Joel and Ethan Coen:
Editing “Intolerable Cruelty”
When Joel and Ethan finished the shoot for “Intolerable Cruelty,” film was transferred to HD tape using a traditional high-definition telecine. When performing the transfer, the telecine created a log matching film edgecode to HD timecode. “We cut at 24 frames,” Diliberto says, “so we set up the Macs so they could work in the same way.”
Next, the production team dubbed the HD video to DVCAM for Final Cut Pro. DVCAM runs at the normal National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) standard, 29.97 fps — similar to the frame rate consumers get when they shoot with a standard DV camera. During this process, the HD deck performs a “pulldown,” the math that fits 24 frames of HD into 29.97 frames of video.
Now there’s just one problem: the DVCAM dub includes extra fields that the pulldown process inserted when it made the conversion from 24 fps HD to 29.97 fps video. And Joel and Ethan wanted to edit in 24 frames.
No problem.
175,000 Feet of Film
Once the video was brought into the Mac — it occupies about 370 gigabytes on three hard drives — assistant editors used Cinema Tools to pull out the extra fields that the pulldown had added, converting the DV into 24-frame format. With a direct correlation between each frame of the DV footage and each original film frame, the Coens could edit every single frame of film as if they had the film in front of them.
“Joel and Ethan shoot their movies very economically,” Dilberto says. “They shot 175,000 feet for ‘Intolerable Cruelty’ — less than half of what a normal movie shoots — because they know what they want. That’s a credit to them, because their movies are so detailed from their inception. As a result, it was possible to store the entire film within the CPU. Looking at the Macs, it looks like two guys with two computers. It doesn’t look like something that could cut a whole movie.”
In the new setup, Ethan opens up Final Cut Pro on his Mac and marks the in point for each clip. Working from the other Mac, Joel opens a folder on Ethan’s computer, pulls the project file over a standard Ethernet connection, opens Ethan’s selects and copies them into his Final Cut Pro project which contains the sequence. Instead of moving film around, Joel and Ethan simply move a project file between the Macs.
“Looking at the Macs, it looks like two guys with two computers. It doesn’t look like something that could cut a whole movie.”
At the end of each day they transfer the project file and additional media — for instance, sound effects or music — onto a FireWire hard drive. Here, an assistant prepares the sequence for sound supervisors and creates a film cut list through a Cinema Tools plug-in for Final Cut Pro. The cut list automatically matches each edit on the Final Cut timeline to the original frame of film.
Screening the Cut
Once the brothers cut the movie, assistant editors generate an edit decision list (EDL), conform a daily workprint into the cut reels and marry them with a temp mix for a first editor’s screening. “Now we’re moving into previews,” Diliberto says, “so we’re doing an online — matching the digital video files to the original 24-frame HD masters.” To make the transfer, the post-production team uses the Media Manager feature of Final Cut Pro.
The result? A pristine workprint for the first preview screening. Unlike a traditional film workprint (a film positive run through a projector), HD is free of the dirt, scratches, grease pencil and tape normally seen on standard workprints.
