When Editor William Hoy, ACE, re-teamed with Director Zack Snyder for Watchmen, the two knew they were embarking on a project with challenges tougher even than those they faced on their previous outing, the epic 300. While that graphic-novel-based feature melded CGI, post-heavy speed changes and virtual camera moves, Watchmen would also have its share of digital set extensions, postproduction “camera effects” and CGI work. And it would have a very bizarre group of superheroes whose behavior and performance in some cases would be wildly augmented and shaped as digital animation that would come together concurrent with Hoy’s editorial work.

Although its look may not declare itself quite as obviously as 300, Watchmen was as much a post-heavy movie and, as such, came together in the cutting room even more than the more traditional film. “When one of your characters is a glowing naked blue guy,” the editor observes, “you’re doing a movie with a lot of effects.”

Hoy’s staff included 1st Assistant Editor Melissa Remenarich and two visual effects editors who would do temp comps in the Avid Media Composer, interact with the visual effects supervisor and constantly track and update effects as new iterations came in. The film was shot on stages in Vancouver, and Hoy’s cutting room was located in the same building. The editor’s proximity to production enabled Snyder to check on progress during breaks in the shooting and decide right away, before sets were struck, if reshoots would be helpful to the edit. This collaborative workflow would not have been possible had Hoy’s editing facility been located off-site.

“I always try to start work a week before principal photography begins,” Hoy says. “It’s important to be able to get everything set up with labs and effects houses and the telecine house. We need to get the equipment up there, do tests and get everything running smoothly so that when dailies come in the first day, there are no hiccups and I can start cutting that day. It’s very important on visual effects pictures like this that we start to give the visual effects houses material [immediately] so they can get started on their work.”

In this case, Technicolor in Vancouver processed Cinematographer Larry Fong’s footage and delivered standard-definition dailies on hard drives that the assistants could then bring into their Media Composers—the same Mac OS 9-based system Hoy had used on 300.

As scenes were shot, Hoy would start cutting, obviously minus the visual effects that are so vital to the final look of the film. “Obviously,” the editor continues, “the visual effects house can’t start working on Dr. Manhattan”—the oversized, under-clothed gent mentioned above—“until I choose the performances. Certainly there are oners where we can say, ‘Go ahead and make it and we’ll determine speed and length as the shot progresses.’ But generally we want the effects houses to know exactly how long each effects shot is going to be. When asking them to render out an effect, I might give them an estimate that errs on the side of [being] longer to give us some leeway, but when I say ‘err,’ I mean by eight or maybe 12 frames. They cost a lot!”

A great deal of 300’s signature look involved slow motion and speed ramps from slow to fast or fast to slow, all of which were created for look, feel and timing by Hoy at the standard-def resolution he was working with in his Avid, then re-created from scratch in 2K at effects houses. Watchmen’s look isn’t quite as infused by this kind of time manipulation, but it still has its share of speed ramps, which were created the same way.

“Unfortunately, there is just no software that will let me give the effects house my Avid EDL and have them spit out something that’s an exact 2K version of that,” says Hoy. “It would be great if there were. What happened at first on 300 was that the visual effects people would take the timings and create the effect a different way—maybe they would blend the frames a little differently or handle motion blur another way. But it didn’t work. When I ramp something, I play with it a lot. There’s one way it’s got to look or it’s not going to look right.”

Many of the shots that end up as speed ramps in the films were initially shot at 150 frames (slow motion when played back at normal speed). Then Hoy would pull out frames to speed up the scene. Since motion blur is significantly more pronounced in a scene shot at 24fps than it is at 150fps, it’s up to software to interpolate, render and apply the look of motion blur to selected frames. Hoy uses the Time Warp function under the Speed Changes option in his Media Composer, which lets him adjust aspects of the look of the “shot” he’s creating to fine-tune it to his eye.

“On 300,” he says, “when I looked at all these scenes coming in slow motion, I was thinking, ‘Where do I ramp? Where do I speed it up? Where do I slow it down? I could be here ramping forever!’ But Zack and I agreed on how it should be done, and he had some very specific ideas about the way it should look. There was this idea of ramping and freezing a character to look like a frame in the graphic novel it came from. It kind of registers in your mind and then moves on.”

But on both films, Hoy realized the fragility of these speed changes he built frame by frame at his Avid workstation. “There are a lot of variables,” he explains. “If the camera’s moving, I find ramping on shots with lateral movement almost impossible. If the camera’s panning with a character, it can be okay because the character is stationary within the frame, but if you’re panning from point A to point B, it doesn’t work. If the camera movement is even a little bit jerky, it won’t work. If the actor’s movement isn’t right, it won’t work.

“Sometimes it helps to blend frames”—using surrounding frames to create a new one that enhances the motion blur effect—“and sometimes it works better if you don’t. So when I work with the effects house, I ask them to use the tools they have to make frames that exactly match what I give them, without any variation on the speed line. I tell them, ‘If you can give me a version that looks better than mine, I’m happy to use it.’ There are times Avid can’t blend certain frames and they can and it’s an improvement, but 90 percent of the time it’s not. I’ve gotten to know the technical and aesthetic aspects of this very well.”

The ramping is a bit subtler in Watchmen than in 300, and in a number of scenes it’s designed to not be visible at all. Hoy recounts one situation in Watchmen in which a very long take didn’t quite work to his satisfaction. “It starts with a shot of an action figure of the superhero Ozymandias, then pans over and rack focuses to the actual superhero being interviewed by a reporter,” he explains. “The actor playing the reporter had these pauses in his delivery that slowed things down, so I cheated the dialogue to tighten it up and get rid of the gaps, but then when we get over to him, of course, he’s not saying what I want him to say. There was one take where I liked the performance of the actor playing the reporter, but everything else was better in the take we used. It’s a long choreographed shot and everything else in it worked so well, so I took the reporter’s head from another scene and plunked it on top of his body in the better take.”

Hoy explains that these types of fixes are great to have, but notes that it’s important for editors and directors not to rely on them. When you have the effects budget to re-create the Avid work in 2K, he says, “you could spend a lot of time and effort for diminishing returns. I’m happy I can do this kind of thing. It saves you from reshooting sometimes, but there isn’t too much of it in this movie. Zack is very clear and knows what he wants, and that’s so important. Especially when there are so many options you could play with.”