Coppola/Murch: Second Youth
Editing in San Francisco with their crew, associate editor Sean Cullen and editorial assistant and visual effects specialist Kevin Bailey, Murch and Coppola honed the film to its essential through-line, trying to bring out the strong plot and mood elements that had initially attracted Coppola to the story while testing the limits for “how many metaphysical leaps there could be without losing the audience.” The editing process lasted six months, including two months working with Coppola in Romania before the film locked.
Workflow Resolution
To efficiently carry his cuts forward given the DV workflow he’d inherited, Murch stayed in DV resolution initially and then worked on an up-res’d 1080p HD compressed version of the footage as he neared his final cut. Cullen and Bailey eventually onlined the film in 1080p 24 uncompressed in their suite, with five Macs running Final Cut Pro over Xsan. That final online version was sent to Laser Pacific for color timing.
“Working in 1080p 24 compressed ended up being an unbelievably good representation of what we were doing,” says Cullen, “because it was essentially indistinguishable from the online, plus it was really easy to move around in terms of jumping place to place in the timeline and locking and loading things. Walter was very happy with image quality of the cut in video.”
Adds Cullen: “Final Cut Pro’s key advantage in the workflow was its ability to easily mix media and compressions. I think the thing that really worked for us, and the thing that made Final Cut the tool of choice, was that we could be smart about how we utilized the resources we had without being hindered by those arbitrary restrictions on the media.”
Visual Effects
Very much in character with how the film was shot, the visual effects strategy was created on the fly. Murch calls Coppola a “process-oriented director” who solicits input and makes decisions as he goes, unlike some result-oriented directors who storyboard each shot down to the last detail.
“One thing that emerged was that in the screenplay the dream sequences are described in parentheses as being ‘purple,’ but that was really just a shorthand for Francis to indicate that somehow we will distinguish these dreams from ordinary reality,” says Murch. “And during shooting Francis came to work one day, looked at a monitor and said ‘Let’s make this shot upside down.’ Because it was digital, of course, they didn’t have to physically turn the camera upside down, they could just electronically invert the images. And of course I can do the same thing in Final Cut. And often did.”
Visual effects specialist Bailey was able to create about 60 of the 180 effects for the film in the San Francisco editorial suite, pre-visualizing in Final Cut Pro and doing final implementations in Shake. “UPP (United Production Partners) in Prague did all the difficult 3-dimensional kinds of effects that we needed,” says Murch. “Anytime we added falling snow, for instance. And the creation of the plane flying over the Himalayas. Things like that. Relatively simple but still critical work was done by Kevin in our own facility.” Using Shake, Bailey was able to digitally erase twenty-first century intrusions from some shots and multiply extras through compositing.
Cullen notes that seamless ‘roundtripping’ between Final Cut Pro and Shake was a key workflow advantage, encouraging easy but critical experimental back-and-forth. “Kevin could take the sequence that Walter had cut in Final Cut Pro, bring it over into Shake with all of its color timing, make the effect, render it back out, put it on the Xsan, and give it back to Walter within an hour. The ability to have very complete visual effects in the next room working right alongside editorial meant we could experiment artistically because it was so easy to make and change the effects.”
Sound Reasons
Murch also used Final Cut Pro to work the audio, eventually handing over to sound designer Pete Horner Final Cut Pro files with 24 audio tracks. “Walter always works very heavily with the audio,” says Cullen. “So we handed over a really complete, really high-quality sound assembly.”
Wrap
Ultimately, working in Final Cut Pro was a huge advantage for Murch and his crew because it allowed them to visualize so far down the postproduction pipeline.
“In the final stages of editing the film, we were working with the ultimate resolution of the film,” says Murch. “So really, the final film, other than the color correction, came out of our editing rooms on Final Cut Pro — in this case Final Cut literally was the final cut.”
