Behind the Seen

by Charles Koppelman

  “I suppose you want to remap the keys, too?” John asks rhetorically, referring to editors who like to customize their keyboards for frequent shortcuts. This joke isn’t so funny.

  “Yeah, I know,” Sean says dejectedly, without prompting. He’s already aware keyboard remapping, a function native to Avid, is unavailable in FCP 3.

  Finally Walter sits down at the keyboard. With everyone quietly observing, like an expectant audience awaiting the first chord at a piano recital, Murch tries out some basic functions and edits on Final Cut Pro. This is not a trivial moment. The group, which is quickly becoming the FCP/Cold Mountain support team, feels the gravity.

  At the end of their day together, Ramy sets up a conference call for Sean and Walter with Brooks Harris to talk about the thorny problem of getting sound files from Final Cut into ProTools. At the heart of this is FCP’s inability to provide OMF compositions (edited audio information) that can be emailed to the sound department and then re-linked to their raw audio files. FCP can only provide OMF export with audio embedded—that is, carrying the sound media with it. Normally that may seem convenient, but sound editors need to work with raw audio files of the highest quality. For Cold Mountain Murch wants the sound to be delivered at 24 bits. The higher the number, the more precisely the original audio signal will be reproduced. (Standard CDs use a bit rate of 16.) However, Final Cut Pro can only handle sound files with 16-bit sound information. Using embedded sound exported from FCP will compromise the quality of sound that was originally recorded at 24 bits.

  The other problem with embedded sound information is that Murch wants to be able to send the sound editors his blueprints for the building (edits points where his cuts occur, levels, equalization, etc.), not the bricks, mortar, lumber, and drywall—all the building materials—which is clumsy, inefficient, and unnecessary. So, if Brooks Harris, one of the original developers of OMF who helped develop OMF Tool Kit, an application used by the post-production community, can circumvent these hurdles, all the better for Murch, Cullen, and the sound editors on Cold Mountain. Everyone stands around the speakerphone in Ramy’s smallish office. On the wall is a full-size Bebe fashion poster featuring a model in her underwear. Two years later, it will be replaced by a one-sheet of Cold Mountain.

  “Walter and Sean are meeting with Apple tomorrow,” Ramy tells Harris, “so everything’s coming to a head. This sound problem—not being able to transfer composition-only sound from FCP—is one of the top three issues that’s on the table right now.”

  “If they just gave me access to the API,” Harris responds, “I could do it through OMF.” There is more discussion about details and options. But in the end, a solution seems possible, and from a top programmer that DigitalFilm Tree knows and trusts.

  “That was encouraging,” Ramy says after the call is finished.

  “Yeah,” Sean says cheerfully, “and Brooks seems to be a pretty pessimistic individual.”

  JUNE 18, 2002—BERKELEY

  Walter and Sean arrive at the Fantasy building in West Berkeley for their meeting with Apple Final Cut Pro managers, Brian Meaney and Bill Hudson. They convene in Murch’s old editing room, No. 305, with Tom Christopher—who is hosting the get-together—and his assistant editor, Tim Fox. Sound editor and sound supervisor Larry Schalit, with whom Murch had worked on The Talented Mr. Ripley and K-19 is also there. Schalit will contribute to the issue of sound file transferability between Final Cut Pro and the ProTools application. Christopher has spent considerable time with both Meaney and Hudson on previous occasions as a beta tester for FCP.

  “Coming into the Apple meeting,” as Sean later described it, “all of the momentum was towards Final Cut Pro. I had essentially decided that Final Cut Pro was the way to go. The only question was the best way to approach it. My sense at the time was that Walter hadn’t decided—that he was still kind of like, ‘Hmm.’ But I certainly had decided, and DigitalFilm Tree had decided, that they really wanted this to happen.”

  As Tom Christopher points out, the meeting is a natural outgrowth of Apple’s aggressive marketing campaign of Final Cut Pro to the film industry: “A two-page, full-color spread on FCP in film trade magazines? That little flip of a page sent out a message. And this meeting between Walter and the Final Cut development team is the culmination. When you advertise in Variety you’re not attracting the high school drama market, you’re not going for industrial clients, you’re going after movie people. And here you have a movie person, and he wants to do it now.”

