Many of the big film festivals (Sundance, Toronto, and so on) are known as “first look” festivals, and they will not screen your film if it has been screened elsewhere in the country. Private screenings, such as focus group tests and cast/crew screenings, are fine, but if you have charged admission to the public for a screening or made your film available to download off the Internet, you may not qualify for these top flight festivals.

Take the time to visit the various festival Web sites and look at their submission policies and delivery requirements before you start the finishing process.

DIY File-Based Masters

By now you should have a locked cut of your project, you should have done a pass on the sound design, you should have fixed any basic problems using color correction and visual effects, and your film should have whatever titles and graphics it requires. If that’s the case, you are done with the hard creative part of making your project. Now you just need to make it available for others to see it.

Back in Chapter 11, “Editing Gear,” we talked about how editing workstations are pretty much plug-and-play these days, thanks to digital acquisition formats. That makes it a lot easier to get started editing, but it also limits what you’ll be able to do on your own without adding hardware.

You can easily make an uncompressed file-based master of your film and then create file-based submasters using codecs suited to different digital delivery standards. You can also pretty easily create a video DVD because odds are high that your computer has a recordable DVD drive. If you need to make Blu-ray Discs or output to digital videotape, things start to get a little more complicated because you’ll need some extra hardware added to your system. For Blu-ray, you’ll need to add the appropriate kind of disk burning hardware.

If you are outputting to FireWire-based digital video (DV and HDV), it’s not too hard— you’ll need a computer with a FireWire connector and a deck (or camcorder) that records in that format. But it’s not that likely that you’ll be delivering anything on HDV (or DV) because the quality isn’t that great. If it’s just a viewing copy and quality isn’t a concern, stick to DVDs or other optical disk formats. If quality is a concern (and it’s likely that whoever you are creating the videotape for will tell you exactly what they require in terms of quality), it’s more likely that you will need to deliver on HDCAM-SR. HDCAM-SR decks are very expensive, and you’ll need HD-SDI coming out of your editing workstation to guarantee that the quality remains intact. To get HD-SDI out of your editing workstation, you’ll need some sort of video card or breakout box. If this is only an occasional need, you’ll be better off going to a postproduction facility and letting them take care of this process for you. More on that later.

Even if you are planning to finish on 35mm film or HDCAM, it is likely you’ll want to create file-based masters to use as a source for Web distribution.

Preparing Your Sequence

Before you output your video, you need to prepare your sequence. Make sure that you’ve replaced all temporary footage and proxies with the real thing. Next, you need to clean up your sequence. All normal video should be dragged down so that it’s all on one video track in your sequence. The only things that should remain on the other video tracks are composites

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such as superimposed titles, luma/chroma keys, and so on (see Figure 18.2). Technically, it is safer to take your composites and export them individually to an uncompressed QuickTime format and then bring them back into your project as new shots and cut them into the sequence to replace the mulit-track composites. However, if you are doing a DIY file-based master, you don’t necessarily have to do this. Put your titles and other texted graphics on a separate track, at the top level of your sequence. This makes it easy to remove them or turn off their display.

Figure 18.2

Clean up your sequence (top) by minimizing the number of video tracks (bottom) before you export.

The first frame of your movie should start at 01:00:00:00. Some editing applications have a default start time of 00:00:00:00, but this is not the industry standard, so if you are going to be working with a post facility, you should change it. If you’re going to stay DIY all the way, it doesn’t matter.

If you are going out to videotape, add two minutes to the head of your sequence. This is a part of the tape that is most prone to physical damage. Instead, start your sequence with bars and tone followed by a head slate and a countdown. Most videotapes are a minute or two longer than their stated length, so don’t worry about wasting a little tape. Remember that these two minutes come before 01:00:00:00 so start your sequence time at 00:58:00:00 to accommodate them.

If your goal is a file-based master, we don’t recommend adding a head slate. You probably just want your project itself and the opening credits to be the first thing that viewers see. Instead, add a tail slate at the end of your sequence, which is simply a title card that lists information such as the name of the project, the name of the producer/director, the name of the editor, the production company, the date of the output, the type of output (master, rough cut, audioonly, textless, and so on), the total running time (TRT), and, possibly, contact and copyright information. This is not technically a part of your film, but it’s a safe way to keep relevant information available to anyone who needs it. You should also add this information to the metadata of your file if you have an application that lets you edit metadata, like Adobe Bridge (see Figure 18.3).

Figure 18.3

A tail slate and metadata in

Adobe Bridge.

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Save your sequence in a special bin and give it a name that indicates that this is the master. You may want to lock the tracks on your sequence and lock the bin if your software allows, for added security.

Sync Pops

If you are doing a professional mix or finishing on 35mm, you need to be extra careful about sync. To be safe, put a 10-second countdown at the start of your sequence with a sync pop at the frame with the number 2 in the countdown. A sync pop is simply one frame of “tone,” which your editing application should be able to generate for you.

Color Grading

At this point, it’s common to spend half a day doing an additional color correction pass. Presumably, your earlier color correction was aimed at fixing problems. Now you’ll need to take a look at the film as a whole and try to match the color and create a consistent “look.” Some people find this incredibly intimidating, but it’s not beyond the scope of what you can do yourself. Of course, a professional colorist will have a practiced eye, top of the line equipment, and loads of experience to back it up. In other words, that person will be faster and better than you. But if the choice is between no color grading at all and DIY color grading, we say you should take your chances with doing it yourself. It’s common that the DP is present for the color grading session. If so, he should be able to offer some technical advice about black levels, white levels, and gamma, along with his creative opinion.

DIY Beware

Don’t make any editing changes when you are color grading or mixing. Be sure that your cut is “locked” before you start.

The Final Audio Mix

Your final cut might have 20 or more tracks of sound if it’s a complicated feature. To do an output, you’ll need to mix those tracks into a more manageable number, usually between two and eight tracks. High-end professional videotape formats usually only have four tracks of audio, while low-end professional and consumer videotape formats usually only have two tracks. Audio for films often has five or more tracks to accommodate the surround sound that’s used

in theaters. Films that have been transferred to DVD/Blu-ray for home video release offer both a stereo mix and a surround sound mix so that viewers can choose according to their hardware setup.

Mixing the audio consists of setting the levels for each piece of sound in the project and then combining the tracks into a final mix. There are several standard types of mixes:

nMono: Mixing all your audio down to one track is called a mono mix. While mono mixes are sufficient for work-in-progress viewing copies and radio broadcasts, for any other final output, you should at least do a stereo mix.