Tapeless on Steroids

The steroid-use documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster* required processing more than 800 archival clips as well as original Panasonic P2 footage through a unique digital workflow at Mind Over Eye in Santa Monica, Calif. Photo Courtesy of BSF Film.

Shortly after the film had been in competition at Sundance, Mark Cuban bought Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (opening in theaters as we go to press). Although the film was remastered to HDCAM SR and filmed out, it had been one of the best-looking HDCAM prints at Sundance. That's noteworthy, considering it was both shot on P2 cards and packed out with 826 archival clips, including many dubious sources from multiple decades and locations — some 24 formats (“everything but SECAM”), from ancient 16mm to a clip that was pulled from YouTube and never sourced to better resolution.

So there was format conversion involved.

But before there was format conversion, there was also an on-set P2 workflow — an experience that gave veteran film DP and Oscar nominee Alex Buono insight into a new way to work.

Buono was also co-writer and producer (with Jim Czarnecki and Kurt Engfehr, producers of Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11), and he says the project clarified something for him about modern filmmaking. While he characterized modern technology as “amazing,” he rejects the idea that expertise — especially post-production expertise — is no longer necessary in a world where anyone can buy and learn inexpensive software. He likewise rejects the idea of enshrining old film-based workflows. He says feels he was rewarded for taking a chance on his gear and the ingenuity of collaborators — such as producer Tasmin Rawady, who designed the asset-management protocol for both the newly acquired assets (P2 acquisition must be managed, just like any IT process) and the elaborate library of archival footage.

Buono's experience gave him a sense of the middle ground — a willingness to adopt the IT modernizations that will eventually transform all of filmmaking, but a reaffirmation of the craft and technical expertise it takes to optimize modern software and hardware for professional results. When we talked at Sundance a few days before his film debuted, he made the point that independent filmmakers can get distracted by trying to be too self-sufficient with the technology and end up becoming frustrated students of menu features and conversion processes, when they should be getting on with their film.

“I think it's creating a type of insecurity among filmmakers that get bogged down thinking they have to learn everything about the software before they can make their film,” he says. “Instead, I think you have to find partners who have the technical sensibility to professionalizing desktop tools.”

Alex Buono shot with a Panasonic AG-HVX200 P2 capturing to 8GB P2 cards, then downloaded to a Mac PowerBook backed up with G-Tech drives. Photos Courtesy of BSF Film.

That partner for Buono was Mind Over Eye, the Santa Monica,Calif., shop owned by Andy Dellenbach, Bill Wadsworth, and Jack Wignot.

“We needed to find someone that was willing to treat each shot on an individual basis as an individual shot,” Buono says. For most big houses, the economics would have meant that the film's archival material would be subjected to best-pass batch conversion — something Buono didn't think would work. He was intrigued by Dellenbach's willingness to commit to the partnership, and by the low cost tools they were able to use to custom convert and color correct each clip. “I was really skeptical too at the beginning,” Buono says. “Having been through DI and knowing how much it costs, I told them ‘We can try this Apple color thing — I guarantee we will be finishing in a Da Vinci room.'' I didn't expect the kind of sophistication in color correction we would be getting.”

He also didn't expect the online flexibility that allowed him to upgrade archival footage right up to the last minute. With Mind Over Eye handling all the graphic design as well, Buono says they were making changes to the main title moments before laying off the final master.

Buono shot the film — a documentary on steroid use discussed through present-day interviews and archival footage — on a Panasonic AG-HVX200 carrying 8GB P2 cards that were downloaded to a Mac PowerBook (an older one, to get the PCMI slot). (The team only used the P2 store to reformat cards; they backed up to G-Tech drives.) “Shooting with P2 by yourself would be hard to do,” Buono says, adding that they had “a great experience” with the camera. “You need to have someone else managing the cards. Once we had a system down, it became routine and became much simpler than carrying tapes and logging tapes.” It also had the advantage of a QuickTime-based review and approval process, which was invaluable on a project where a lot of people had to see and/or catalog a lot of footage.

The team (editor was Brian Singbiel) wanted to use Avid for the offline because of the complex collection of assets and the superior media management tools they could count on from their Avid Xpress Pro HDs — three running on a Unity system. (At the time, only PC-based Avids could handle P2.) But the Apple Final Cut Pro/Color online and color correction was key to the plan for the archival footage. “Mind Over Eye has an incredibly fast and accurate conversion workflow [done with an EDL/AAF/OMF-to-XML proprietary conversion process],” Buono says. “All of the Avid-to-FCP files converted in a day.”