  Two years later, also looking back on that Berkeley meeting, Bill Hudson, Apple’s senior manager of Market Development and Strategic Accounts for Professional Applications, says, “We wanted to make sure someone of Murch’s experience understood what the workflow was going to be—making sure there were no blind spots. If you go into something with your eyes wide open and you know what to expect, you can address things as they come up.”

  In the corner room on the third floor of the Zaentz Film Center, Sean Cullen presents his Cold Mountain game plan to Hudson and Meaney, what systems he plans to use, and how he will put together the edit room. Cullen presents several unresolved issues based on his research during the last several weeks. He proposes that Apple help solve them.

  “They were basically giving a brain dump of post-production needs for this project,” Christopher recalls. “The wants, the wish list. It was the most elaborate Final Cut Pro scheme probably ever devised.” Hudson and Meaney listen quietly. Cullen does not get much of a response.

  In essence, Murch and Cullen are asking Apple for Final Cut Pro functions and attributes that are not likely to be available until the next version release. Christopher, having been in many development sessions like this with Apple, knows this is a line that cannot be crossed. Christopher tells Cullen that Apple is being non-responsive because neither Cullen nor Murch have a non-disclosure agreement with Apple.

  “Hudson turned to me,” Christopher recalls, “and said, ‘Thank you.’ Because these are the rules they run by. You have to talk about what things are important for your workflow. You’re not allowed to come around and say, ‘When can I have it? Will it be part of the next release?’ You can’t buttonhole these guys, because they’re not allowed to talk like that. But they do take the information you give them; they take that home.”

  First off, Hudson and Meaney feel Sean will have problems getting the FileMaker database program to work with FCP. Cullen says, “Everything I’ve seen shows me that it’s just the same as using it to work on an Avid, so that’s not a problem. I’m expecting to have to do that kind of work.”

  Sean is warned that FCP might crash.

  “I’m expecting to have crashes. Crashes happen all the time. That’s not a problem.”

  “Media might get corrupted.”

  “Media gets corrupted all the time. I’ve got videotapes.”

  Apple does not seem to understand the amount of strategic thinking Sean, Walter, and DigitalFilm Tree have already done on their own. Sean also senses they hold Avid in too much regard. “I think they had an impression that the Avid was much more turnkey than it was. Their impression of Avid was the sort of big brother—that it can’t do anything wrong, that Avid’s perfect.”

  Brian Meaney, part of Apple’s Final Cut Pro team.

  “Up until that point,” Brian Meaney explains later, “many of the people we had met in the higher end of the film community, with studio productions, didn’t understand Final Cut Pro and its nuances—didn’t understand its differences from the Avid or other systems that they may be used to working on—at a tech level as well as the editing itself, to some degree.”

  Then the issue of systems versions that Walt Shires alluded to at DFT the day before in Los Angeles comes up. Bill Hudson says the Final Cut Pro team has been instructed from the highest levels at Apple that all advancements, all software development must be in OS X. According to Tom Christopher, “He was basically saying, ‘None of this can happen for you, Walter, Sean. You’re i
n 9.2.2. You can’t have any of this. We can’t do this for you. We are doing things that you will like, but those things will only be usable in OS X.’ That was a sobering moment. I wouldn’t call it chilling, because it didn’t chill these guys. But it basically set the stage for this being a space walk with no leash. If you’re on the Shuttle and you go out to fix something, you have a leash. The astronauts have a leash. Bill basically said you’re going to be a space walk with no leash, no net, walking out with no net.”

  While understanding the partnering relationship Sean and Walter would like to have with Apple, Meaney implies that FCP is still fundamentally a consumer application, not intended—not yet, anyway—to withstand the demands of a full-length feature film of Cold Mountain’s magnitude. He intimates there are reasons, technical things, that Walter and Sean don’t know about that could hurt them.

