April 2, 2005
It’s probably one of the most grueling road races in the history of the sport: a 40-hour, 1,000-mile ordeal that takes riders from Ensenada on the northern end of Baja California to La Paz at the peninsula’s southern tip. Hundreds of racers make the trek every year to drive over the rocky terrain in all sorts of souped-up vehicles—cars, trucks, ATVs and motorcycles—often for the glory of simply finishing the race.
Now in its 37th year, the Tecate SCORE Baja 1000 has attained legendary status in the world of off-road racing. In 2004, there was something slightly different about the event. Filmmaker Dana Brown, director of the surfing documentary “Step into Liquid,” was there to capture every twist and turn of the massive competition. The results can be seen in the documentary “Dust to Glory.”
In addition to spotlighting the thrill-seeking racers who compete in the thousand-mile motor odyssey, the film is remarkable in its revolutionary use of desktop solutions to complete a large-scale postproduction process. By harnessing the powers of Adobe Premiere Pro and CineForm Prospect HD on a BOXX HD [pro] workstation, Brown and his team were able to use an online compressed digital intermediate format to complete all of the film’s editing, effects, color correction and titling. HD footage was edited in a real-time, 10-bit color space on desktop workstations. Further, the workflow enabled producers to deliver for digital cinema, as well as a 35mm theatrical film print, directly from the Adobe Premiere Pro timeline.
Production
Working closely with a small team that included executive producer C. Rich Wilson and producer/editor Scott Waugh, the logistics of documenting such a sprawling event with so many participants was no mean feat. Perhaps it’s fitting that ‘Dust to Glory’ was shot on so many formats. “We shot on every format known to man except for 70mm,” jokes Waugh.
The production team shot HD whenever they could, including all the pre-race interviews, helicopter footage and a fair amount of the race itself, but they also shot 16mm, Super 16, 35mm, Mini DV, DVCAM, HD and even Hi-8. That adds up to 55 cameras—15 Panasonic AG-DVX100 24p cameras, nine Sony HDW-F900s, one Sony HDW-F950, 13 ARRI SR3 Super 16s, two 35mm ARRI III cameras, two 16mm Bolex time-lapse cameras and 13 onboard cameras—and a team of more than 80 people.
Following the race were four helicopters, two of which were equipped with HD cameras (one HD camera was supported by a gyro-stabilized mount and the other was handheld) and two with 35mm cameras (each 35mm camera was attached to the side door of its respective helicopter with a Tyler mount).
The Hi-8 footage came from two lipstick cameras that were connected to Hi-8 decks. “We wanted them to go to DV decks,” says Waugh, “but it wasn’t possible. The decks were encased in special boxes because of the motor noise and rattle. We didn’t have time to open them up, put in DV decks and rebuild them.”
During the 40 nonstop hours of filming, more than 250 hours of mixed-format footage was acquired. Brown and Waugh sat down to edit this footage shortly after they returned to Los Angeles. Waugh set up an Avid Xpress DV 3.5 system in his Hollywood Hills home, while Brown worked on an Avid Media Composer 10.1 in his house in Long Beach. All the footage was converted with matching timecode and duped to Beta SP for Brown’s system and DVCAM for Waugh’s.
The two had worked together on “Step into Liquid,: with Waugh serving as the film’s additional editor. “On this film, we were very lucky that we had the same sensibility,” says Waugh.
It took four months to digitize the footage, giving the two editors an opportunity to discover the film. “During those four months,” says Waugh, “we would talk every day on the phone about the footage we were seeing and we would piece the stories together.” In production, one camera unit had no idea what another unit was shooting; different teams were often capturing small pieces of the same story. As they were digitizing, Brown and Waugh wove together the threads of the various storylines.
After digitizing, they sat down for another five months of editing, often e-mailing segments back and forth to inspire new ideas. “If I was burned out on something, I’d pass it back to Dana, and vice versa. We’d just bounce back and forth, showing each other stuff until eventually it got to the screening process,” says Waugh. They finished the film together, working on Waugh’s offline system, which had 1TB of storage.
