Figure 1.1 © Fabio Venni (www.flickr.com/photos/fabiovenni/)
Chapter 1
Introduction
“Don't worry; we can just fix it in post!”
—Anonymous
The Beginning of the End
Postproduction is where a lot of the magic of moviemaking happens. The shoot's in the can and the actors, writers, and production crew are long gone, often leaving behind a director on the point of exhaustion and a producer trying to regain control of spiraling costs.
As with every other stage of production, nothing ever goes smoothly in post (despite what the DVD extras tell you). Piecing the film together can be a laborious, unglamorous, tedious, and wonderful roller coaster of a journey to deliver a unique experience to an insatiable audience.
Years ago, the hairiest moments of post involved damaged strips of film, missing footage, and sound sync problems. These are all but conquered in the digital age, giving rise to a brand new, yet hauntingly familiar set of problems, like corrupt data, dropped frames, and format compatibility issues. It seems that rather than providing a faster, more reliable way of completing a film, digital technology has just provided another outlet for venting our frustration.
But before depression sets in and a stream of tears renders the rest of this text a blurry mess, consider this: as a result of improvements to digital technology over the last few years, the overall standard of quality and control over a finished picture is much, much higher than was ever possible before.
There are several imperfections with the film-making process that were so difficult to fix that until very recently, they were considered an innate part of the process. Almost every frame of 35 mm film ever produced is subject to dust and scratches of varying impact; cameras inherently contain some amount of “weave” as they pull that film across the lens; and fine control over the color of the images was impossible. In a relatively short period of time, correcting these things has become such a routine process that we are probably more likely to notice what hasn't been fixed than what has.
The Myth of Digital Magic
The adage that pretty much everything can be fixed in post has become something of an inside joke among postproduction professionals over the years. While it's true to some degree, the reality is that certain fixes can be provided only through the use of heavy-duty visual effects. For instance, while bumpy camera movement can be smoothed reasonably easily, replacing one actor with another cannot.
There is a romanticized view of digital image processing that believes it can somehow “undo” degradation, restoring detail to areas where there was none. Although most people intuitively understand that the ability to pan around inside a digital photo (as portrayed in the film Blade Runner, for instance) is not possible, there does seem to be a widespread misconception that all high-end postproduction systems contain an “enhance” button that can magically bring blurred objects into focus, or allow the viewer to glimpse into deep shadows, revealing someone hidden in the gloom.
The reality is that detail cannot be created where it does not exist. That requires artistry and imagination, not software and mice. That's not to say that it's impossible to highlight areas of an image that were previously invisible; on the contrary, much of the day-to-day “enhancement” that is done simply involves changing the viewers' perception —that the person in the gloom was in fact visible all the time, just difficult to make out among all the dark tones and colorful noise.
Some of this magic is surprisingly easy to perform. Much like adjusting the brightness and contrast settings on a television set, anyone with the most basic tools and knowledge can make improvements to their material, given a little time (not to mention a degree of taste). On the other hand, certain improvements, even those that may at first seem trivial, can prove to require a great deal of time and energy, with no clear solution.
This area of production requires a blend of technical and artistic sensibilities: you have to understand the technical limitations you face, and then you have to be creative about how you get around them. This is not a field of number-crunching, like accountancy, where there is a definitive “correct” result; nor is it a pure art form like paint on canvas or poetry on paper.
Definition of a Visual Effect
There is a great deal of overlap between the practices, and certainly the toolset, of the techniques in this book and those used for creating visual effects. Indeed, it can be difficult to determine where restoration and enhancement becomes compositing and effects. I consider visual effects to be a much more intense process, often requiring the artist in question to spend weeks working on a single shot. In contrast, you won't find much in this book that will take longer than an hour or so to complete on a typical shot. Although it's easy to define visual effects shots as “in-your-face, dinosaurs rampaging around cities” -type shots, the reality is that most visual effects are meant to be invisible, such as duplicating extras to form massive crowds. My working definition of a visual effect is anything that involves reconstructing a scene in some way, whereas the techniques featured throughout this book are about enhancing a scene in some way.
The Substitute Time Machine
There isn't a hard and fast rule for determining which types of fixes can be accomplished easily — that tends to come with experience. The only real way to be certain of anything working as expected in a finished production is to try and get it in-camera.
That said, the limited availability of time machines for producers means that on many occasions it is just not possible to anticipate or notice problems that occur. Similarly, many of these problems only present themselves in the editing suite, when they can become glaringly apparent through the veil of context.
In these situations, recognizing the easy fix before having to resort to paying for costly visual effects, or worse, reshoots, will make everyone more comfortable.
The Bottom Line
Having worked on productions of all sorts of budgets, I've come to realize that in postproduction, quality and expense tend to be unrelated. Spending more money gets it done faster, but not better (sadly, this does not seem to be the case with preproduction, production, distribution, or marketing). That's not to say that postproduction is the best place to tighten the purse strings; after all, good postproduction requires an experienced team and robust tools, and these tend to cost money. What it means is that you're not faced with dilemmas like whether to pocket some cash and shoot 16 mm while taking a hit in quality compared to 35 mm.
About This Book
Who This Book Is For
This book is designed to appeal to anyone looking to improve footage after it's been shot, whether it's someone gainfully employed in postproduction, a producer or director who likes to take more of a hands-on approach to completing a production they've been working on, or someone simply looking to learn more about the process.
Throughout the book, I'll assume you know what pixels are and basic computer stuff like moving files and folders about, and that you're not put off by the occasional bit of film production jargon.
I should also point out that this book makes no effort at all to cover two of the most important areas of postproduction: editing and visual effects. As deeply fascinating as those topics are, they are also far too broad for me to do any sort of justice to them here.
All of the techniques in this book are ones that are used regularly on commercial productions. Although it was tempting to put a lot of gratuitous, eye-candy-style tutorials in here, such as how to create the effect of film burning in a projector, in the end I felt that they were best left for a different book.
TIP
To learn more about editing, I highly recommend In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch; on the subject of visual effects, look no further than Digital Compositing for Film and Video by Steve Wright.
How This Book Is Organized
This book provides a collection of the most common production issues that occur and methods for correcting them in post, from those that are caused by the camera lens to those that can be caused by the nature of working in a digital environment.
Some of these issues will have very simple solutions, some will have more involved, time-consuming fixes (the bean counters among you are free to substitute expensive for time-consuming throughout this book), but all of them are field-tested and work in a variety of situations.
The techniques covered are organized into categories by the type of problem that requires them. If you're so inclined, you can read the chapters in order, or you use the book as a reference, dipping into it when you come up against a problem.
Contacting the Author
I can be reached at [email protected] if you want to provide feedback about the book (which is always welcome), or about any of the techniques I discuss.