Driving Along

A few weeks ago, a spot Pilot created for BBC America and Mercedes-Benz called the "Mercedes-Benz Social Adventure" premiered. It was meant to get viewers excited about the new C-Class Coupe through the posts of a group of hand selected Instagramers that captured fun pictures of the car in different areas around Southern California. I acted as Assistant Editor on this piece, and was so thrilled to actually see it be featured on the official Mercedes-Benz USA Facebook page and have it air on television.

The biggest challenge for this project had to be up-rezing for delivery and working with mixed video resolutions. When we shot the spot, the car we used was a dark navy blue. Unfortunately, the footage that Mercedes provided for us to cut with featured a black car. As a result, any shot of the car that we captured had to be color corrected to a matching shade of black. Because of this, I eventually had a mixture of 1080p and 2K shots of the car; some from Mercedes and the rest from our colorists. However, because we were cutting in AVID, the question became how to maintain the resolution of the new car shots. While I could have easily just imported them at a higher resolution such as DNxHD 145, I was worried about the 2K footage looking compressed.

To solve this, I AMA linked the entire sequence back to their high res source files and applied any LUTs and additional color corrections to match the original sequence. My initial course of action was to just export out an EDL and then link up and export the sequence from Da Vinci Resolve. However, the issue came down to having a proper Broadcast Safe Filter to apply to the footage in Resolve. My company uses a custom filter created in AVID to throw on top of all of our deliveries. With this in mind, I knew that even if I exported out of Resolve, I'd have to bring the file back into AVID to apply the filter. Being pressed for time, I was unable to work with my Post Supervisor to create a new filter in Resolve. As a result, I settled on over cutting the sequence with AMA linked HighRes footage. It did take a while, and I'll admit it didn't feel super efficient, but it allowed the spot to be delivered on time and at the best resolution possible.

This spot was a fantastic group effort and I'm honored to have been a part of it. Hope you enjoy watching the final product!

Next Chapter

Last week, I completed my first job as a Freelance AVID Assistant Editor for 7ate9 Entertainment. Basically, whenever the studio has a new project they're putting together, they call upon their pool of assistant editors to come in and work until completion.

My first task included transcoding a variety of footage in Resolve. There were about 5-7 different cameras used, ranging from the RED CineX to GoPro. While it took a bit of time to get the exporting going, the real challenge came once I brought the media into AVID. I began by making folders for each of the spots, creating bins within each one of them with the names of the cameras that were utilized. With a structure laid out for myself, I was able to sort and move the footage around with ease.

The footage was often shot at a frame rate other than 23.976, ranging from 48 fps to 120 fps. Initially, I was terrified as to how I was going to sync it with the sound as it played back in slow motion. However, it was because of this fear that I was able to challenge myself to figure out how to troubleshoot the problem on my own. It had been a concept I remembered one of my Pixar mentors mentioning to me about how the job of the Assistant Editor is to find the answers versus constantly asking others for the solution. After much searching, I discovered that the motion effect editor would allow me to type in a new frame rate to convert my footage to. Soon enough, I had converted and synced all the footage just in time for the Editors to begin working.

On Monday, June 15th, I begin my first full time job as a Post Producer/Assistant Editor at Pilot, a company that creates promos for major television networks. I look forward to the new lessons I gain at Pilot, building upon those from 7ate9 and others.

Certified Fresh

For the past month, I've been attending my university's Interterm session where a semester long course is compressed into an intensive four weeks. This year, I decided to enroll in Avid Certification Prep, a course that would allow me to become an AVID Media Composer 8 Certified User.

The first half of the class focused on AVID's hotkeys and audio mixing features, with the second on visual effects and compositing. What was probably the most interesting aspect of the class for me was getting exposed to AVID's AMA linking, as I had never truly understood or used this feature. Basically, AMA linking allows someone to edit footage of a file type other than AVID's DNxHD codec without having to import it into AVID. One can simply point to the footage they wish to use on their drive, and voila, it appears as usable media in AVID. The downside is that AMA linking only works if the drive with the footage remains connected. Otherwise, the dreaded "Media Offline" title plasters itself on the screen. Also, cutting this "foreign" footage can put a strain on the system, causing frames to be dropped, and slow scrubbing. It could be useful if someone needed to quickly cut a short string of clips together, but a whole film this way would be painstaking and ill advised.

While taking the course, I was relieved to find that I was not as stressed or overwhelmed as I thought I'd be. Even though I was being fed a large amount of information, I realized that over the course of my time at Dodge College and at Pixar, I had come to discover the hidden gems AVID had to offer, either through cutting shorts or mentorship. I had been wanting to take AVID Certification for quite some time since I was a Freshman, but in hindsight, I'm actually glad that I waited until now to do so. Getting to first learn and see AVID's features be used in a practical way allowed me to gain an appreciation and understanding of why certain aspects were added to the software and how they were helpful to editors and their assistants. For instance, Markers were included to organize notes as well as indicate where a new scene begins.

Now officially certified, I want to go back through the books that I used for this class and try to determine why each feature was designed and how I can adapt them to my own workflow. The pursuit of learning never ends!