Geoffrey Richman: Editing “Murderball”
Richman and his team didn’t originally think they would finish in Final Cut Pro. “We were going to have it done at the lab,” he says. “But we were in crunch mode, so we took it to Final Frame, a post facility in New York. We upconverted the footage to HD and color-corrected straight from our Final Cut Pro timeline. It worked out very nicely.”
Over the months of crafting “Murderball,” Richman got deep into the program. “I learned a lot about the inner workings of Final Cut Pro,” he says. “And I fine-tuned the keyboard layout to the things we were doing, so by the second month the editing was going a lot faster.” One of the things Richman learned was the impossibility of putting all his materials into one project file. “We broke it down into sub-projects and they opened as fast as any scene in Avid,” he notes.
“I really appreciate the things you can do in Final Cut Pro that you can’t do in Avid. Take audio mixing — it’s so much quicker in Final Cut.”
He also became a big fan of QuickTime. “The ability to work with real DV QuickTime movies was a huge timesaver,” says Richman. “It was great not having to deal with all those random file names and Avid media formats.
Quicker Audio Mixing
“I really appreciate the things you can do in Final Cut Pro that you can’t do in Avid,” Richman continues. “Take audio mixing — it’s so much quicker in Final Cut. There’s no separate mode you have to use, like in Avid. You just play your timeline and ride the audio levels, and it automatically records your adjustments as it plays. So it’s easy to put in a new track of audio or music or dialogue and mix it in fast.”
He also likes being able to mute clips. “That is indispensable,” says Richman. “Now, when I work in Avid, I can’t stand not having that.” The editor explains that when he has five alternate shots piled on top of each other on the timeline, this feature allows some of them to be turned off. “That way, you see only the one you want, but the others are there if you need them. You want to keep your alternate shots floating around in the vicinity of where they may fit later on, instead of making separate sequences that you have to cross-reference later.”
Assistant editor Stephen Walker at his Final Cut Pro station.
He also relished the ability to work in full resolution the entire time. “We certainly would not be doing that in Avid,” he says. “Early on, we decided to do the entire film in full DV instead of working in offline RT. And it was great because we were able to deliver our rough cuts in full resolution on DVD, instead of VHS; the only difference between the rough cuts and the final was that they weren’t color-corrected.”
Starstruck
Throughout the months of editing “Murderball” and the heady days of its premier and prizes — besides the editing award, it also won the audience award for best documentary feature — at the Sundance festival, Richman never lost sight of the most important thing: the people the film celebrates. “It was such a big deal for me just to meet the guys and hang out with them,” he says.
“I only knew them from looking at their faces on my editing screen for nine months, and through the process of working on the film they became superstars to me. They were such strong presences on screen. And of course I knew their every mannerism, the hidden details and all the stuff they’d do when they didn’t know the cameras were rolling. You build this whole story that they are at the center of, and then you meet them in person — and I was just so starstruck in their presence.”
