Thought I would give a quick update on the edit proccess.
After a while of editing, I have gotten to about the halfway point (of the rough cut) scene 2 and scenes 8-15 have been cut. That covers most of the dialouge scenes, so the rest should be more or less easy. Look for a cut in a week or two. Also it looks like we may need one reshoot :( on just one of the shots the camera was dorking out. It seems that the shutter did not close before the pulldown claw moved the film, so there is a little verticle smearing, esp. in the highlights (which with white walls means most of the image). This was on scene 3 (the hand washing scene) everything else was fine, and I can sort of cut around it since the shot itself is not very important. The only thing I need on that shot is Karen turning the tap off. I will try and recut the scene without her turning the tap off, and put the sound fx of it turning off over one of her closeups; or I could remove any shot of the tap off, and let people assume she left it on the whole time If that doesn't work adequatley, we will have to reshoot just that shot, maybe as an insert or something quick and easy.
The short ends posed less problems than I thought they would. Since the film comes second hand there is never any telling what condition its in. All the film matches just fine, except one reel. That one is a bit more contrasty and seems to have a little greenish tint in the shadows. Its possible the people who used it first flashed the negative (though I would expect less contrast from that, not more), or maybe its just a bit out of date and stored improperly. Either way the difference is so slight, not only can it be corrected in digitial color, but I think we could even correct it in photo-chemical printing if we needed too. In the rough cut I have a filter applied which matches the footage together really well.
The audio was a pain to sync up, since we have about 300 differenct audio tracks. It took three days to log organize convert (to 32bit wav instead of 128kbs mp3, and add the 99.9% speed shift) and sync to slate. Also a problem, sometimes we didn't have a slate closing in the first shot of a reel. I will need to remember this in the future. I thought rolling 5 or 10 feet would give us enough lead for the lab to work with, but apparently they cut off a bit or expose part of the end or something because there are 4 takes where the film doesn't have an image until a few frames after the slate closes. Most rolls I rolled 10 feet of leader and another 5 or 10 feet of colorchart, so the majority is fine, but those 4 or so I had to hand sync, which is a pain!
Other than that everything is cutting together beautifully. If I were smarter and realized that every take was pretty much spot on, I would have varried my coverage a bit more and only shot one take of each angle. Then again its very scary to shoot just one master, one OTS, one med, and one CU and hope that everything will work out (refer to the smear issue earlier). I think in the future if I get actors as good as this we won't be seeing more than two takes per setup.
Total editted material is about 10 minutes so far, and I think 20 minutes is a good estimate for TRT, including titles. At some point I need to get Jeff and I think Kyle, maybe Dorrell to record scene 1, and I might have more scenes like 1 written to smooth out scene transitions. I dunno. Also we will need to record some foley of Karen for some of the shots that were MOS (just breathing noise and running sounds mostly, I don't think we need ADR for any of the dialouge) Thats the news for now. Call or email me if anyone wants to see the rough cut where its at.
