First Day Observations in the Editing Room
The ACE Internship Program selects interns and gives them the chance to observe the daily routines of an assistant editor. This is an opportunity to see firsthand the inner machinations of the assistant’s tasks and how he juggles the work flow and problems that arise during the course of the day. Each show is at a different stage of postproduction, and even though everyone’s daily experience is quite different, there is a commonality of work flow in every venue. We asked a few interns to write down and share their experiences, and what follows are excerpts from their first day’s journal entries and a peek into the doors that were opened for them.
9.1 A Day on Episodic Television
… Laura Sempel (American Intern 2010)
Today was my first day in an episodic television editing room. I managed to arrive on a very good day! The editor had finished his editor’s cut the day before, so he was making changes according to the notes the director had given him. The show is still missing a few scenes, so we will still be receiving dailies in the next few days. They will only have one day to cut in the last scene before the picture needs to be locked! It’s amazing how quickly the world of television moves compared to features, and I think it’s fair to assume that the end of the week may be extremely hectic.
The wonderful thing about being on this show during this week is that the assistant is leaving the show, and so he spent all day today giving the new assistant the rundown of the editorial process. So essentially it was as if he were training me as well to be the new assistant.
Going into this I knew hardly anything about TV, so some of the things I learned today may seem a little simple, but they were new to me. This show is broken up into five acts that are separated by commercials. The assistant separates the time lines by acts, so anything he needs to find or change is easily accessible. He puts the editor’s cut into a new bin, and so the acts that are left in the project are relabeled as director’s cut because that is what they are currently working on.
The assistant gave the new assistant and me a tour of all of the project bins. He explained what was in each one of them, how he labels them, and why he does it that way. He showed me the forms that come with the dailies, such as the progress report, the sound report, as well as the camera report. It looks like all of these reports are emailed to him and are kept in files on his computer as opposed to a binder.
In terms of music and temp tracks, it appears that the editor likes to cut in his own temp track, and so the assistant just needs to keep the bins organized and accessible for him. The assistant also went over the way the show is delivered. He printed out a sheet that goes over everything that needs to be delivered along with the final cut. This includes paperwork as well as all of the elements and what format they need to be delivered in. He also printed me out a final continuity, a format sheet, a recap sheet, and an ADR list. Needless to say, all of these elements will be extremely helpful to refer to as templates when I have to make my own set of forms as an assistant!
I did manage to get a look at the continuity used for the editors cut. The concept of what it was made so much more sense when I was able to hold one in my hands and look it over.
Because the show is shot in New York and the visual effects are done out of house, they use a private Internet exchange program called D3. This way they can post QuickTimes of the episode, or just of specific scenes, for either the director or the producer to see. This makes it easier for someone to see the changes after they have given the editor their notes.
There was a break from the all the technical stuff, though, so don’t think that I was just trapped in a room furiously writing down strange words like VAM and CTM all day! The editor wanted us to take a look at his editor’s cut, so we watched it after lunch. Afterwards he came in and sat with the three of us and asked us what we thought about it. I, of course, remembered all the warnings and said very positive things about the episode. The editor seemed a little distracted, though, because there are a few story problems that he is aware of, and I’m afraid there isn’t a whole lot that can be done about it. It’s nothing major, and I think we were aware of it only because we were being asked about it.
The editor gave me a copy of the script for the episode to read tonight so I’ll understand what’s going on in the scenes where the footage is missing. Tomorrow is time for dailies! The assistant showed me how they process their dailies. Because the show is shot in New York, all of the dailies are digitized there and sent to Los Angeles on a FireWire drive. At the facility here, all of their media is stored on the Avid Unity system. This includes files for special effects, renders, media files, as well as all of the Avid project folders.
When a FireWire drive containing dailies is received, it contains five things: MX files of media, wave files of sound, a FLEX file, an ALE, and an Avid bin. The FLEX and ALE are delivered from telecine and allow the assistant to have a record of all of the footage that should be on the drive. The paperwork that comes with the drives is kept on the assistant’s computer, except for the line script and the notes from the script supervisor. These forms are printed out and placed in the editor’s binder so he has access to them as he is cutting the scene together.
Only one scene was received today, and it contained only three setups. It was a scene with two characters walking down a hallway having a conversation. I was extremely glad to see the dailies be processed because I realize how thorough an assistant needs to be while processing dailies. The assistant has a saying that he explained to me as “garbage in, garbage out.” This means that if media is ingested into the system incorrectly, then it will be incorrect when it needs to be exported. He had a copy of the script supervisor’s notes in front of him as he watched the dailies, and he checked each take off with a red pen to ensure that each take was, in fact, delivered.