“We can literally translate very complex Avid edits — with nested edits, color correction, native Avid effects, and even timewarping — directly into Final Cut Pro,” Wadsworth says. This effectively eliminated the traditional offline-to-online conform, giving filmmakers great flexibility and lower costs.

Meanwhile, back in archival — while Rawady and archive producers Pamela Aguilar and Andy Zare furiously sourced clips, adding new ones or new versions nearly every day — Wadsworth quickly figured out that conventional transcoding and conversion hardware wouldn't suffice. At the same time, Wadsworth's long obsession with plug-ins and his long-standing beta experience with Algolith (core technology found in Teranex and Miranda conversion products) gave him an idea for what would work.

“We captured the clips into Final Cut 6.0.2 at native resolution, then subdivided into categories depending on the source, format, frame rate, whether it was interlaced, whether we could do an inverse telecine, whether we could even ID the pulldown, etc.,” Wadsworth says. They standardized at 720p to help avoid glaring disparities among clips that could be native HD, PAL DV, SD HD, VHS, Digi Beta, etc.

Wadsworth reworked a software-based algorithm to custom tune each clip. The Unix-shell-based process employed a combination of host applications (Apple Shake, Adobe After Effects, etc.) for handling scaling stabilization, pan and scan, frame rate conversion, and noise reduction.

For example, Wadsworth used the MAADI (Motion Adaptive Anti-Aliasing De-Interlacer) set of tools for building progressive frames from an interlaced source. MAADI is a series of tools from within Aloglith AlgoSuite. The toolset had never been productized, so Wadsworth used Shake as the host application and then developed a set of basic qualifier scripts that allowed them to work around glitches in the MAADI software, such as its problems with HDV and extended clip duration.

“The killer thing about it — and we've used it even on commercials that need film look — it does the best 30i to 24p conversion that I've ever seen,” Wadsworth says. “It won't heal dropouts or fringing, but it won't introduce anything new. The spatial image it creates is very pleasing to the eye.” In the case of Bigger, Stronger, Faster*, with all its plaid shirts, success was measured in part by a stunning absence of moiré.

The other cornerstone of the Mind Over Eye conversion pipeline is the render aspect, a process more like configurations used for large CG and visual-effects render farms, but not for media conversion. It helps that Mind Over Eye is an all-uncompressed, all 4:4:4-capable shop with the storage to support it.

And then came color timing. Bigger, Stronger, Faster* was one of the first films to be entirely graded using the latest version of Apple Color. In fact, Wadsworth gritted his teeth and did a version upgrade midstream — facing an OS, application, and QuickTime upgrade. He was a veteran of version 1 (“really just a toy; you could maybe bumble through a 30-second spot”) and 1.01 (“really starting to be something”). With 1.02, for the first time, everything worked almost the way it was supposed to — including the back-and-forth handoff with Final Cut Studio 2.

The workflow was to do the broadcast color pass inhouse at Mind Over Eye, then digitally transfer the projects and media files to the DR Group, where colorist Joe Faissal had the exact hardware configuration for color timing of the projection master. Using a standard Barco D-Cine Premiere DP90 projector for reference, the entire film was corrected in 32-point float-point color depth. The suite was also equipped with a Tangent control surface. Buono never missed his Da Vinci room.

“Seeing the film at Sundance and seeing it finally projected, we were so proud of it,” Buono says. “Our archive footage was so good compared with other films that had to struggle with the usual obstacles of archival footage — problems we recognized, but we had been able to address. I remember thinking: ‘That would have been our movie too.''”

When it came time to upgrade from the HDCAM master — and do all the other deliverables Cuban required — the final verdict came in on Apple Color too. Although the master went through a content-adaptive scaler and a number of optical and conform processes, no color correction had to be done again. “Everything held up,” Wadsworth says, “and it saved us three days by not having to do cuts only.”

Wadsworth says he believes that through this project, and the pipeline built to support it, Mind Over Eye has developed a postproduction blueprint for the reality of mixed formats and the need for flexibility that is particularly acute in independent and documentary filmmaking. “We were very nearly done with the film [about steroid use] when the news came out about Marion Jones; we could cut a Bobby Bonds clip, reformat, and drop her in.”