HD For Indies

In short, it's this:

Indies don't have money, but they do have time.

If you shoot HD and have your editor go to some post facility, you are burning a HUGE hourly rate as you sit in there and try to make decisions as fast as possible while $100 bills go poof every time you take a coffee break or have try to tweak an edit a different way.

Is that how you really want to work?

What might you REALLY want to do editing your film?

How about hang out in a comfy environment of your choosing of creation?

How about take as long as you feel comfortable editing your film?

How about having complete creative control to mess with different pacings, different editorial decisions, etc.?

How about having the freedom to do some George Lucas style cutting, where you do split screen edits, speed up and slow down certain actions, etc.?

How about if you want to do a complete, full color grading of the ENTIRE film? And you want to do it all on an uncompressed, 10 bit per channel version of your film? Huh, what's that mean? What if you want to do some cutting edge color treatment of your whole film to give it that intense look that you just saw in some top dollar release?

What if you want to tweak color, shot by shot, for the whole film, but be able to change your mind and go back and fix it after you come up with a better way later? Like you always do?

What if you just want complete control and want to take as long as and your editor see fit?

Then do it this way, do it my way. If you can scratch up 15 to 20 grand, you can OWN your own editing system. Or sell it when you're done and treat it like a rental system expense.

Independent filmmakers don't have some things but do have others.

One of the things they don't have, pretty much as a rule, is big huge heaping gobs of cash tothrow around on production and post production. If they were, they pretty much wouldn't be independent anymore. But I digress.

But what they DO tend to have is a bit more TIME. Unless there is a looming film festival deadline, from what I've seen independent filmmakers have some time. Their editors tend to work on a project basis rather than an hourly basis...or at least a weekly/monthly rate not a day rate.

The working difference between systems with full realtime capability and systems of equal image quality that have to render their effects, color corrections, and transitions much slower than real time is chunky - a 3 second dissolve just plays back on a realtime system, it might take 10-15 seconds to render on the lesser system. Color correction can eat a lot of time. But your editor probably has it. It will slow him down by a factor of, say, 30-50% per day, probable worst case (I'm researching those stats now). But having him operate in your studio (or his), without that under-the-gun pressure, allows for better decision making...and a better product.

The kinds of solutions I'm suggesting are NOT as fast as the top flight systems costing 10 to 20 times more. BUT what they do offer is EXTREMELY high quality, and the luxury of your own time to get it done as you see fit.

A lot of folks are editing offline at home and then going in for online HD sessions with realtime everything. Great!

Work with either FCP or Avid DV Express for that workflow if you wish.

If you want to do everything yourself, be sure to have a guru on tap (there's an email link on this page somewhere, right?), but once trained and prepped you can do an awful lot yourself or with your knowledgeable friends if the groundwork is carefully laid.

I've spelled out in another posting how to get a high end, kick ass, uncompressed, 1080p24 10bit system. If you don't want to do everything yourself, there are all kinds of ways to scale back to save money.

Don't want to do your own effects, final quality color correction or be able to integrate effects yourself? You don't need uncompressed. Pat yourself on the back and save a few thousand dollars.

Don't want to have to see your work in full HD? Save many many more thousands of dollars and just work with DV dubs of your HD footage.

...and so forth and so on.

You've come this far doing everything yourself. Keep working with smart people you trust who know their craft, but work smart on the least amount of equipment to do what you want while maintaining the quality you need.

There are some very interesting tradeoffs to be made in terms of letting things take a little longer to get done but having it save a bunch of money. Check your options, and carefully analyze what you want to get done on your film.

-mike