Behind the Seen

by Charles Koppelman

  Preparing a “selects roll” that samples each setup adds an extra side-step to the preparation of dailies. The lab processes and prints in “camera rolls,” in the order footage actually goes through the camera. So the assistants must break down the film print from each camera roll into individual shots, pull out the proper ones, splice these together for projecting dailies, and then find the sound to go with them.

  The day after Murch’s Final Cut Pro system finally receives its first digitized material, ready to cut, just when the road ahead seems clear, the external world intrudes with some disheartening news. Walter unexpectedly receives a long letter from Will Stein, the senior executive at Apple managing the Professional Applications Development group (“Pro Apps”), which includes Final Cut Pro.

  Stein first acknowledges the July 7 email message Murch sent to Steve Jobs updating him about how well everything seemed to be going on Cold Mountain. Stein writes that editing Cold Mountain on FCP, “has a lot of visibility inside Apple, and we are very excited to see Final Cut Pro proposed for such a significant production.” Stein looks forward to Murch’s “feedback” about working with FCP.

  Stein also responds to Murch’s earlier communication with Brian Meaney about director Minghella being “a little surprised” at Apple’s “lack of enthusiasm in the Cold Mountain project.” Stein writes that Apple’s Final Cut Pro team has “a long-term strategy to push into the high-end film market only when our product and support team are ready to provide a great experience to the feature film production community. What may appear to be a lack of enthusiasm,” he writes, “is actually concern over the quality of experience” given FCP’s missing change list feature, possible rough edges in trim mode, and the issue of OS X not supporting SAN (shared area network) storage—linking editing stations to a central hard drive array through a fiber connection. “Speaking for the team,” he writes, “we would rather encourage you to be a happy partner later than a less-than-happy partner now,” a turn of phrase that had a somewhat ominous ring, given that production was already underway.

  Young Walter Murch prepares rolls for a screening of dailies.

  Stein goes on to write that advances and improvements to FCP are still in progress. “Based on our project plans,” he continues, “and what I understand to be your production schedule, there is **almost no chance** [Stein’s emphasis] that any of these changes will make it into a stable and shipping version of Final Cut Pro or Cinema Tools in time to be used on Cold Mountain.”

  Then Stein says that if Murch is “reasonably confident that our applications (and third-party tools), as they are shipping now, will be sufficient for your needs (and you are looking for that ‘early adopter’ type of experience)—I will be very happy to work with you to extend our support of your project. The types of collaborative efforts you outlined in your message to Steve are exactly the type of thing we look for to help drive Final Cut Pro to the next level in the Hollywood community. I hope all is going well at the shoot, and look forward to hearing from you. Best regards, Will Stein.”

  Murch genuinely believed that once he was “in country” and actually using Final Cut, Apple would come through and work directly with him on Cold Mountain. With this letter Murch knows that door is now closed. Later he describes feeling like a trapeze artist caught off-guard when the master of ceremonies announces, with no warning, that tonight’s performance will be done without a net. There’s nothing else to do but swallow hard, trust one’s instincts, and not look down. The show must go on!

  Instead of agreeing they’ve reached the end of the road, Murch writes back to Will Stein reiterating their common interests, while also acknowledging the current incomplete state of Final Cut’s version 3.

  * * *

  Cold Mountain • Kodak • Bucharest

  TO: Will Stein

  FROM: Walter Murch

  DATE: July 26, 2002

  RE: Apple Cold Mountain

  --------------------------------------------------------

  Dear Will Stein:

  Good hearing from you, and I’m sorry we couldn’t have linked up back in June.

  Thank you for your encouragement and your words of caution. We are fully aware that there will be no shippable fixes for FCP by early next year, and we have – or will have by the time we need them – our own solutions for the outstanding concerns, such as Change Lists and OMF export. The smaller issues – such as 4 hour project length, asymmetric trim, ink & key number fields, etc. – I would categorize as desirable but non-essential.

  We actually welcome the current state of FCP, in a way, because we hope that some of what we learn on this film can perhaps be integrated into later versions of the software. In fact, other than the excellence of FCP, one of the central reasons for embarking down this road, as I hoped I indicated in my letters to Brian and Steve, is to promote a creative exchange between you at Apple/FCP and us on Cold Mountain.

  I am intensely interested in furthering the evolution of cinema post-production, and I see it taking the FCP path. I am, and have always been, in my thirty-seven years of working in film, an “early adopter” personality (to use your words) and fully prepared for the smooth as well as the sometimes rough patches that are part of the territory.

  At any rate, we are “in country” in Romania with four FCP stations, happily digitizing and working away – Cold Mountain started shooting two weeks ago – and I would like to reiterate my belief that we both have things to offer each other, and hope that this project can be the field on which the exchange takes place.

  Best wishes from sunny/rainy Bucharest,

  Walter Murch

  * * *

  The same day Murch writes his response to Stein, he finally gets underway editing Cold Mountain using Final Cut Pro.

  July 26, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Response to Will Stein.

  First really prowling around on FPC and although slightly awkward, there are some good things. I am keeping lists of things to improve.