  “Brian Meaney is a really good technical Apple product manager kind of guy,” Tom Christopher says later. “I’ve been at trade shows with him. He has this rocket delivery of stuff. Very confident. Here, the nervousness level was quite high. He was getting more intense at this meeting. I could just see he was nervous.”

  “We knew for a fact that OS X wouldn’t work,” Sean recalls, “because DigitalFilm Tree identified a number of problems with it.” Cold Mountain would be using a SAN (shared area network) because Sean and Walter will network together four or more computer stations that share audio and video from one central storage data bank via a fiber channel. No SAN solutions run on OS X, either from Apple or any third-party company. Another problem with OS X is that Aurora, a third-party hardware developer for Apple, has not completed a capture card driver to use with OS X. Aurora’s Igniter card, which DFT will include in Murch’s system, is the most reliable and proven method to capture 29.97 frame per second (fps) video dailies to 24 fps video in FCP and provide 29.97 output and viewing, all in real time. Finally, at this time OS X is an unknown quantity in general.

  For Cullen, System 9 versus OS X was a red herring: “We said to Apple, ‘We’re going to do it on Final Cut Pro, and that’s what matters. We don’t care about System 9 or X. We can switch over to OS X later in post production.’” The push for OS X, which Meaney and Hudson admit comes from “top management,” has to do with Apple’s mission to eliminate OS 9 from the scene. When a major computer maker like Apple introduces a new system version, it wants it to become the gold standard as quickly as possible. But software upgrades are not like launching the Euro and simultaneously taking all the old European currencies out of circulation. To this day in fact, OS 9 is still used to run most advanced Final Cut Pro systems because of the lack of third-party software and hardware development for OS X.

  “We hadn’t come across anyone yet,” Brian Meaney says later, “who has spent the time to understand these things. What we don’t want, and what we worked very hard to do, was to not have false expectations out there in the industry. Many times that means not going in to make lots and lots of sales, and we’re fine with that and always have been. We had reservations that this might not be a good idea.”

  “They were very much between a rock and a hard place,” Sean recalls, speaking of Hudson and Meaney. “I can certainly understand their concern and their trepidation. Myself and DigitalFilm Tree, we had already decided we would be able to make it work. It was a question now of how much would Apple help. How much easier will they make it? Before the Apple meeting I said to DigitalFilm Tree, ‘It’s important that we have a solution that gets us all the way through post production to the delivery of the film that will be successful if Apple goes out of business tomorrow, because we can’t tie the fate of this film to the fate of a software company. Apple came a little too late to block the flood.”

  “They really were saying, ‘We don’t want you to do it, because we’re not ready,’” Cullen recalls later. “I could hear a little corporate doublespeak. There was a little bit of, ‘We know what’s going on, but we can’t tell you. We don’t want to share information with you directly. We’ll only share information with you in an indirect manner.’”

  The session in Room 305 ends in a stalemate of sorts. Sean and Walter shared their plans to use Final Cut Pro on Cold Mountain and their requests for how Apple might smooth the road. Apple had a punch list of needs and wants to take back to Cupertino from a top feature film editing team that would soon be pushing the limits of its editing software. The atmosphere was cool but not unfriendly. They adjourned for lunch to the Westside Bakery, a light and airy café across the street from the Fantasy building.

  Murch’s sketch of the workflow he planned for Cold Mountain, as drawn during his meeting with Apple in Berkeley.

  At lunch the conversation continues about film editing and Final Cut, though less intensely than earlier. Murch excuses himself for the rest room. Tom Christopher turns to Hudson and Meaney, who sit across the table from him. “Walter is very determined and he will figure it out. His crew will make it work. They’re tired of doing it the way everyone else is doing it. You’re not dealing with some guy in a garage on Cahuenga Boulevard in North Hollywood. And you’re not going to dissuade him by saying ‘It’s a scary tunnel you’re going into, Walter.’”

  Larry Schalit was also at the lunch and later recalled: “I sensed Walter was very disappointed by the end of the lunch at the Westside. He was disappointed Apple wasn’t going to help him out. Apple could have been enthused, like DFT. They were nice guys, but it seemed they never really got what an opportunity this was and who Walter really is. And they didn’t really give him the respect. Here they were, sitting across from the one guy who could take FCP to the big leagues, to big features. I don’t think they realized that.”

