HD For Indies

It DOES take time to sync dailies, it IS a pain in the ass. While getting the best results is extremely important, depending on the scope and nature of your production, time effectiveness does fold in there somewhere. I love production folks that blithely (or ponder seriously and then still recommend) taking steps that dramatically increase time in post. 

Sometimes these can be for the benefit of the production - like insisting on a separate, superior sound recording system. Some can be to the detriment - I cringed every time I was on set and  heard "Hey, shouldn't we fix so-and-so?" "Nah....MFIP." Which was the shorthand for Mike Fix In Post. While time on set is the most expensive, valuable, and hard to come by (getting everybody and everything in one time and place all working properly), taking 30 seconds to tuck in a greenscreen, flag a light, get the boom out of the shot, etc. can save hours to days of laborious lipstick application to a pig of a shot. 

Or, put another way, I always loathed spending time turd polishing a screwed up shot to make it viably passable rather than spending the same amount of time on the shot the way it should have been to make a decent shot look great. Or burning up my "I have X hours to spend on this shot" time fixing problems before I could get to the Make It Look Good part...and had precious little time left to make deadline.

THAT'S where/when your post dollars are spent badly - fixing broken things that weren't shot right in the first place.

It is a clear mantra of quality filmmaking to get the dollars up on screen - as in, have production value. Have the results of time/effort/money show up on screen in a GREAT looking shot, not a medicore shot that the budget got burned fixing. It is all too possible to shoot mediocre to slightly flawed footage, then burn through what COULD have been your awesome color correction or VFX budget to get fabulous looking shots, and instead that time/effort/money gets burned on making flawed shots look marginally acceptable. OR, or course, you can just go way over budget and have decent looking shots with some inescapable flaws still in there. 

For all the things that can be fixed in post at considerable time and money, it is still BEST to get it right in camera in the first place. Saying MFIP is a punt. Sometimes a wise punt balancing all the other factors, but still a punt, because you couldn't do it right on set in the first place. That's a mistake of either mishaps, lack of preparation, lack of skill, lack of proper time budgeting, whatever. But saying you'll fix it in post is admitting you couldn't get it right in the first place. BAD.

This is a great point Christian brings up about the No Luv sound gets on set - a great way to consider it is WWCD? Huh - whazzat? It is short for What Would Camera (Department) Do. He brings up the example of muddy audio from background noise. If it were people walking around in the background adding visual noise (instead of people on or off camera making unwanted, uncontrollable noise) would the camera department say "Don't worry, its OK, we'll just roto out those folks in post?" Of course not. But directors/producers all the time do that kind of thing for audio.

Remember reading that audio is at least half of making a good looking picture? This discussion is the exact moment on set when you commit to making a compromised product.

Another good example I just thought of - going back to ADR/looping is the audio equivalent of the camera department saying "We couldn't get it right on location, don't worry, we'll shoot background plates and a greenscreen production later." Time, cost, effort, complexity, and in the end...it almost never looks as good as if it had been shot there in the first place, the performances suffer a cold, distance because the actors can't relate because they aren't in the same physical and emotional space as when it was originally done or should have been originally done....etc.

OK, done ranting...for now.

Go read the three above linked articles, and ponder what it takes to make good product.

-mike