I thought you'd be interested in his reply. (By the way, he originally
sent this in Hebrew, but as my Hebrew is a tad weak, I asked him to
rewrite it again in English.)
This project was made for a museum named Massuah. They decided to
renew their content and build a new space into the current walls. The
creator of this new museum, Nava Schreiber, looked for something quite
special and unusual that can speak directly to teenagers. She decided
she wanted a huge movie on the main room. The dimension of this movie
must be around 12x2 meters.
With Yally Bergman, the director of the movie, we looked for different
options of projections and styles of movie, all of them unsatisfying.
Everything was revolving around a traditional 3 projectors movie with
3 different windows.
By chance, Yally met the band "Shakatak" who took the
project in an unexpected angle and they started to work on the soundtrack
(it's actually a lot of old song from the 30's remixed to our years
flavours). This changed radically the design of the movie. A few
meeting later with the designer, Ethan Bar-Tal, the cameraman Ofer
Einov (the one who shoot Bofort from the last Oscar), Yally, Nava
and myself, we got a first storyboard. It was my turn to find the
technical solution to make it happen.
This movie was started around January 2006. I had then 2 choices
for the video format SD or HD. SD was too small for such a screening
and HD was beyond our budget and too small and too big at the same
time... All the editing (both off and online) must be done on my
home video equipment (a G5 2x2Ghz with 2GB RAM). After a lot of hesitations,
I decided to go for a 3x16/9 anamorphic SD format and ask to build
the screen around this format. We made a 10x1.7m screen. The projection
options we had was for 3 independent projectors or a seamless screen
based on 3 projectors (in this case it looks like you have only
1 screen instead of 3)
We shoot everything on anamorphic 16/9 digibeta, especially because
of the heavy chroma key work I had to do afterward.
After all the hard pre-post work, I found myself in front of a lot
of problems (beside the artistic ones): a very suspicious client
(this kind of work is not usual in museums and she was very scared
by the results), a desperate need for speed (we couldn't afford any
new computer but my current one that was only one generation behind),
my low skills in compositing (i'm an offline, online editor and colorist),
a very tight budget, almost no post-prod facilities, no producer
and a lot of bugs in the compositing department of FCP.
I made all of the digitize in a post-prod house using a FCP workstation
with a blackmagic card. SDI all the way, uncompressed 1:1 8 bits.
The beginning was a lot of try-and-miss task: I started to edit
the first scene in offline jpeg mode. I immediately found myself
confronted by the problem of photoshop files and how FCP handle them.
Since everything is 1/4 resolution, all the layers in .psd got messed
up in their positions. I had to resize and replace everything by
hand. The speed was ok, the offline resolution was ok. To be sure
the online will only be a rendering task and no more, I made a test
and move the sequence from offline to online. Horror! All the layers
, all the keyframes, everything stayed into this 1/4 resolution.
No full screen! I had to re-do every animations to match the screen.
At this time, i had a sequence for each screen plus a "big" sequence
with the nested other sequences showing the 3 screens side-by-side.
I understood I cannot use this offline-jpeg technic. I switched
to full SD resolution screens with a lower codec. Everything was
edited in DV to be fully rendered at the end in uncompressed 8 bit
like the footage. And to simplify the compositing and animation process
and to give us a lot more freedom in the creative department, i moved
from the 3 anamorphic 16/9 screens to one huge anamorphic 48/9 screen
(anamorphic 2100x576-> almost 3000x576 pixels at the end!) I was
happy to have chosen FCP for this project as any other editing software
of my knowledge would have gave me this option (and especially not
Avid Media Composer nor After Effect)
I had to deeply understand what FCP sees and uses from Photoshop
files: which modes and effects. And I have to say, it's less than
perfect with a lot of unexpected results. The worse was to work with
compositing mode into the timeline. The results were very different
from what I was getting with Photoshop or After Effects. Even between
codecs, the results were not constant. Some mode were impractical
in DV and were rendered the right way under the uncompressed codec!
(took me a while to understand this one) Even more, adding dissolve
effect would give me different mode result to return to the expected
result at the end of the fade (!). You can see it happen from time
to time on the movie. All the textures on some scenes appear as cut
instead of fade because of that. I wasn't unable to solve this matter.
The most ambitious scene is the 1st scene: we have a one minute-long
traveling with tons of layers, graphics, keyed video. Because the
dancers are also singing, I had to be in sync all the way. After
a lot of tries, I decided the best way to do that was to lay all
the layers into a very huge sequence (a whoopy 13,000x576, resolution
and that's not a typo) and to nest it into my "regular" sequence
which will play the role of a window or camera on this huge seq.
But to be in synch with the music I had to begin from the end and
set the traveling movement and then place all the players and layer
into the stripe. I'll let you guess the rendering time of this scene
alone (more than 30 hours).
As you can see, this project was indeed huge and took almost 1.5 years
to finish (90 shifts during this time) and pushed FCP to it's limits
I think.
Larry Jordan is a post-production consultant and an Apple-Certified Trainer in Digital Media with over 25 years experience as producer, director and editor with network, local and corporate credits. Based in Los Angeles, he's a member of both the Directors Guild of America and the Producers Guild of America.
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