We’re heading into the “final stretch” on production and (finally) into the post-production intensive portion of the documentary “Our Mothers’ War.” We might have another shoot in the near future to try to pick up some loose ends and even get an intro and some transition elements.
The shooting has been done at 23.98psf on the HDCAM with the use of a net ring, which is a $25 piece of plastic that holds a 1″ circle of garden variety stocking. I’ve decided that I like this look far better than anything a more expensive soft fx 4×4 filter might achieve, plus it also makes for a much lighter traveling crew. With a 4×4, we’d be stuck lugging around the entire matte box, which is no small deal when you’re producing without any money and you’d rather not spend that money on something silly like baggage overages.
Starting up the post means digitizing the files to DV — I wish we were going to DVCPro HD, but our offline machine is an old workhorse CineWave edit system and in order for it to play nice with both online and offline files, we have to go to anamorphic DV.
Which takes me to the next place — which is imagining the next facility upgrade. As we put the final touches on things around here, we have it set up most beautifully with a small contained space which we’ve been using as the online room and a slightly larger space that will house our 42″ plasma monitor. This is frankly a little bit more client friendly — slightly larger, big display, etc. Certainly, in a situation where you want to get constant feedback from the client — this is the place to put everyone. But, we’re wired in to have the online computer going to the small room and the offline computer into the larger room. But, clients are sometimes (maybe often?) going to want to sit in on the finish — color correction, and even sound mix are sometimes best overseen with client contact.
So, what to do?
I know they make computer routers — small matrix switches that can send signals to anywhere in the world, joined together with some cat5 cabling or what not. These tend to run in the several thousands of dollars range which I’m not really in a position to expend in upgrading — I’d rather spend that kind of money making sure we get the right plug-in for a new Pro Tools system, for instance. So, what’s the cheapest way to do what I want to do, which is to have it possible to patch any of the computer signals (2 monitors, keyboard, mouse and USB peripherals) to either of the workstations. It would be brilliant in the efficiency of it, really, if both computers had a Pro Tools system and both had mimicked on/offline video editorial facilities. I think I’m within a few hiccups of figuring out how to make this happen, at which point we’ll be able to stick the offline in the small room, when needed, and the online in the big room, when needed.
More as I learn more…