When the assistant made sure that all of the takes were on the drive, he organized the clips by scene in a bin for the editor. This way all of the takes for scene 40 are in one row, below that are all the takes for scene 40A, and below that are all the takes for 40B, and so on. The assistant jokes about being extremely anal about all of his paperwork and starts a lot of sentences with, “It’s probably not necessary, but I like to…”. He keeps a database in FileMaker Pro of all the scenes in an episode that have been received, how long they are, how many takes there are, and what the script supervisor estimates the scene time should be.
Prior to arriving on this show I did not realize that the script supervisor keeps an estimate of how long each scene should be; when added up it gives an estimate of how long the show should be. At the moment with all of the scenes they’ve received, the estimated TRT for their show is seven minutes longer than what the editor has actually cut. The editor came into the assistant’s room to ask him about the measurement of the episode, and when he informed him how short the show was running, the assistant asked, “So what does this mean?” The editor looked at him and simply said, “Trouble.”
9.2 Different Venue in Episodic Television
… Andreas Arnheiter (International Intern 2010)
I had an awesome and really interesting day working with the assistant editor on this TV series. The whole editorial team enjoyed the pastry I brought from Switzerland, and they gave me a really warm welcome. Then the assistant and I jumped directly into our work. There are eight days of shooting for the current episode, and the PIX lock is in a couple of days. I wasn’t aware that TV series are produced that fast! First we started getting the dailies ready for editing. The assistant usually prepares a small scene first, so when the editor comes in, there is a least one scene to edit.
Today we got almost three hours of footage! The director tends to do several takes in one shot, and because it is shot on video, there is always some time before the clap (slate). This might add to the amount of footage. The set is in New Jersey, and they load the footage and sound to the exchange server. In the morning, the assistant copied everything to the external hard drive. He also got all the reports and made duplicates, which he put into the editor’s binder. When the editor arrived, the lights in the editing room were set and the Avid Media Composer was started and the binder was ready. The assistant told the editor which moments from the dailies she liked and also let her know that another editor—there are currently three editors and three assistants on this show—would help out with editing some scenes if she needed help. The really cool thing is that they all access the same server, and the editor gets the changes the assistant editor makes immediately and vice versa. That makes the work flow really easy!
After having lunch, we faced a problem; a wild audio line was missing. We had to call the sound facility in New York. They sent us the wrong file but eventually resent the correct one, and we were able to sync it by eye with the in-points. We continued to do the paperwork. All reports are sent first by fax. Later in the day we also get the same reports, tapes, and the audio backup by FedEx. In case we lose a file, we can recover it with these materials.
The rest of the afternoon consisted of the following tasks:
• Checked measurements, filled estimated times from facing pages and editorial time into the scene time log and sent it to the post supervisor so he could decide whether to report back the differing times to the producers.
• Prepared temporary background sound (music, SFX, dialog), chose the position of sound effects, and leveled the sound.
• The editor gave us two cuts and two music options, and we had to give her our opinion as to which we preferred.
• Checked the continuity breakdown and compared it with the shooting schedule to see which scenes we had already received and what we were still expecting.
• Made a to-do list for the next day.
Things that caught my attention today are grouping clips is awesome, communication with the editor is essential, a good bin order–view makes editing easier, adding color to the clips helps a great deal, setting locators and making notes is important, watching the scenes during dailies is vital, adding background SFX and being asked to evaluate cuts has been a really good education. The variety of tasks accomplished today led me to a far deeper understanding of the responsibilities of the assistant and his vital contribution in the editing suites.
… Paul Penczner (American Intern 2010)
I was anticipating a difficult day where I would have to carefully maneuver as an intern in the cutting room of the first feature film that I had ever been involved with. I had been running through a few notes of advice I had been given; don’t be too loud, don’t be too small, ask laterally, be honest, avoid triangulation! But, as I stepped into the editing suites for the first time, all of those thoughts suddenly floated away and were replaced by overwhelming excitement.
The feature film is currently in production day 52 out of 70 shooting days.
Many people were out of the office today. This meant I got to ease into things and spend a lot of time with the assistant editor as he broke down the new Red Camera work flow that they are developing for this film. I will try to quickly go over here some of the things I learned today in as much as I can understand it so far.
The editing staff is currently four people. The first assistant is in charge of syncing the transcoded video footage to the raw audio, managing the final cut project file, and preparing sequences for edit and review. The second assistant is in charge of ingesting the material, managing the server, creating LTO tapes for archive, maintaining the digital database that combines all of the information from the paperwork from the set with the metadata from the footage, watching all of the dailies for quality control, and reformatting and preparing the drives and CF cards to be delivered back to the set to be shot on again. The post PA is in charge of moving the media back and forth and manually logging script notes, camera reports, and sound reports.
