Confessions of a film editor: Stephen Mirrione opted for HD dailies while cutting the George Clooney-directed Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind - Edit This! - high definition - Brief Article - Interview

Post, August, 2002

A game show host living out a secret life as a CIA agent, carrying out "hits" on unsuspecting contestants as they claim their vacation to Aruba? Sound like an E! True Hollywood Story or pure fantasy? Actually it's a little bit of both.

Due out nationwide in January 2003, the feature film Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind is based on the fictitious, yet "autobiographical, book by Chuck Barns, the creator of such TV shows as The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and The Gong Show, which he hosted, and who claims in the book -- quite believably -- to have been a CIA operative who killed over 30 people.

In his directorial debut, actor George Clooney turned to Steven Soderbergh's noted editor of choice, LA-based Stephen Mirrione, to cut the feature, which stars Clooney, Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore and Sam Rockwell.

POST: What got you interested in working on Confessions?

STEPHEN MIRRIONE: The fantastic and unusual script got me hooked. Also, I've been doing quite a few ensemble pieces lately, so it is nice to do something that concentrates on one person.

POST: What editing systems are you using for this film?

SM: We're using two Meridien hardware-based Avid Media Composers on Macs. This is my first time bumping up from the older (ABVB) systems. It's been a whole lot faster and more stable, Also, because this new format can handle importing from a digital source and the system offers really outstanding compression, we've had a great image all the way through the process. For basically the same amount of memory, you get a far superior image. And we were able to judge things like focus and really see details that in the past I wouldn't have.

POST: What have you used to edit your previous films?

SM: I've used all kinds of systems in the past... Lightworks, laserdisc systems and I've cut on film, but for the most part I've used an Avid. Whenever I'm given a choice, I definitely prefer to work with an Avid system. Although I've been upgrading a little bit at a time over the years, this is the first film in a long time on which we made a major leap forward with the technology, in part because we decided to do our dailies in high definition.

POST: Now that you've used it, how stable have the systems proved to be?

SM: We've been really happy with it. Or Oceans 11, it was common that I would have to wait for the system to catch up with me, whether I was dealing with effects or just opening a window. Those are small things, and it's hard to measure it as anything significant, but it all adds up.

POST: Tell us about your post production setup for Confessions?

SN: On this film, we redesigned the way our editing systems are hooked up. We have a central machine room that has all of our drives and decks -- it's kind of the hub of the entire set-up. In both my room and the assistant editor's room, we are just running a few Ethernet and sound cables. We have a lot of flexibility and can patch any deck into any room, so we can use both rooms for almost anything. This was actually something I had seen when I went over to visit the editors who were cutting Panic Room. This was a system they had designed and were using, and I was able to model my set-up on theirs and make some adjustments to suit myself

POST: Could you explain the choice to screen the dailies in HO?

SM: Another thing they did on Panic Room was to screen all their dailies in high definition. Instead of printing film, the negative was transferred to HD to screen the dailies, We are doing a lot of color manipulation, which really affects the look of the film rather dramatically. By going with the HD dailies, we were able to start seeing the way these things will look, and we can get an idea of what we're really dealing with.

POST: Can you describe the nature of the color manipulation?

SM: This is a movie that takes place over 40 or so years -- from the 1940s to the early 1980s. One of the things we did was take a lot of the footage and turn it B&W and then add color back into it. We used these kind of pastel looking colors, so it almost has a hand-colorized look--like the Ted Turner colorizing thing. This was just to represent that time period in a more interesting way. Our DP Tom Sigel was the one who really led the charge in getting us using HD for dailies.

POST: How did you view the HD dailies?

SM: During the shoot we moved the editing room to Montreal. Now that we are back [in LA] we have a room at Warner Bros. George [Clooney] is also starring in Steven Soderbergh's Solaris, so we wanted the editing rooms to be close to the stage so George could go easily back and forth between the two movies.

The lab in Montreal didn't have an HD screening room, so we set up a projector in the building with our editing rooms -- a Sony g-90u HD projector. In order to screen the dailies, we had W-VHS dubs made from our D-5 masters. W-VHS is an analog HD format that uses a special VHS tape stock. That way we could screen in HD without having to bring in an expensive D-5 deck When we got back to Los Angeles, we screened most of our dailies at Technique, where we will be doing our final digital color timing.