Surveying the Great Unknown: Part 3
Post & Color
This is part three of a story outlining my work on Jukebox the Ghost’s newest music video “The Great Unknown”. Part one focuses on the concept and preproduction, while part two dives into our three shooting days. If you haven’t seen the video yet, it can be viewed right here.
Editing has always been my bread and butter. When people ask me what I prefer between shooting and cutting, the answer is always secretly “cutting”, even if I say otherwise. I was fortunate enough to discover nonlinear editing just as it began becoming accessible to people without enormous Avid and Media100 machines. Dailies from my first skate videos were shot on VHSC, and then edited from VCR to VCR every night to pick out the selects. One of my high school teachers helped me transfer my selects tapes onto MiniDV so I could dump them into iMovie 2 and complete my first edit. Everything snowballed from there.
The biggest benefit to being an editor who shoots is having the ability to shoot like an editor. People with that skill can see the cut-points within takes, demand the correct amount of coverage for the shoot, and be extra diligent when it comes to slates, sync and timing. It’s priceless any time we’re on a run-and-gun set, or staring down the barrel of a controlled shoot with a very limited timeframe. It’s also maddening when you get unscripted footage in from shooters without the editing mindset, and have to work around every single oversight.
As the person tasked with directing The Great Unknown, I didn’t want to hate myself when it came down to the edit. I also knew how limited our time would be in each location, and what we had to accomplish. This led to an obsession with the song in the days before cameras started rolling. I had a basic Final Cut timeline with text describing every scene, and I listened to the song on repeat, visualizing every location, every big camera move, and every cut. The piece was edited before the crew even shook hands with the band, and that’s the only way it worked out in the end.
While this project would have worked fine in Avid or Premiere, the unscripted nature of the coverage, mixed formats and multicam-craziness made it best suited for FCPX. Everything from Cinestyle 5D to 2.7K GoPro Protune clips would be able to go in without any issues, and logging would be quick and painless.
We traveled with my Macbook Air (1.7 GHz i7 with 8GB of memory) a G-Drive mobile thunderbolt, and a LaCie Rugged drive, intending to use them for data ingest and backup. Most of the video was ingested into FCPX from my lap on the road. The quick ingest process limited the possibility of losing cards within the chaos between the shoot’s two vehicles, and our very rushed setups and teardowns. After the road-trip day, Ben and the crew was in desperate need of sleep, but reviewing the footage was exciting enough to keep us all awake and staring at the screen in our hotel.
Just as the video was shot on the road, nearly every version of the edit was completed from my Macbook Air. A family emergency saw me flying back to Wisconsin as soon as the shoot wrapped, and the video found itself being formed in a variety of vehicles, airplanes, airports, hotels and family houses. My bay at home is made up of two 27" displays and the occasional reference monitor. Real-estate on the 13" 1440x900 screen was at a premium, and it took a lot of smart organization and window managing with FCPX to make it work.
Keyboard shortcuts for “hide libraries” (shift+command+1) and “hide browser” (custom set to shift+command+option+alt+1) were put to heavy use. My library was diligently organized into an event for every day, with keywords for every location, shot type and action type assigned to every clip. All the location folders went into a “locations” folder for easy access, and each day/event followed the act structure of the piece pretty cleanly. “Day 1" was the piano intro for act one, “Day 2" was our road/travel day for the middle of the video, and “Day 3" was our live rooftop performance at the end. This allowed me to only need one event open, depending on which section of the video I was working on.
I can’t say enough about how valuable it is to be able to select a range within a clip, and assign it to a tag or as a “favorite” (pushing ‘f’ with a range selected). This is something that was done extremely poorly in Final Cut Classic by creating “subclips” that caused a world of problems. Locations were tagged quickly with every card dump I did (tip: go to view and select “show skimmer info” to quickly mouse over clips and see the tags), and then a careful pass was done for favorites on every clip. Favorites can’t be rushed, as quick opportunities for cutaways and transitioary elements can often be found in the most haphazard clips. Even after a couple rough cuts had been completed, I did one more real-time pass through every single clip to make sure I didn’t miss any potential gold. Any time I needed to cover a cut, I found the correct shooting location in the browser, popped over to the favorites filter (control+f), and was generally able to find whatever I needed.
