Challenging rules and demons: FCP allowed Sharon Rutter to cut her own documentary, take on a Hollywood feature and even learn how to mix - Edit This - Apple's Final Cut Pro

Post, Sept, 2002 by Helen Shortal Daly

SAN FRANCISCO--When Bay Area video editor Sharon Rutter became an early adopter of Apple's Final Cut Pro two years ago, she had no idea that it would lead to a job editing a Hollywood feature film -- Roger Avary's The Rules of Attraction, which is slated for release by Lions Gate Films in October.

The veteran Avid editor and budding indie filmmaker was simply looking for a cost-effective way to cut her first documentary, Demon of the Derby, Written and directed by Rutter, Demon tracks the 40-year career of roller-derby diva Anne Calvello.

With a Sony VX-1000 Mini DV camcorder; Rutter shadowed her subject for more than a year and gathered video and 16mm archival footage of Calvello competing during roller-derby's hey-day. The film footage was transferred to Mini DV at SF's Video Transfer.

PROBLEMS & POTENTIAL

As shooting was underway, the filmmaker and her partner, producer Christine Murray of Fireproof Productions (wwvv.fireproofproductions.com), invested in an Apple Power Mac G3, configured with 256MB of RAM, Final Cut Pro V.1 and external FireWire drives. After running into reliability problems with the external drives, the pair replaced them with a SCSI controller card and four internal hard drives.

"The early FireWire drives weren't delivering the throughput, so we installed about 350 gigs of storage on internal drives," says Rutter." Sometimes I'd walk into the edit suite and smell smoke -- but the system got the job done. There were also some problems early on with the stability of Final Cut Pro, but I stuck with it because I could see the potential of the system."

Like many documentary filmmakers, Rutter was faced with the challenge of distilling a tremendous amount of source material captured over a period of many months. Having her own editing system allowed her vision for the film to emerge overtime.

"With a rented Avid, I would have been under pressure to cut quickly," says Rutter. "I don't know how I would have cut Demon if I hadn't had my own system."

Rutter edited the video and preliminary sound mix for the 74-minute program, outputting the video footage to a DVCAM sub-master for online color correction at Video Arts. She output her eight-track audio mix as AIFF files for sweetening at SF's Disher Sound & Music, where the finished tracks were laid back to the Digi Beta master.

"The audio capabilities in Final Cut Pro have always been pretty good, but I wanted to finesse a few things in the sound mix, like adding EQ," says Rutter. "And I had to go online for color correction, because the early versions of Final Cut Pro didn't offer it. Version 3 has sophisticated color correction, so it's more standalone as a professional tool."

GOING HOLLYWOOD

With Demon behind her, Rutter relocated to Southern California last summer to edit The Rules of Attraction, which is based on a novel by Bret Easton Ellis. The film was edited in director Avary's Manhattan Beach home, where DigitalFilm Tree of West Hollywood had installed a Final Cut Pro edit suite. The Power Mac G4 dual 500 MHz system was equipped with Final Cut Pro Version 2 (later upgraded to Version 3), Cinema Tools Version I and more than a terabyte of storage on Medea RAID drives.

"We've finally reached a place in film editorial technology where anyone can purchase off-the-shelf technology at reasonable prices that enable you to own your own system and cut anywhere in the world," says director Avary. "We're cutting the entire film in my home, on a run-of-the-mill Power Mac, and the system has proved itself robust and stable."

The 35mm dailies from the shoot were transferred to DV for input into Final Cut, with Cinema Tools converting telecine files into FCP batch lists. The DV footage was also digitized at Apple's OfflineRT (PhotoJPEG-based) resolution, with links maintained to the DV files. Editing with low-res OfflineRT footage sped up system performance, while the project could readily be output at DV quality for screening purposes. Cinema Tools tracked the edgecode numbers for later matchback to the film negative, which took place at Magic Film & Video in Burbank.

"There was a certain degree of apprehension at the idea of working with a new nonlinear solution," says Rutter. "People were wary of how it might affect our sound editorial and our negative matchback. But our negative cutter; Edvin Maherabian, was great at ensuring that everything went as planned."

By January, 2002, Rutter and Avary had a rough cut of the film. As the pair finessed the project, Rutter gained substantial expertise as a sound editor; crafting "a pretty detailed temp mix with about 16 tracks per reel.

"Our original vision was just to do a rough mix, but it sounded so great coming out of Final Cut Pro that it became the guide track for the final mix, which was done on [Digidesign] Pro Tools," she says.

DEMON REDUX

Bay Area PBS station KQED-TV recently purchased Demon for its fall line-up, and Rutter was faced with trimming her 74-minute feature down to the 53-minute PBS hour. To retain the color correction and audio mix in her original master, she digitized the Digi Beta master of Demon back into her edit system, which she upgraded to FCPV.3.