432 The Digital Filmmaking Handbook, 4E

Deliverables

If you sell your film to a distributor, they are likely to have a long list of things you’ll have to provide, so here’s a typical list:

nDCP, 35mm, or HDCAM-SR master

nDubs of the master with various mixes

nKey art (graphics, still photos for use in publicity materials)

nDVD/Blu-ray Disc cover

nPress kit

nSound spotting list

nProduction notes (including crew list, contact list, deal memos, shooting schedule, time cards, location agreements, camera and sound reports, final shooting script, call sheets, releases for talent and extras, and pretty much any other documents you generated during the shoot)

nMusic cue sheet

nComposer agreement

nCopy of musical score

nChain of title documents (proving that you and your production company own the rights to the film and the rights to the screenplay)

nE & O (Errors and Omissions) insurance certificate to cover any liability over legal/ contractual things you didn’t do right (errors) or at all (omissions).

Be aware that the deliverables can vary greatly from one distributor to another and also depending on what you are delivering (VOD, theatrical feature, etc).

High-End Finishing

In a perfect world, you made your DIY file-based master, distributed it via optical disk or the Web, the right people saw it and liked it, and now you need to make a high-end videotape master, 35mm film print, or file-based Digital Cinema Package (DCP). You’ve now officially left behind the world of DIY.

Reel Changes

If you’re heading for a 35mm film print, you’ll most likely have to break your project into 20minute segments to accommodate reel changes. This is due to physical limitations on the length of a reel of 35mm film. Even if you’re mastering to videotape, there is a chance that your project won’t fit on a single tape. The longest HDCAM-SR tapes are 124 minutes. Even for digital cinema delivery, reels are still the norm.

Earlier we mentioned that most films that deliver DCP still also deliver on 35mm as well. For that reason, films are still broken down into reels. Also, shorter reels allow you to spread workflow across multiple workstations when color correcting or rendering, which is especially useful for large, uncompressed format projects such as 4K Red footage.

Talk to your post facility about this as early as possible. Be sure to make these breaks at a hard cut, not at a dissolve. In addition, make sure they’re at a natural lull in the soundtrack, not in the middle of a line of dialogue or music—the transition from one reel to another might not be seamless. As a rule, make sure there isn’t any important dialogue in the one to two seconds leading up to and following a reel change. For this reason, reels can vary in length and can be as short as 15 minutes or even less. Sometimes, it’s hard to find a place to make a reel change.

Preparing for a Professional Audio Mix

If your edited sequence has 48kHz audio, you can use the tracks directly from your editing project as sources for your mix. To do this, you’ll need to create a split-track audio export from your edited sequence. How many tracks you choose to export can vary, depending on your project, but it helps if your audio is somewhat organized with dialogue on one group of tracks, effects and ambience on another group, and music on a third. If your audio tracks are a mess, they’ll clean it up for you, but you’ll be paying by the hour. You’ll also need to provide a guide for the video in your project, usually a QuickTime movie.

The most popular sound editing application for mixes is Avid ProTools, but there are several others. Most of them can accept OMF files. When you export the OMF files, you’ll need to make a couple choices (see Figure 18.9):

nChoose an audio sampling rate (usually 48kHz).

nChoose a bit rate (usually 16 bit).

nChoose between an encapsulated OMF (contains all of your sequence info from your project) or separate audio track OMF (each track of your project gets its own separate file).

Ask your mixer and/or post facility what works best for them.

Figure 18.9

Export options for OMF audio files.

434 The Digital Filmmaking Handbook, 4E

Before you go to the mix, you should have a sound spotting session to make notes of things you’d like to fix or change. A basic professional mix starts with a short sweetening, or sound editing, session. If you know of special effects you want to add, it’s a good idea to let the sound effects editor know about them in advance so that he’ll have some options loaded up and ready to go at the beginning of your sweetening session. Your sound effects editor will probably be working on a ProTools or other high-end sound editing system. Unless you have lots of time and money, the amount of sound editing you do in the sweetening session will be limited to things you couldn’t do on your editing software.

After you’ve tweaked your sound, it’s time to mix. Your tracks will be sent through a large mixing board, and the mixer will set the levels as your video master plays and continue to tweak things until it sounds good. You’ll probably want more than one type of mix—for example, a stereo mix, a 5.1 surround sound mix, and an M&E mix. If you’re creating a Dolby surround sound mix for a film print, a technician will record the mix using specialized hardware. If you’re mastering to HDCAM-SR, which has 12 audio tracks, the typical choice is to use two tracks for the stereo mix, two tracks for the M&E mix, and six tracks for the 5.1 surround mix. That leaves two extra channels, which are sometimes used for Dolby E encoding.

Preparing for Professional Color Grading

Always talk to your colorist or postproduction facility before you prepare your media for color grading. Typically, you will be asked to provide a DPX export of your film for the color grading session. DPX is sequential still image file format that is the current standard for digital cinema finishing, although other uncompressed sequential still image formats, such as sequential TIFF files, will often work as well. In some cases, your colorist may be able to work directly with your project’s master sequence; for example, if you are editing in Avid Media Composer and your colorist is using Avid Symphony or any other software-compatible combination. You’ll be able to give her a copy of your project and drives containing your media, and she can import your sequence directly into her app and do her magic.

You’ll want to clean up your sequence by doing the following:

nMake a copy of your project and sequence and add “for color” or similar to the name of both the sequence and the project.

nRemove the titles. Unless you want them color corrected as well, which isn’t the norm.

nRemove any color filters that you added as temporary fixes while editing. Make notes of these problem areas and send the list to your colorist.

nIf you have composites, motion effects or other special effects shot, it is considered best to export these shots to an uncompressed file format and reimport them as new shots and replace the composites in your sequence. Talk to your post facility about what they can best work with.

nCollapse all of your video onto one track.

nCreate a drive with copies of all your original media files (that are in the cut) on it. Most films will fit on a 1TB drive. It is best to always have people work on copies of your media, because that way you still have the originals and can keep your editing workstation functional.

nThey might not require it, but give them a mixed down track of your audio as a guide track. When you watch your project at the color grading session, you may want to hear the audio.