The performance of the Macbook Air really shocked me though this entire process. This computer was purchased with the intent to have something very small for flights, and on-set DIT, with the intent to replace it if I ever needed a portable editing solution. I never expected or intended it to do any kind of actual work, but cutting this piece from a thunderbolt hard drive was absolutely no problem. The 2.7K GoPro clips worked flawlessly, and the timeline easily handled the FS700's AVCHD. Even on long flights with no outlets, I was easily able to work for the majority of the flight. A mini-displayport to HDMI adapter allowed me to plug in to a large TV at my family’s house, and finally preview the video in full resolution for the first time, right around version three. Working on this laptop was by no means ideal, but it was unbelievably usable. We have come a very long way since the no-brainer split between iBooks and PowerBooks.
Laying out the video turned out almost exactly as I expected it. Ben’s piano performance kept things calm during the intro, and we exploded outdoors when the song starts to pick up. Jukebox the Ghost starts exploring “the great unknown” during the first chorus, and the first grandiose aerial reveals itself when that chorus gets big. The bridge was always marked off in my notebook as “crazy shit happens here”, which became a home for all of those favorite aerial clips that didn’t fit in with the key locations. Finally, the live show comes in with a shot of the crowd singing the gang-vocals at 2:06, and we join a big party that continues after the song draws to its end.
I started the cut by laying down the key shots that carried the song at each individual location, then built the gravy shots in higher and higher layers. Despite having FCPX’s “auditions” feature in my pocket, I opted to have clips laid down and visible on the timeline. It was good to have a visual reference of my shots, and enabling/disabling them to explore different options. Despite running on a track and using a slate, multi-cam wasn’t used much in the video. Between my favorited regions and markers being dropped & labeled for key portions of the vocals, I was able to easily find and sync different parts of the song.
Our picture locked just in time for me to get back to my big-boy bay. I was able to move the FCPX Library file from the travel drive into my Drobo 5D, and stretch my legs a little bit. Everything from this point on was completed on a 27" Late 2013 iMac i7 with 32 GB of memory. It’s paired up with a 27" Apple LED Cinema display, a Wacom Cintiq, and a ton of storage.
A few minor visual effects were used to solve issues that came with our guerrilla style shoot. Quick cleanups were completed in Apple Motion, and more in-depth comps were done in After Effects. The real-time playback inside Motion and heavy masking+precomps in AE gave each program it’s own advantages for each use case. Much like deciding which NLE to use for a specific project, loyalty to a specific software takes a distant second priority for finding the tool that will best get the job done. I removed beachgoers from the Morro Rock aerial shot, and did a very deep cleanup on the transition from inside the recording studio to the driveway.
Once picture lock was set, I simplified the timeline down to a single layer, and imported the project’s XML file to DaVinci Resolve. This would be my first project on Resolve 11, and it worked out wonderfully. I used resolve to find the color inside the flat profiles on all three cameras, and handle white balance inconsistencies between the 5D and FS700. Coloring got extremely deep for the scene on the rooftop, as individual parts of each band member needed to be tracked and enhanced against the busy crowd. Large portions of that scene were shot in direct golden-hour sunlight, and had to be toned down from being fire-orange. A few stylistic touches were added in the end, with some selective focus and exposure control on background elements. This was my first time in the driver’s seat with DaVinci, and it only took a couple days of floundering for me to catch on.
The biggest lesson I took away from this edit was all about transitionary elements. I would have loved to use some clever matchframes, or surprise location shifts from scene to scene. The extra color & framing latitude from shooting on RED would have also been very appreciated, but simply sat outside of our budget for this one.
The crew and the band both agreed that traveling up PCH and shooting this piece was much more fun than the typical music video shoot. Post production had the same feel. Thanks to all of the hardware and software working perfectly (not to mention the great camera coverage from Sean and Jenna), the time I spent solving problems was a drop in the bucket compared to the time I could spend playing jazz and having fun. Even deep inside rotoscoping and color correction, I didn’t give second thought to the hours put into the piece. I was thrilled to work on it from the first card dump to the final output.
Jukebox the Ghost just released a new self-titled album, which can be found on the iTunes music store.
