South Park - Creative COW Magazine

One team. Three shows. Every week.
How can one team triple its post-production workload without going insane, while keeping all
three clients happy? Here are some lessons learned from a decade of workflow innovation.
DigitalFilm Tree was born from the idea of combining
some key then-emerging technologies to
create budget-conscious film editing workflows, using
basic desktop computers, and basing it all on tools like
QuickTime and Final Cut Pro 1.0.
Some of our first breakthrough features were “Full
Frontal” and “Rules of Attraction,” helmed by visionary
and maverick directors who explicitly wanted to
explore new workflows for independent production.
Our first major challenge was designing workflows
that could be relied upon for traditional, largescale
feature film production.
Working closely with editor Walter Murch, we
were able to do this for Anthony Minghella’s “Cold
Mountain,” which established once and for all that Final
Cut Pro could be a viable part of mainstream Hollywood
filmmaking.
The software itself is easy enough to use. Our challenge
was providing the in-house expertise to resolve
specifically film-related issues. These included cut list
and negative cutting problems that could be traced
Zed Saeed
Hollywood, California USA
back to improper telecine, or a less-than-thorough
creation of the initial Cinema Tools database.
We saw many of these same issues on our first
major HD project, “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,”
which was shot on HDCAM at 24p, using the
Sony F-900 camera.
The biggest obstacle wasn’t managing all the effects
and compositing, which is what you might think.
It was that none of the tools of the time — Final Cut
Pro, Cinema Tools, AJA Kona, the SANs we worked with
— were qualified to work with HD.
The producers of Sky Captain were determined to
live on the bleeding edge, and these solutions simply
weren’t more than half-baked at the time. Fortunately,
we were able to work closely with all the manufacturers
involved, who were every bit as anxious as we were
to pull it off...which we did.
Our recent work on “The Forbidden Kingdom,”
starring Jet Li and Jackie Chan, added many additional
layers of complexity. We coordinated with the prodution
team during the shoot deep in mainland China,
Zed Saeed is the Senior Post Production Consultant with DigitalFilm Tree in
Los Angeles and New York. “Each year, some miracle technologies appear.
Few of these last,” he says. “Part of my job is to bet on the right horse.”
Cinematographer Peter Pau with Jet Li (left) and Jackie Chan (right) on
location deep in mainland China for “The Forbidden Kingdom.”
where our responsibilities included making tape backups
of the Panavision Genesis RAW files, and placing
them physically in a safe to satisfy the insurance bond.
We also coordinated a post team spread across China,
the US, Korea and Australia.
[Editor’s note: Zed wrote a full article for CreativeCow.
net covering every aspect of this remarkable production.
You can find it at http://library.creativecow.net/forbidden_
kingdom.php]
All of this put us in the right place, at the right
time, to work with Final Cut Pro in the world of episodic
production: all of the challenges of film production,
now applied to the creation of two dozen “short films,”
non-stop.
Episodic work brings so much more pressure that
it’s no wonder that the same studios who signed off on
Final Cut Pro-produced movies weren’t ready to use it
on their TV shows.
The pressure on us: the same team of nine that
used to post one episode of a single show each week
now becoming responsible for posting three different
network TV series, every week, at the same time.
SCRUBS
We helped the medical comedy “Scrubs” become the
first major TV series to be onlined in Final Cut Pro,
starting in their second season. By the next season, we
took on the role of consultants and created, designed
and implemented an on-site Xsan system and network
for two editors and two assistant editors.
Even though “Scrubs” originates on super 16mm,
the final air master is delivered on Digital Betacam. At
the same time, the studio requires film cut lists in case
of a future film negative cut, which means that we had
to build that into the workflow as well.
We offline QuickTime files
from the dailies we process.
These are sent to the Scrubs editorial
for a creative edit. The Final
Cut Pro project files are then
emailed back to us for online
and finishing.
Our work has expanded to
all post services, including visual
effects. It is no small honor that
Jon Michel won the 2005 Emmy
for Outstanding Multi-camera
Editing for his work on Scrubs
Along with a move from
NBC to ABC, “Scrubs” will also
be moving from film to HD. The
HD transition has the reputation
for being difficult, but
compared to film, it’s a breeze.
One of the things you can’t
see as a viewer is that we’re
carefully preparing the Cinema
Tools databases and linking
them to the QT files as
we go, totally conformed to
match back for film integrity. That is, we have to
confirm every single clip against the edge code, so
that when going back to the sources for later cuts,
producers can actually find the clips they need.
Now, with HD, the only thing we have to
Zach Braff, “Scrubs”
worry about is timecode. We capture video, we output
video, end of story
THE GREAT FLOOD
Every post house has its challenges, but nothing prepared
us for what we call “The Great Flood of 2005.”
We came in one morning to find over 6 inches of water
across the entire facility. Let me tell you, walking from
32 Creative COW Magazine — September / October 2008
Creative COW Magazine — September / October 2008 33