  Feeling weird—just overwhelmed by things in general—that slightly levitated feel I remember from the first day shooting on OZ after I was brought back on again, in the tower room.

  Murch’s Final Cut Pro workstation in Bucharest.

  On July 27 Stein writes back with a follow-up: “All required cautions now out of the way, I can reiterate that we are very excited by the project, and will try to be actively involved in smoothing the way for you where possible... Brian [Meaney] and Bill Hudson will also be the leads in terms of organizing technical support where required during your production.”

  This dance between Murch and Apple will continue until Cold Mountain is finished.

  In Murch’s view, Stein’s initial July 26 letter was the fallback position. Murch reflects a year later: “If, say, two months down the road, everything blew up and we were running around with our hair on fire in Romania, Apple would be able to pull this letter out and say, ‘Listen, we told them this was our position, and they went ahead anyway.’ It was written as a documented record in case there were troubles down the road. Full Frontal, which was also edited in Final Cut Pro, was a qualified experience on both sides; neither party enjoyed it the way they had hoped, and yet that was a low-profile, low-budget film with a very quick turnaround—two weeks of shooting and only a few weeks of post production. Cold Mountain is a different animal and much more visible, so if there was a calamity of some kind, Final Cut’s reputation would be damaged. It would not be their fault but nonetheless they’d be damaged. So it made a lot of people at Apple nervous.”

  The Stein letter means the company isn’t going to partner with Murch in any official capacity. Murch had been hoping Apple would be a companion to climb Cold Mountain—together they might take Final Cut Pro to a higher level, working in a mutually supportive way. Murch offered Apple an applied laboratory, so to speak, for testing and improving more advanced uses of its application, and at the end of the process, a high-visibility film Apple could point to as a succes
s. He assumed Apple would openly embrace the chance to put the application to task, with the company stepping in to provide needed solutions and improvements as they arose. He imagined a give-and-take, we’re-in-this-together spirit that defined Murch’s association with Ramy Katrib and DigitalFilm Tree. Instead, Murch will go up the mountain with his own team: Sean, the assistants, DigitalFilm Tree, and Aurora. Apple will stay at base camp, wish them well, and occasionally send up a few supplies and fervent prayers.

  Still, Murch doesn’t give up on Apple. Even if FCP is not yet fully developed to accommodate the needs of a major feature film and doesn’t have all the functions he’d like, Murch is becoming a fan.

  July 27, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  More working with FCP: in a sketch-pad mode, understanding the clips, sequences, projects, etc. Navigating around the controls, which are good—sometimes very good—and sometimes just different and sometimes not as good (no asymmetric trimming). I am keeping a running list of things to send to Brian and Bill.

  This dance between Murch and Apple, a tango of overlapping interests, will continue until Cold Mountain is finished. Coming as they do from two different worlds, the creative and the corporate, the editor and the computer company move in different rhythms. Walter is drawn to the Final Cut Pro application and is willing to use it, even in its present imperfect state. Apple looks at a high-profile project and wants to proceed cautiously, lest its new baby be running before it safely walks. Nevertheless, when Murch writes to Ramy back in Los Angeles about his exchange with Will Stein, he reveals an unwavering optimism, a belief that the natural symbiosis between Cold Mountain and Apple is self-evident and might still prevail.

  * * *

  Date: July 28, 2002

  From: Walter Murch

  To: Ramy Katrib

  Will S. has opened the door a crack, and I am writing him today to tell him that I would like him (Apple) to work with DFT and give you what you need to proceed. Our main focus, as I outlined in my letter to Will, should be change lists and non-embedded OMF export (for sound files). I am happy with how this has all turned out—perhaps a month late, but the essential fact that we are in Bucharest and working with FCP on Cold Mountain, already two weeks into production, is a major “convincer” of the seriousness of our intent. Sydney Pollack just arrived today, and is happy that we are using FCP. He has it on his laptop.

  * * *

  * * *

  Date: July 29, 2002

  From: Walter Murch

  To: Ramy Katrib

  Jim Foreman [Aurora’s and DFT’s man in Bucharest] left this morning. All worked out very well and I think he enjoyed himself. We kept a clipping of his hair to bring near the hard drives and the CPUs if something begins to go wrong—a kind of editorial voodoo.

  * * *

  July 31, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Article in Herald Tribune about nerve systems. We have two: a thick fast fiber, giving us the ‘hard’ information about when, where, impact, etc. and another, thin slow fiber system giving us emotional information about the nature of the touch, love, etc. The signals for this second system are processed in the visual part of the cortex .

  Don’t forget little people for the monitor here. Tomorrow.

  The “little people” are another one of Walter’s handmade edit room tools. These are paper cutouts in the shapes of a man and a woman that he affixes to each side of his large screening monitor. They are his way of dealing with the problem of scale.

  Murch’s “little people” next to his viewing monitor remind him that this image will eventually be 13 feet tall.

