On-Set Offline

This summer, Santa Monica-based design studio Belief took a unique approach to producing and editing its 30-minute piece titled Untitled: 003-Embryo. Belief shot the film about a mysterious dream-catching invention in an abandoned house in Santa Monica using a Sony HDW-F900 camera and, essentially, edited it on the fly.

According to Mike Goedecke, Belief's creative director and director of Embryo, the entire piece was offlined on location by a five-man editing team who used one of Belief's Media 100i desktop systems to cut images during production.

“It was like an assembly line,” Goedecke explains. “We had a FireWire drive connected to the little down-conversion box on the HD camera, and that brought realtime, down-converted NTSC [29.97fps interlaced] video directly into the Media 100 edit station where our editors could cut while we shot. That let us create a complete offline during the shoot. We also had no script supervisor, so it was also a useful method for keeping track of shots.”

After the shoot, Belief moved directly to the finish. The offline was performed by Belief editors using Apple's Final Cut Pro 3 system, running Pinnacle's CinéWave high-def card. The only drawback, Goedecke concedes, was the fact that the finish required significant match-framing work since the down-converted offline edit lacked timecode numbers.

“That was more tedious than anything else,” he says. “Next time, I'll have a high-def editing system on set, or at least an editing system that can take 24p timecode.”

Belief also cut five experimental dream sequences into the piece. Those sequences were independently created by different studios around the country (MK12, Crush/Voodoo, BeezleBug Bit, Whitney Digital, and independent animator James Dean Conklin) that submitted proposals to Belief without knowing the storyline. Goedecke then picked those that best matched the characters, and as the finished sequences were submitted by the collaborating studios, Belief weaved them into the live-action footage.

“Since not all the studios had HD pipelines, we had them create the dream sequences at standard def, but still in a 16:9 aspect ratio,” Goedecke explains. “They sent us those files, and then we up-rezzed them to HD [using After Effects], adding grain and treating the footage as necessary to have it match our footage.”