David Bigelow: The Tapeless Post-Production Workflow
The tapeless post workflow simplified the final steps at the Technicolor film processing lab. “Because we were using DVCPRO HD, we just sent them a TIFF file sequence of the whole movie, which they used for color correction and output to the 35mm negative,” says Bigelow. “There was no tape.”
That was a huge savings. Outputting to an HD master tape requires renting or buying decks, which can cost $80,000 to $150,000, notes Bigelow. “With as little as a PowerBook and a hard drive to hold the media, I can deliver a movie that’s ready to be transferred from video to film.”
A Wider Palette
Bigelow prizes the tapeless workflow especially because it encourages creativity. “It’s so simple that it makes people more willing to experiment,” he says. “You can have multiple versions of a scene and a wider palette of choices to pull from.”
The streamlined workflow gave the director-editor the freedom to explore his film from alternative angles. “We were able to work with various expository methods and see how we might tell the story differently,” says Bigelow.
The film crew and actress Cassidy Hinkle prepare to shoot a scene.
Reviewing Cuts on DVD
Using DVD Studio Pro, Bigelow and his colleagues made 24fps SD format DVDs of various versions of the film and the trailer for their screenings. “I love being able to encode 24fps MPEG-2 content so the look of the film is preserved in playback. Many DVD authoring programs take your 24fps footage and convert it to 30fps, which looks okay on TV, but computers display all the interlaced information, so you see these thin horizontal lines. But DVD Studio Pro lets you output your HD projects in 24fps SD, so you don’t see those artifacts — they look good on computers or TVs.”
Ghostly Effects
Moody Street’s live action digital effects supervisor and artist John LaFauce used Shake to key the green screen shots with the background footage — like the New England woods with fall colors, which the crew couldn’t go back and redo. “We had to make the green screens work in relation to the scenes that were already fixed,” says Bigelow. “Shake helped us make sure the camera was in the right position, the angles matched, and so on.”
Shooting the fall foliage in one layer and the actors in another gave the Shake artist more freedom to composite the elements, allowing him to make the ghost bright and glowing, in clear contrast to the background.
Beautiful Screenings
Bigelow recalls how well his chosen platform pleased the director: “When Stimpson began to edit in 24fps HD, viewing the cut from his PowerBook to our 23-inch Apple Cinema Display, well, he was just staggered by the quality. In fact, the beauty of that and having the ability to see the footage in the same quality it would ultimately be shown in — right on his editing station — was one of the things that sold him on the whole process. He was able to evaluate shots better, and he said it was the best-looking offline edit he’d ever worked with.”
The Moody Street team gained valuable insights by showing the film-in-progress to test audiences. “We outputted from our PowerBook to the digital HD projector,” explains Bigelow, “so we were doing theater screenings in full HD right in the middle of the edit process — instead of going to SD, which is what you usually have to do during post. We didn’t have to apologize for some soft-looking low-res offline edit, like we would have had to do with Avid. We even did color-correction in Final Cut Pro, so it was very close to the look of the final film.”
”With as little as a PowerBook and a hard drive to hold the media, I can deliver a movie that’s ready to be transferred from video to film.”
No Excuses
Theater screenings used to require HD tapes and decks. “That was a huge investment and a huge risk dragging around a $30,000 deck every time you set up,” notes Bigelow. “Now, we output directly from our project, make a file and burn it to DVD. We take that to a theater with a digital projector, and if anything happens to the disc, well, that’s $1.50 of media. The quality is virtually the same — the Apple H.264 compression format looks awesome — and it costs a tiny fraction of the original HD media.”
The changes and challenges are what keep Bigelow enraptured with film. “There are always new things,” he says. “And I love collaborating with people. At Moody Street, I’m not a cog in a wheel but a member of a creative team. And with the Apple tools, I have the ability to work as fast as I can. It goes from my inner eyes to my fingers, and we see pro results on-screen very quickly. I have so much power for so little money. So there are no excuses. Anything anyone asks of me, I can accomplish it.”
