David Bigelow: The Tapeless Post-Production Workflow
“I’m like a race car driver who’s also a mechanic,” says David Bigelow, who’s that rare combination of crackerjack technologist and accomplished creative hand.
“I’ve been working on the Mac since the early days, so I know it intimately. And over the years I’ve learned film and video editing, graphics compositing, DVD authoring, audio filtration. So when I’m behind the wheel and the engine makes funny noises, I know why sooner.”
Definitely the guy you want on your crew when complex workflows overheat your filmmaking engine, Bigelow has a lifelong passion for the cinema. “I grew up on Martha’s Vineyard,” he says.“I watched ‘Jaws’ being filmed on the beach where I was taking swimming lessons. Then I saw it at the theater and it was terrifying! That movie kept me, and millions of other people, out of the water all summer.
I was so impressed with where movies could take me — into this incredibly exciting world I’ve been obsessed with ever since.”
That obsession has made Bigelow a savvy post-production supervisor for “The Legend of Lucy Keyes,” the latest project of Boston-based Moody Street Pictures. The film, directed and edited by John Stimpson and slated for release in Fall 2005, is a spooky historical thriller based on the true story of a family who lived near Wachusett Mountain in mid-18th-century Massachusetts.
“I’m like a race car driver who’s also a mechanic,” says David Bigelow, whose skills as both a technologist and creative artist made him the perfect post-production supervisor for “The Legend of Lucy Keyes.”
Filmed near the site of the original Keyes house, the movie explores the mysterious disappearance of four-year-old Lucy, who followed her sister to a nearby lake one day and was never heard from again. Her mother, Martha, searched the woods every evening until grief drove her to the edge of insanity. Some years after she died, the truth came out.
People to this day swear they’ve seen the ghosts of Lucy and Martha haunting the wooded hillsides of Wachusett Mountain.
A Week to Switch
Bigelow designed an ultra-efficient, all-Mac post-production platform that makes the 18th-century ghost story very modern indeed. His first task was convincing director and editor John Stimpson to learn Final Cut Pro HD. “Originally he was going to cut on Avid Express,” recounts Bigelow. “But the typical Avid workflow involves downconverting your HD tapes to DVCAM for offline editing at 30fps in SD, then onlining in HD, after which you have to resolve the relationship between your 30fps edit and your 24fps edit.”
“The tapeless post workflow is the cat’s meow. I can shoot in Varicam, edit in Final Cut Pro HD and deliver my files on inexpensive hard drives for transfer straight to film — without any additional decks or equipment. That is the most efficient digital workflow I know of.”
So Bigelow lobbied for Final Cut Pro. “I explained that we’d be able to work in the native compression we shot in, so we wouldn’t have to downconvert to a lower-res offline version,” he says. Stimpson had shot a short film to test the Panasonic Varicam with an Avid post-production workflow and encountered problems with video and audio sync and offline-to-HD online conform. “He said, ‘If I have to go through that times ten for this film, I’m not looking forward to the workflow,’” remembers Bigelow.
The director was only “mildly reluctant,” according to Bigelow, to learn a new editing system. “Stimpson embraced Final Cut Pro because it just made sense for his big feature film.” Once he dived in, the switch was easy. “It took him all of a week to get really comfortable,” Bigelow says. “He mapped his keyboard settings the way he was used to, then he was off and running.”
Where’s the Tape?
Bigelow likes to talk about the tools he and Stimpson used to edit “Lucy Keyes”: The Panasonic AJ-HDC27 Varicam and AJ-1200A deck, a PowerBook G4 and a dual-processor Power Mac G5, a 23-inch Apple Cinema Display and a 42-inch Panasonic HD plasma screen, with Final Cut Pro HD, DVD Studio Pro, LiveType, Shake, QuickTime and Photoshop and a bunch of heavy-duty LaCie FireWire drives. But he gets truly excited when he talks about what they didn’t use: tape.
“We explored doing a tapeless post-production workflow and saw that there was no advantage in going out to tape,” he says, satisfied to have eliminated both the cost and the time. “So we ingested our footage through FireWire and we outputted directly to film. We used FTP to transfer all our media back and forth with the VFX house. We were file-based in every aspect of post — and I don’t personally know of anyone else who’s done that. This project demonstrates that a tapeless post workflow is possible.”
Not only possible, but super-streamlined. “To me, the tapeless post workflow is the cat’s meow,” says Bigelow. “I can shoot in Varicam, edit in Final Cut Pro HD and deliver my files on inexpensive hard drives for transfer straight to film — without any additional decks or equipment. That is the most efficient digital workflow I know of.
