ASK & DISCUSS
INDEXPost Production Advice: Indie Feature Shot on C300
11 years, 7 months ago - Amy Daneel
Hi SP!
I'm about to embark on the offline of my first indie feature film & wanted to check whether anyone has any pearls of wisdom.
It's been shot on the C300, roughly 70 hours of footage (1920 x 1080, XDCAM-HD 422).
The DP shot two thirds of the footage at 24p (I'm unsure why), and then forgot to change his settings so a third is at 25p.
The assistant who existed before my time set up the project and synced sound in Premiere.
Though I'm based on Final Cut 7, I thought it would be better to move over to Premiere (I have version 5) to avoid transcoding to Pro Res & because valuable leg-work has been done.
I've got a Mabook Pro (late 2011) only unfortunately, 2.2, i7, 8GB RAM, on Lion 10.7.5
I wanted to ask whether anyone has any suggestions moving forward so that the process is as smooth as possible for myself and online.
E.g.
Should I request a thunderbolt drive instead of 800firewire?
Should I have multiple project files for different parts as to not have one massive Premiere project?
Looking forward to any feedback.
Regards,
Amy
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11 years, 7 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin
70hrs is one heck of a shooting ratio, I'd start by getting rid of 60 hours of it. Did your script supervisor give you a marked up script of good/no good takes and coverage? Maybe start from there and create an assembly edit based on the marked up script, then see what needs rescuing? If you've access to an avid, the script-based editing can be quite an interesting way to work.
But proper editors will likely be along soon to give real, useful advice I'm sure...
11 years, 7 months ago - Dan Selakovich
Holy crap! 70 hours? How is that even possible? Is it a documentary or a narrative feature? I have to assume it's a doc with that kind of shooting ratio. If that's the case, and this is mind boggling to think about, but if a doc, I'd transcribe all that footage and do a paper edit. It would save you time in the long run. Think about it: just viewing the footage once would take a week of 10 hour days.
If narrative... damn. Can Premiere even handle a project of that size? There are certainly more tech savvy people here than I, but one thing is for sure: you're going to have to break this thing down into "reels". (In the old days when we used to edit on actual film, a reel was 1,000 feet, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. Around 10 reels made up a feature.) I've never used Premiere, but just thinking about cut footage, I'd keep each "reel", or in FCP terms, sequence, between 9 and 15 minutes just to keep a handle on it creatively. The last thing you want to do is scroll through a 2 hour timeline. I certainly wouldn't make each reel a separate project, if Premiere is capable of that. By the way, Everybody knows about Avid, but in those early days they had a competitor known as Lightworks. Lightworks was designed by editors, and was SO much better. They had this window on the system known as a "rack." As you finished each digital reel, you threw it into the rack. When the time came to view the film as a whole, it took a simple mouse click to throw all of those reels into the timeline. FYI, Lightworks is still around, but now it's open source and free (or a yearly small fee if you want more codecs). The Mac version should be available in April.
As for firewire and thunderbolt: Thunderbolt drives simply kill firewire. Even USB 3 is faster than firewire 800. I would go with Thunderbolt if that is an option (I was unaware that Thunderbolt was available in 2011 macs, so it just goes to show you how much I know). I don't envy you cutting this monster on a laptop with such limits. Hopefully some more tech savvy people will chime in.
I'm afraid I'm mostly worthless with your technical questions. I'm old, and keeping up with all of the digital editing systems, and quirks of each, just wears me out. Once Lightworks has its Mac version, I'm switching to that, and never looking back.