DigitalFilm Tree takes root on Cold Mountain - Edit This!

Post, Dec, 2003 by Ken McGorry

WEST HOLLYWOOD -- Small, software-based editing systems aren't known for handling major motion pictures; they're more suited to laptops and short promos and sketching design work.

But Ramy Katrib and Zed Saeed of DigitalFilm Tree (DFT) were ready the day Sean Cullen, first assistant editor to none other than Walter Murch, walked into their shop with Murch in tow. It was a few months before Cold Mountain was to go into production and Cullen had been cagey over the phone in preliminary chats, but Katrib and Saeed could tell by Cullen's technically sophisticated questions that something big was up. Big as in 600,000 feet of feature film to be shot in Romania by Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella. Eighty-five-million-dollar-budget big.

DigitalFilm Tree's (www.digitalfilmtree.com) specialty is putting together "workflow design" for people editing films in Apple's Final Cut Pro. They had previous experience on Full Frontal and Rules of Attraction but Cold Mountain, says CEO Katrib, represented the first development of a large-scale Final Cut editing workflow for a major motion picture.

For Cold Mountain, Murch and Cullen sat with Katrib and Saeed, DFT's senior post production consultant, for three days of talks about creating their own workflow customized to the scale of this film. Saeed says he made sure to emphasize any potential "bad news" as well as the good on such a job so there would be no surprises once the film was in production.

Katrib and Saeed put together a package of four FCPs with four 2GB Power Mac G4s running Cinema Tools (formerly known as Film Logic) and DVD Studio Pro. The DFT team relied on Aurora's IgniterRT 311 video capture and edit cards to handle realtime 24fps digitizing of telecine dailies and to provide Murch and his team with a most film-like editing experience. "The Igniter card allows realtime reverse telecine of 29.97 fps video into a true 24fps timeline, not a 23.976 approximation," says Saeed. "At the same time the Igniter Film Option resamples the audio to account for the 0.1 percent difference from 23.976 fps to 24.000 fps, allowing editors like Walter Murch to sync production audio in the timeline."

Aurora technician Jim Foreman accompanied the four kits--1,000-plus pounds of edit equipment--to Bucharest, where it was assembled and installed at Kodak Cinelabs Romania, the same place where Minghella was having his dailies done.

Two of the Power Mac G4 units were used by Murch and Cullen as individual edit stations, while a third was dedicated as a digitizing station for synchronizing dailies. The fourth system was used for exporting files and burning media to DVD. Murch's team had 1.2TB of networked online storage at their disposal via a Galaxy 60 Fibre Channel SAN from Rorke Data Systems.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In addition to saving on budget by using Final Cut, Murch expected to get online picture quality out of Aurora's capture card compression. As far as turning bad news into good, Murch found that, when he did experience any picture-quality problems associated with the Igniter card, Aurora technicians back in Sterling Heights, MI, were willing and able to e-mail him fixes overnight and even rewrite a new driver and put it up on an FTP site.

Both Katrib and Saeed have backgrounds as film students. Saeed says working with Murch was "such a significant thing. He's one of our heroes."