  As an editor, Murch must remember that images in the edit room are only 1/240 the square footage of what the audience will eventually see on a 30-foot-wide screen. The large TV Murch uses for viewing—the “client” monitor—is masked off to the proper aspect ratio, (the width 2.35 times the height in the case of CinemaScope, the wide-screen projection format for Cold Mountain). But it’s still easy to forget the size of projected film, which can trick an editor into pacing a film too quickly, or using too many close-ups—styles more akin to television. The eye rapidly apprehends the relatively small, low-detail images on a TV. Large-scale faces help hold the attention of an audience sitting in a living room with lots of distractions and ambient light. But in movies, images are larger than life and more detailed, so the opposite is true. The eye needs time to peruse the movie screen and take it all in. But for many months, except for projected film dailies, the film editor works at TV scale. The solution for Murch is to have these two human cutouts stand sentry on his monitor, reminding him of the film’s eventual huge proportions.

  August 1, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  August first—new month. Let it be blessed with good luck and productivity. Amen. Cutting “soldiers” tape.

  Problems arise almost immediately as Murch begins to use Final Cut to actually begin editing footage on Cold Mountain. Never one to panic, he casually mentions this at the end of an email to Ramy, almost as an afterthought: “We are still getting the occasional stutter in the Canvas screen, so if you have any brainwaves in that department, let us know. All best wishes from Bucharest. Walter.” The Canvas is the screen in the FCP interface that shows the results of an edit. Those faltering images are annoying, even if the edited material isn’t itself flawed.

  DFT and its network get to work searching for solutions to the stuttering image problem among software engineers, developers, and Final Cut users. The problem makes its way from Bucharest to Zed Saeed at DFT in Los Angeles and then to Michigan, headquarters for Aurora, the company that makes the Igniter add-on card for digitizing video into FCP. The issue turns out to be simple to resolve; it’s not unlike the set-up problems any computer user has with new equipment, setting preferences and defaults to work optimally with a system’s associated hardware and software. All computer monitors have settings for resolution (the size and density of the screen pixels), brightness, and color depth (number of colors). Aurora suggests that Jim Foreman, who is providing on-site tech support, reset the pixel resolution on Murch’s monitor and change the color depth to “thousands of colors” instead of “millions of colors.” That does the trick; the stutter goes away.

  The Mac OS 9 Display control panel for setting numbers of colors for the monitor. Until Murch reset this to “thousands” he had problems with image stutter.

  The next hurdle that shows up isn’t so easy to get over. Sean reports to Ramy that when Walter works with color-corrected digital video footage, he can’t get his preferred edit-on-the-fly technique to work accurately. If he taps the spacebar (stop), or the K or Enter keys (pause) while watching a scene play back on the monitor, the scene plays on for several frames, instead of stopping immediately. This negates Murch’s intuitive frame-marking method.

  * * *

  Making it Work

  Robert Grahamjones: “After [Walter] got settled in Romania, I got emails from him saying everything was going really well. He was really happy with the things he was able to do. What I was hearing back here, from friends and colleagues in the film business, was ‘I wonder what his assistants are saying now?’ Because they’re the ones who have to make it work as a system.”

  * * *

  On July 30, Walt Shires weighs in on the problem of frame-accurate stopping with an email to Sean. The news isn’t good: “The problem you are referring to has been a common problem with FCP. There is a certain mount of CPU time necessary for FCP to process the keystroke for stop and then make the call to QuickTime to stop the video playback. I suspect that when working with real-time color correction the load on the CPU is causing the stop playback to occur later than usual. Unfortunately, there is really no way around it.” This function was one of Walter and Sean’s deal-breakers when they first went to see DigitalFilm Tree about Final Cut Pro. Murch continues working, however, bypassing the color-correction mode until it can be fixed at some later date. The telecine transfers of the film to video, done by a Romanian technici
an just down the hall at Kodak, are extremely good, and generally no extra color correction is needed. With confidence in Sean and DigitalFilm Tree, tolerance for the ups and downs of technology, and a deep-seated faith that things work out eventually, Murch is just satisfied to be underway.

  August 2, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Finished the “soldiers” tape and put music on it, gave it to Huw [Cold Mountain liaison to the Romanian army]. My first cut sequence on FCP! worked out well Anthony viewed the tape, and liked it—“good to see some Walter cutting”—thought that the interaction between Oakley and Inman is an indication of how it will be. He liked the music—wondered if I had come upon that decision myself. I told him Dianne had told me what he was thinking.

  Walter’s August 2 Journal entry reveals something very telling about relationships and communications within the Cold Mountain film community. Minghella is much admired and respected by his cast and crew, in part because he creates a working environment that is open, creative, and collegial. Many high-caliber people keep working with him—in front of and behind the camera—because Minghella encourages contributions from all quarters, and conversations about creative choices, which isn’t the rule among many film directors. The collaborative environment, his directorial sensibilities, and the kinds of material he finds attractive are reasons some of the best people in the film business stick with him on one film after another: cinematographer John Seale, costume designer Ann Roth, composer Gabriel Yared, top producers—and Walter Murch. Minghella encourages his film family to engage in crosstalk and to share ideas and information even if he’s not always aware of what’s under discussion.