP.

We found that After Effects works fastest and most reliably with uncompressed footage (e.g. not HDV) so the footage in Premiere is output as several uncompressed AVI files. Note that the project is divided into four reels of 20 mins each. Why 4 x 20mins? Well 20mins corresponds to a reel of 35mm film - should we ever print back to film we're good to go. In fact we'll now refer to the project in terms of Reel 1, Reel 2 etc. Breaking the film up like this also means the project files are faster to deal with - especially in Premiere which previously seemed to take forever to check all the clips and load up.

The uncompressed footage is imported into After Effects where we add the effects and grading. The graded footage is then output as a Targa file sequence. Working with image sequences is great because it means if one shot is re-graded, only the files that make up that sequence need to be re-rendered. Otherwise we’d have to re-do the whole reel. On our Alienware 4-processor PC (with 4 GB ram) with the Nucleo plug-in a 20min reel takes between 12 and 17 hours to render depending on the effects used.

The Targa sequence then becomes the “master” for all subsequent uses of the footage – for example, it’s rendered into Quicktime files for sharing with the sound designer and editor and into MPEG2 for playback on DVD.

All the sound is edited in ProTools which is then mixed down to a stereo track for testing with the picture. Ultimately we’ll have a 5.1 surround mix but right not it’s not necessary for checking the effects and grading.