courtesy of Dr Alan Taylor
The Apple Pro-Cut World Tour that started in Los Angeles on May 13th and ends in Sydney on June 18th rolled into the German capital city on June 5th 2008 to deliver a highly proficient and effective presentation that took the hundreds of attendees through the wonders of Final Cut Studio 2. There was some poignant irony that a show that celebrates the technical and creative wonders of digital filmmaking took place in the former DDR`s cinema showcase, the newly refurbished Kosmos on the Karl Marx Alle.
The three-hour presentation was led by Joseph Lindscheke (US), Hilary Percy and Chris Duke (UK) who took turns in highlighting the “next generation of post-production†that its originators asserted is designed “to free up the creative people to do their creative workâ€. Duke provided the initial overview on the Final Cut Server that allows for a marked improvement in cataloging, accessing, and sharing files in a fully customisable and less linear fashion; more significantly, it allows for batch processing of different film and digital formats.
To emphasise the latter point, the baton was then passed to Lindscheke who provided case study video reports from Radical Media that gloried in the sharing facility that The Final Cut Studio.2 allows. The second case study featured sequences of the 720 hours of footage covering the ASP Pipeline Masters Tournament (Hawaii); the full range of formats, from 35 mm, Red Eye, regular, video, to High Definition, were “tweaked†to consistency in a shared timeline and so allowing a number of print packages to be delivered to numerous clients within four months.
This overview was then supported by Hilary Percy who from front stage led the audience in a detailed post-production tweaking workshop on colour rendition, grading and audio (the Studio comes with 6,000 audio royalty-free files that include sound FX, music loops).
The focus then shifted from marketing applications to Hollywood. Lindscheke sketched the traditional post-production process that, from film to telecine, then back to film usually involved two awkward loss-generation conversions. Advances provided in Film Work Flow now brings HD editing to the desktop (even film short on 24 fps is captured), so no conversion, thus a quicker, smoother process.
The studio case study in this instance was 20th Century Fox (`Little Manhattan`, 2005, `The Comebacks`, 2007) and for whom Final Cut “connects all the dotsâ€. Editor Alan Edward Ball of Fox confirmed in the video sequence that filmmakers themeselves now have “100% control over the creative process”. The sample footage at this point in the afternoon came from Fox`s `Alien vs Predator: Requium` of 2007 which, amazingly, was filmed on 35mm. Other films that were mentioned included the 2008 Oscar winner `Old County for Old Men`, whose directors, the Coen Brothers, are featured talking about Color on the Apple Studio 2 website. The same website section highlights the recent work of Walter Murch Sr. who recently edited Francis Ford Coppola`s `Youth Without Youth` (2007), down from 170 hours. It was Murch, incidentally, who edited the late Anthony Minghella`s `Cold Mountain` back in 2003 on Apple Pro Cut – a breakthrough step for the multiple Oscar-winner and Hollywood itself. So much so that it earned an Oscar nomination, a point oddly not mentioned in the Berlin World Tour presentation.
Back in real time Lindscheke clicked through the benefits of PRO-RES, “the next generation of post production formats” that eliminates off-line editing and is able to compress across the range of formats (SD, HD, 2K) with no loss of quality. An example that brought one film project down from 1 tetrabyte to 170 gigabytes brought one of the afternoon`s biggest audience aws!. One clear and obvious advantage for film marketeers particularly is that quality trailers can now be delivered to cinemas far earlier in the film production process than was previously the case, in fact, long before the film completes actual production. Which is ironic, as what passes for the accepted aesthetic style, as noted by Percy, is for visual grunge.
Surfers in Hawaii and prehistoric monsters gave space in the end to the celebrated 2005 `Gorgeous` campaign for Jaguar. Again on video, Hal Wolverton of agency Outside Editorial confirmed that, when it comes to post-production, “What ten years ago was a whole building full of services, is now in that box!”. The Pro-Cut Studio 2 box of tricks in this instance was wholly devoted to a market upgrade: “the fetish of the car is what we are looking for”.
That pervasive need for control, of course, isn`t restricted to sports cars. From a critical perspective, the Apple Cro-Cut 2. World Tour seemed itself to encourage the fetish of the laptop, and invite purchasers (1,000,000 and counting) to succumb to the God-like alibity to “tweak” the colour tone of a crashing wave in Hawaii, `improve`upon the suntan of a beach babe, or partake, however distantly, in the internal operations of a Hollywood studio that very few can ever enter. In a world of increasing uncertainty (grounded, one might argue, in the advances of such technologies), such nominal power has its obvious attractions. However, when a producer extols the “time-saving” wonders of a new technology, we have reason to pause and wonder how many jobs that producer no longer has to pay for, how many skilsl and competences that once were in the building are now in the street.
In keeping with their highly efficient and persuasive demonstration, team Lindscheke, Percy and Duke wrapped at 4.55pm, wished their Berlin users all the best, zoomed past the grande Zeiss Ikon film projectors in the Kosmos Foyer, and headed for their next stop: Mumbai, June 11th, 2008.
All in all, a smooth and effective presentation that found its ideal venue in the Kosmos where space, (smooth working) technology and comfort made for a rewarding afternoon.
CODA.
The Final Cut World Tour continues….
Berlin: June 5; Mumbai: June 12; Seattle: June 17; Sydney:July 22 Singapore: June 18; Hong Kong: June 24; San Francisco: June 24 Taiwan: June 27; Atlanta: July 2; Dallas: July 8; Melbourne: July 24 Auckland: July 29.
For details on the production of `Cold Mountain` (2003), see, `Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch Edited Cold Mountain Using Apple`s Final Cut Pro and What This Means for Cinema`, by Charles Koppelman.
* Autor: Dr. AlanTaylor
E-Mail: kinowords@hotmail.com
Abfassungsdatum: 07.06. 2008
All rights to the author
