April 2009

Transit
Pogo Films was approached by Chris Roche to make an application for the Art Fund at Westminster council for a short film and in November, we were awarded the prize to make “Transit”. From the pre-production to delivery we managed to turn the film around in about 10 days and deliver it for a Westminster screening on the 24th of March.

Our main interest in producing the short was to understand first hand Red format from a production angle and the workflows that are needed. We decided to take on the data wrangling job on the set. This role is so new there isn’t yet an official term out there (although my fave is Data Wrangler), but you can use DI technician. A worthy disscusion for the forums…

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James Mather brought over his own Red camera from Ireland and his lovely collection of lenses. Chris Roche decided to go for the anamorphic prime lenses as he wanted to get a cinematic look to the film. This meant James had to set the Red camera to the 2.1 format which enables it to record anamorphic on it’s huge 35mm cmos chip. So we ended up with a 2.35 aspect ratio.

The story is set in an airport, so we had to source a suitable location for the short. We ended choosing two locations one was the Epson race courses and the other was Sandown race course of which both have been previously used for airports. Ant Rutter and Debbie Burton did an amazing job dressing the locations to make them look right and on budget.

Data Wrangling
With Transit, James Mather had 10 SD 8 GB cards that would be used to record in the camera. There is another option of recording straight onto a Red drive. Each of the 10 cards were labeled Mag 1 to 10 and would be swapped over once full. Then the full card was filed away in an ‘exposed’ pouch prior to transfer to an external drive. 

As the media was going to be cut on a non intel G5, we had to transcode the media to DV for Final Cut Pro. ProRess can be too cpu intensive and takes longer to transcode so went for the DV codec.  Transcoding on the set using compressor managed to do it in about 30-40 mins just in good time for the next SD card to be copied over. We also found transcoding quite useful as it double checked if there was any corruption on any of the takes.

Post Production
The offline was edited by Miikka Leskinen and was in one of our offlines. Once the off-line was locked off, we took the media and the project to the Quantel IQ for the on-line. The Quantel only needs the EDL from Final Cut Pro (or Avid) and the drive with the original rushes. It will then find the relevant clips and conform them to 2K. If you are in a massive rush you can start grading as the footage comes in. You can also change the ISO on the meta data but generally if it’s shot correctly it’s very simple. As the Quantel is a 4 in 1 solution we can finish the whole short in that one system and by the second day had the 7 min short on Digi Beta and HDCAM-SR (444)

Links
http://www.jamestmather.com/