Dailies come in to the facility in a variety of media. Video comes in on CF cards, Red SSD, or Red HDD. The preference is to shoot most video on 16 GB CF cards because there is less risk of losing data if a single card fails because you can fit fewer takes onto it. The failure of a large hard drive with many more takes would mean a much greater loss. Audio comes in separately on a portable Lacie HDD.
The first thing we do is run a checksum program that copies source material from our media onto the server. After all the files are written, the checksum reads through all of the data to look for any potential discrepancies between the files sitting on the drive or card and the server. Now that they are sitting on the server we can access the R3Ds for transcode. Before we run the transcode, the first assistant first consults the script supervisor notes for takes that the director has asked to be deleted for one reason or another. The remaining takes are for print and are then transcoded to Apple Pro Res LT for the second assistant to start organizing. The first assistant then plays each clip that comes in to see if there are any irregularities in the footage.
Simultaneously, the first assistant will be entering the footage data into a digital database created through FileMaker Pro. This database automates a variety of fields of information that are derived from the metadata coming from the camera. Additionally, through a terminal command, the assistant automates frame grabs from the QuickTime proxy files by building a line of code that extracts a single frame from the centermost frame in a clip. For example, in a clip of 24 frames, the code would know to grab frame 12 and place it in a field for that page in the database. This little trick was the first in a series of code lines and terminal commands that the assistant showed me to quickly navigate and automate much of the tasks that would otherwise take too long to do manually as an assistant.
The assistant also reviewed scenarios where hard drives have corrupted or are missing directories that would cause hard drives to appear empty when they have been shot on. This can sometimes happen if a hard drive is ejected from the camera without being safely shut down. The data is usually still sitting on the drive, and so we use a command built by the Red company called RedUndead that rebuilds the directory of the file system to allow access to these files.
We discussed the conforming process that they are preparing so that when the picture is locked they can send a 2 K sequence to the DI for the online. Through RocketCine-X we can manually look up and load the corresponding R3D files that match the ProRes clips in our sequence and then export those R3Ds as DPX sequences made from single frame DPX files. But the assistant is building a program that utilizes the EDL with the database that he has been creating to automate that process in RocketCine-X in a way that essentially rebuilds a 2 K final cut sequence shot for shot.
I also realize that everything here is not necessarily universal to all feature films. In the world of digital post, tapeless work flows are still like the Wild West. Most importantly, I think that I am understanding the depth of control one can have over their machine if they can develop an understanding of the code behind all of the video software. Though most assistants rarely use terminal commands, they are empowering and kind of neat to know.
It’s an exciting challenge for me because I see postproduction as ever changing. The hope is by opening your work flow to new ways of thinking and processing film in post, films can really move the ball forward in creating better systems for editing. I can see already that all of us in post are striving for the same things—faster ingestion periods giving more time for the editor to be creative, and easier outputs.
… Nompi Vilakaze (International Intern 2010)
I now understand what is meant by “the editor cuts, and the assistant editor does everything else.” Shadowing the assistant was a true lesson in this. I came to realize what responsibility she carries on this reality show. Everybody from the editors, to story producers, to the postproduction supervisor wanted something from her. She is the first one to arrive on the premises and the last one to leave. Her day, my day, began at 9:00 a.m. and ended at 8:00 p.m. She booted up all the machines and logged everybody on. She dealt with people’s requests, such as monitors that did not work, offline media, virus scans, sending the PA to buy DVDs and labels, and onlining a sizzle. A sizzle is about two minutes long and is used by the production company to get funding for the pilot. I watched as she disconnected this sequence from the server so that the media was offline, and she decomposed it and batch captured it at high rez at 1:1. I also watched as she put together an OMF sequence. They use AAF because it’s more compatible with the DS Nitris. This had to go to the mix house because one of the characters pronounced a word incorrectly. Because an ADR line was not possible, she had to find different takes of the shot where the word was said correctly. She later emailed the file over to the mix house.
In all the episodes of this show, they have an international add-on. This consists of extra cut scenes that are dropped in at the end of the finished show and can be inserted in the international version. It’s called a snap in. After lunch, the assistant helped the online editor draw a schematic for his online suite because he was not happy with the way it was wired. Their tech support came in, and the assistant had to make sure that the bay would be correctly wired according to the specs required by the online editor. For technical problems, I learned the assistant becomes the go-to person. She manages the Unity and gives people read or write access and decides what they need to see and what they don’t need to see. It was also interesting to see how she dealt with different personalities. Mostly everybody was great, but there was an occasion where she had to navigate a certain challenging personality. I’m learning.
These interns experienced a variety of technological tasks, organizational insights, and social skills at work on their very first day in the cutting rooms! It is important to arrive in the cutting rooms with a basic knowledge of the tools and a willingness to learn on the job. Having a hands-on experience completes your education and is one of the best ways to observe the kind of decorum that is expected of you when you join the workforce.