  Bill Hudson remembers it differently. “When we were driving back to Cupertino,” he says later, “Brian and I were going like, ‘Okay, wow, he is totally getting it, and he’s seeing the benefit in working a different way.’ Not a lot of people are willing to set aside the tools that they’ve honed their craft on and have the confidence in their craft, and he does. Walter is a great exception. And that was really exciting and invigorating for us.”

  But Hudson and Meaney also realized that with OS X eclipsing OS 9, they could not do all they might want to assist Cold Mountain. “We could make improvements,” Meaney continued later, “but any improvements were going to be on System X. And he [Murch] wasn’t going to benefit from those. We don’t do special builds, special fixes, to try and help out individual clients. We do a lot of software for a lot of people. We needed to make that clear. In addition to that, if he hit any particular problem, we weren’t going to be able to help.”

  Hudson sighs. “Yeah,” he says, ruefully agreeing with Meaney.

  June 18, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Meeting with Apple Bill Hudson and Brian... Larry Schalit, Tom Christopher, Sean, Me, and Tim Fox. All seems good or tending that way. They were greatly relieved to meet us (i.e. Sean) and feel our competency and enthusiasm. We told them about our reservations and they listened to us attentively. Tired... Nice evening with Bea and Kragen and Hana sitting on the sofa.

  Soon thereafter Walter asks Ramy to send him a budget comparison between Avid and Final Cut Pro. He will use that information to prepare his final pitch for using Final Cut Pro. Interestingly, Murch puts a positive spin on the meeting with Apple in his email to Minghella and producers Bill Horberg and Iain Smith.

  * * *

  Dear Cold Mountaineers: June 20, 2002

  We had a very good meeting with Apple (Bill Hudson, Strategic Accounts Manager and Brian Meaney, Product Designer) on Tuesday, regarding Final Cut Pro, and they are as enthusiastic about the project as they are about giving us technical support. So it looks like this is the system we will be using. Cold Mountain would be the first “high profile” 35mm feature film project to use FCP, which makes a powerful statement to the industry, and Apple will get much free publicity out of this. How we can parlay that to our further advantage, I leave to your large brains.
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br />   I am very happy for a number of reasons, but mostly I am impressed with the programming architecture of Final Cut, which uses the Macintosh’s native abilities and is thus inherently elegant and effective. I can put sequences on my G4 laptop, with all the associated media, and show things to Anthony “live.” (Avid, by contrast, is a clunky hardware & software “add on” which is becoming more and more of a dinosaur.)

  And then there is the question of cost: Final Cut systems are many times less expensive than Avids. Our plan is to install four FCP editing stations for less than the cost of one Avid station. This will allow us to multi-task—editing, assisting, digitizing, and making tapes at the same time, plus having a station available for the second unit and VFX, etc. It also assures us a certain amount of redundancy: if a problem develops with one of the machines we can keep rolling on three wheels rather than, as on “Ripley” with the Avids, grinding to a halt until someone could come down from London to fix the problem.

  I will include at the end of this letter a list of all the equipment, down to the most trivial, but let me just say by way of explanation that there are four interlocking pieces of the puzzle: 1) the FCP G4 computers which are the core of each station—this is where the editing, digitizing, etc. is actually done; 2) the hard-disk storage, where the media (the images and sounds) are kept. Each station accesses this media through a Fibrechannel network; 3) the outrigger equipment such as tape decks, mixers, CD players, etc.; and 4) the more conventional 35mm editing room equipment: a Steenbeck, benches, rewinds, splicers, etc.

  Our savings come with the first puzzle-piece—whether we use Avids or FCP, the other three pieces would remain the same.

  I would like to have this equipment in place in Romania by the week prior to shooting, so that we have time to shake it down.

  I am leaving for London on Sunday the 23rd, and will be there with Aggie for a week, arriving in Bucharest Sunday night June 30. I will be on email and phone. Sean Cullen can also handle any specific questions about any of this.