updated 02 Feb 2006

 

The Making of "Hip Hop's Dead," Part Two: Post
an article by Jon Fordham, Director of Photography, D.I.T.

Jon is a contributing member of our DV Info Net Community.

Once I had the footage in the can, I was now faced with the daunting task of cutting it together. For anyone that knows me, you know that post is the one area of production that I absolutely loathe! There's nothing I hate more than sitting at a computer editing. My hats off to anyone who can edit and enjoy it, as I find it to be the most tedious and boring task ever!!! It's all I can do to keep my sanity whenever I have to sit in a telecine bay or in a DI suite to color correct or manipulate my images. So when it came time to edit the Music Video I was not looking forward to it at all.

My saving grace was my new PowerBook! I travel so much that when it came time to invest in a new computer, the PowerBook G4 was the obvious choice! And yes, I was a little excited to see how Apple's latest version of Final Cut performed. Final Cut Pro 5 boasted native HDV editing. Native post support was one of the many issues I had with the HDV format. And I now had the opportunity to venture into native HDV post.

Capturing the footage via Firewire was just as easy as it is with MiniDV. And thanks to Final Cut's 1080/60i HDV preset, configuring the project was elegantly simple. Fortunately, this project was a Music Video. Which means that cutting was as simple as finding the best shot/performance and laying it onto the sequence in sync with the track. My only complaint with Final Cut's native HDV editing is that you can't view the project live via Firewire. With MiniDV, I can have any MiniDV camera or deck connected via Firewire, and view the project live on an external monitor. This is invaluable if you need to apply filters, fx, or color correct. I was lucky, in that I was working with a project that was black and white, and had been carefully shot and monitored in a controlled environment. So color correction or any other image adjustment wasn't required. But it was still a very handicapped way of working for someone used to seeing a true representation of his work on a calibrated CRT monitor.

Actual editing time only took about 8 hours total. But upon finishing the cut, I was faced with the single greatest issue that I've raised with HDV since it was introduced… A very interlaced, very video looking piece! 60i is just too "real" to sell a narrative project. And even though this particular project looked great, it still moved with the tell tale motion signature of video. So I turned to Nattress to eliminate that movement and restore the narrative polish that is 24 frames per second!

A little history: In the summer of 2003, I shot a 20 minute film with a Sony DSR-500WS. At the time, the DVX100 had only been on the street for about 6 months and was still somewhat unproven as a quality 24P camera. The budget did not allow for 24P HD. And ultimately I was forced to shoot 60i NTSC with the Sony DSR-500WS strictly for budget reasons.

After an exhaustive post schedule the film was finally completed in the spring of 2005. And while I was plenty satisfied with the quality of the image, the 60i motion signature was a huge detractor from the cinematic look. Many colleagues stated that the film looked great, but that the movement gave it away as digital.

After discussing post options like Magic Bullet, to manipulate the motion signature, an editor suggested that we try Nattress. I took a look at the demo results and was very impressed. The plug ins were so incredibly affordable that the producers had nothing to lose. So the editor ran the final cut of the film through the 24 frame conversion. I couldn't be more pleased with the results.

That was a year ago… Ever since, I have been wondering how Nattresss FCP plug ins would fare with HDV. And this project was the perfect test subject!

I contacted Graeme Nattress and informed him of my intention to use his plug ins on this music video. Not only did he send me full versions of both his Standards Conversion and Film Effects plug ins, he stated that he would be happy to assist me in any way possible! Talk about customer support! I first applied the infamous G-Film filter to the 1080/60i HDV sequence. The G-Film filter works by smart de-interlacing the video into 24 frames and then applies a pulldown to get it back to 60 interlaced fields conforming to NTSC. It took about 2 hours on my 1.67Ghz G4 PowerBook (with 1Ghz of RAM) to render the 60i to 24 frame pulldown to the 5 minute HDV sequence. The G-Film filter seemed to render a lot faster with the last project that I had used it on. So I suspect that the only reason it took two hours to render five minutes was the combination of my single processor laptop and the GOP compression string of the HDV format.

As I understand it, since HDV's GOP string relies on the first frame of the GOP to establish a base, cutting into that GOP involves a whole new render of the video. This is why you can't view a live Firewire output image in Final Cut. Because FCP has to re-create the images that been have cut into during the editing process.

Regardless, once the render was done, the 1080/60i HDV sequence played back with the movement of a 24 frame project with a proper 3:2 pulldown! The 24 frame motion was very convincing, dare I say, flawless!

I then output my HDV opus via Firewire to the Sony FX1 and had a 1080/60i HDV piece that moved just as if it had been shot with a 24P camera. The output, or "Print to Video" as it's called in FCP, took a few minutes to perform. Cause even though I had rendered the sequence, FCP then had to re-order the GOP before it could play it back through the Firewire. This was a minor annoyance. Just as I thought I had finished the damn post production process, I had to wait another 20 minutes while FCP re-ordered the GOP and was ready to output! This is not an issue I've ever faced with MiniDV. Though it's a minor one to deal with for such an easy and familiar app like FCP. Hopefully as faster processors are introduced, FCP will be able to re-order and display native HDV footage live via Firewire, just as with MiniDV.

I now had my 1080/60i HDV master ready to screen during my lecture at HDFEST! However, I now had to deal with a harsh reality of delivering HDV. Fewer than 10% of US households have HDTV's. And fewer than 1% have access to any form of HD-DVD. So I needed a way to deliver the Music Video to Elus, in a format that he could play and distribute. I turned to Nattress Standard Conversion for the answer. With Nattress Film Effects filters, the footage gets smart de-interlaced and pulled down. But it stays at the native 29.97 frame rate. So if you want to output a 60i project to a straight 24 frames, you'll need a different workflow than simply applying the G-Film plug in. While applying the G-Film plug in works for 90% of the projects out there just looking for the 24P motion signature, the Standards Conversion package will give you the universal mastering ability of frame rate and standards conversion.

Using the Standards Conversion plug in, I was able to nest the 1080/60i HDV sequence in a 480/23.98 DVCPRO50 sequence. Nattress Standards Conversion works by using an "image well". The image well is a little box that allows you to "drop" the original source file from the browser into the filter. What this does is points FCP to render from the source clip instead of rendering from a reference clip. The results are far superior to simply rendering a clip by switching the settings around.

Again, my render time was the same, about two hours. But I now had a letterboxed DVCPRO50 Standard Definition version of my Music Video! And DV50 is something that FCP can do live. So I was able to view the DV50 version live via Firewire on my desktop monitor. With a 24 frame SD version of the Music Video I could now output the piece and author a true 24 frame DVD for distribution.

Hip Hop's Dead made its World Premiere at HDFEST 2005 as part of my lecture "HDV: A Cinematographer's Point of View". It screened in full resolution, directly off the native HDV master from the Sony FX1's component output. It was definitely a huge success!

I would like to offer my most sincere thanks to Adrian Richards, Unique, Elus, SKY-O, Joe O'Brien, Shadow Studios, Joshua Freeman, Graeme Nattress, Rachel Rabinowitz, and Heath McKnight for their assistance in making this project possible.

Go back to Part One of Jon's article.
Written by Jon Fordham, Director of Photography, D.I.T..
Thrown together by Chris Hurd.