new year-->new edit suite

Things started moving super quick toward the end of 2008. It was decided that as a company, we needed to expand and move onward and upward and all that. So, from the countryside we have moved to our new home, Fazeley Studios, in the heart of Birminghams creative district, Digbeth. The final touches are being added this week, so on monday I should be making myself at home in my new edit suite.

Aside from that, I was busy editing a corporate film for Land Rover, for their Armoured Discovery range.. but ill blog about that when ive got some still from the edit to show

Momster>Crimson>Red

Earlier in the week the DP (Ed Moore) and myself sat down to do the roundtrip from Final Cut, through Crimson, into RedCine and back again.

Crimson was easy to use and worked really well. We had a slight issue with it matching to the wrong clips, however this boiled down to an error in reel name generation on the shoot, rather than a software problem, so that was easily solved.

Redcine was pretty straight forward. We were going out to ProRes HQ 1080p, so once all that was set, we went through the shots giving them basic colour treatmeant and scaling and cropping any shots we needed before leaving overnight to export.

Back in Final Cut and finally we have our HD sequence ready to be sent off for animation, its already looking tight without the Momster in, so im super excited to see what its going to be like when I get it back. It's going to be with these guys for a few weeks, at the same time as the sound guys go to work on the soundtrack, before I get it back for the grade and finish.

Momster/RED Workflow

RED.

This was my first time using RED footage, so I was a little anxious, what with it being so new and there still being a lot of debate over the best workflow with Final Cut etc..

Immediately after shooting, we backed up the .R3D files to 2 separate firewire drives, for safety sake.

With the help of my super colleague, Dave Stephenson, we ran some tests on immediately going to ProRes out of RedCine, and found we were getting a approx. time of about 6:1. Although with only 2 hours of footage, this would be pretty much done over night, I decided to go down the route of using the proxies to get my offline edit down, as time is tight on this project.

Working with the proxies in Final Cut went smoothly. Sure, it doesnt like cross dissolves too much, but i knew this was going to be somewhat of a straight forward cut anyway. The offline is now ready for viewing by whoever it is that need to approve everything is going ok.

So the next step will be going via Crimson into RedCine to spit out a 2K .tif seq before being sent off for animation. This is happening later this week.

Momster

This little bundle of fluff is Momster.

Momster, (directed by Stephen Spencer) is the story of a little girl, Emily, who is imprisoned in a flat by her father - who makes her clean all day and prepare his dinner for when he gets home. One day Emily finds some pictures of her mother and an old sketch book. Inspired, Emily draws a little monster that comes to life and helps her try to escape the life she is currently locked in.

The film has been shot on RED by Ed Moore and is a mix of live action and animated footage.

I have just finished cutting the offline edit for the producers to see, (after all, they are funding it) before we go ahead and send it to the animator (also the director, Stephen) to add all the external shots of the council flat and of course, Momster. It’ll the be coming back to me for the online and grade.

Directed by Stephen Spencer

DP - Ed Moore

hello.

hello. welcome.

i dont really know why i started this blog, the chances are i will forget i have it in about a week. if i dont forget, the aim is to fill it with all things in my world of post.

enjoy

si-