Editing Columbine

At press time, Michael Moore's treatise on gun violence, Bowling for Columbine, was being considered as a possible Academy Award nominee in the documentary category. But for editing aficionados, the film is already noteworthy. It's reliance on source material from “all over the place,” according to editor/co-producer Kurt Engfehr, illustrates “the complexity of trying to merge the film and video worlds.”

According to Engfehr, the documentary includes “about 26 minutes of 16mm footage, about 31 minutes of archival material that came to us in 13 different formats, including off-air broadcast footage, and about 50 minutes of original footage shot in HD [using a Sony HDW-F900 camera]. While the Avid [a 9600 Media Composer] didn't care [about format] for the offline, we had a massive organizational job to keep track of all the material during editing, and then the online people had a big job matching frame rates and bringing everything together for one HD master.”

After Engfehr and Woody Richman, associate editor, finished the offline, the archival images were upconverted to 24p HD at Duart in New York, using that company's Teranex and Arrilaser systems. That material was then used in the HD online, conformed and mastered at the Creative Group, New York.

Charles Suydam, chief engineer at Creative Group, offers one example of the issues confronted in mixing-and-matching imagery.

“Some material started out as film, at 16- or 18fps, and at some point or another, it was converted to 30fps and then back to 24fps,” explains Suydam. “The net effect of all those conversions is that, in some places, it produced an unusual cadence — unusual motion artifacts. To deal with that, we initially thought about fixing it in Flame, but we quickly figured out it would be faster and more cost-effective to synchronize source material by putting a DVE [Sony DME-7000] into strobe mode, with a two-frame freeze and a two-frame release.”

The HD master was then used to create a 35mm print at Duart, again using the Arrilaser system.