After the pair had offlined the footage and locked the cut at DV resolution, it was time to consider how to finish the film. Brown and Waugh were fully prepared to do a traditional online for “Dust to Glory” at LaserPacific, just as they had done for “Step into Liquid.” But Wilson and one of the film’s co-producers, Mike “Mouse” McCoy, suggested they look into Adobe Premiere Pro. Waugh explains, “I was familiar with Adobe Premiere and I liked editing on it. I remember telling Dana I thought it would give us major creative control all the way through to the film-out.”
Post
The filmmakers brought in Adobe Premiere consultant Jacob Rosenberg to conform the online in HD resolution. Rosenberg did some initial tests with CineForm Intermediate, CineForm’s 10-bit compressed Prospect HD format, and felt it could keep up with the demands of the film. After further tests to demonstrate the tools’ capabilities, the filmmakers liked what they saw and hired Rosenberg to oversee the finishing process, from the online to the film-out. “My background is in filmmaking. As long as I’ve been using Premiere I’ve wanted to see it do what we put it through on ‘Dust to Glory,’” Rosenberg says.
At LaserPacific, where they were helped by account representative Tom Vice, the filmmakers set up two BOXX HD [pro] RT workstations equipped with dual AMD Opteron series 250 processors, 3GB of DDR memory, 2TB of RAID 5 storage and HD-SDI I/O through AJA’s Xena. One machine was used for the online edit in Adobe Premiere Pro and the other for color correction using Synthetic Aperture Color Finesse with After Effects.
Even as “Dust to Glory” was being finished, Brown and his team were constantly making changes to the film. “One of the reasons they wanted to use Premiere was because of the creative power it gave them,” says Rosenberg. “They continued to work on the film up until the very end, and they could make any adjustments without compromising the resolution.”
One of Rosenberg’s first responsibilities was overseeing the conversion of the SD footage to HD, which LaserPacific did by running it through a Teranex converter to bring it up to 1080p. The HDCAM footage was brought in at HD resolution, as was the Super 16 and 35mm film; these were telecined to QuBit at 1920x1080 resolution. All of the elements were then digitized into the 10-bit 4:2:2 CineForm Prospect HD codec at a resolution of 1920x1080. The crux of this operation was the CineForm Digital Intermediate codec, which uses wavelet compression.
After the footage was conformed in Premiere Pro, edited sequences in CineForm Intermediate format were shared via LAN with the second workstation for color correction. Footage was color-timed by Henry Santos in Synthetic Aperture Color Finesse, a beta version of the After Effects plug-in that now works directly in Premiere Pro. The color correction was, by all accounts, the most challenging part of the online process. After Effects was not yet on the wheel system, so Santos, an experienced colorist, could only click the mouse. In addition, the processor grid the filmmakers had hoped to use was never functional. Working sporadically over the course of two months, Santos and DP Kevin Ward finished the color timing.
When that was done, Rosenberg had approximately 350 clips per 20-minute reel. He exported each 20-minute reel from After Effects and re-encoded it with color correction back into the CineForm format. This single 20-minute file now reflected the specified reel and was imported back into Premiere. “Since it was being printed back to 35mm film, we had to build the film based on 20-minute reels,” says Rosenberg. “For the whole film, we had five primary reels and a sixth reel of credits.”
Title designer Amul Patel designed the main title sequence in After Effects and provided templates for the rest of the titles in the film. Jason Woliner was brought in from New York to complete a handful of effects shots and to perform the dust and scratch removal, which he did in After Effects. If a frame had a scratch, he could find an earlier or later frame that was clean, use the clone tool, apply the necessary time shift value and paint directly over the dust or scratch. Woliner managed to complete the dust and scratch removal process for the entire film in one 12-hour day.
Would Rosenberg make any changes to the post-production process if he could do it all over again? Yes. He says that if he had known what CineForm Digital Intermediate could do at the outset, he would have digitized more of the elements directly into that format instead of going to tape and then digitizing. “If I had it to do again, I would bring the Premiere system into the telecine room and capture live. There would have been no tape and I would have done everything live to disk.”
To date, “Dust to Glory” is the most ambitious project edited on Adobe Premiere Pro. As technology advances and more filmmakers embrace Premiere Pro, postproduction options will continue to evolve. Films like “Dust to Glory” will be leading the charge.
.
|