Little Frog Plays With New Features In The Kona 3, And I Rant About Producers Doing Post Work In-House

Shane Ross (little frog in high def) has written a decent blow by blow of editing DVCPro HD over firewire and via the Kona 3 and Kona 2. The Kona 3 has added features of up converting and cross converting HD for multiple delivery requirements. This is of huge importance as more and more HD productions are co-productions Jane Eyre on BBC 1 at the moment is a co production with WGBH Boston. Similarly Rome sees BBC and HBO in bed together. At the moment at work I too am looking at BBC and Discovery co-productions. Not too long ago Nuremburg aired on BBC 2. For Nuremburg the producers were required to deliver 18 masters for the 3 part series. That is 6 different versions of each film. These included Textless and Texted UK TX, Discovery and Worldwide versions. This is an ever-growing issue, one which Post houses need to brace themselves for. In the end, Shane uses a workflow that I have seen a number of times: rendering an uncompressed 10 bit 1080 QT for colour correcting and vfx. I imagine Aja do better conversions than FCP, so choosing to export via the Kona 3 at 1080 is probably a good move.  Had the original workflow been adopted to use the Kona to do a frame rate conversion, I would begin to worry. Their tests seem to have been a success but I wonder if it really will hold up in real world practise.

BBC Post in London is buying the New £90K Snell and Wilcox Alchemist Platinum as it is ‘the only HD cross converter worth using’. According to the folks here, there is no converter on the market which utilises comparative motion estimation technology. Frame rates conversions can look so dire we have them a lot in the UK for US commercials and they are bloody awful. I would like to hear first hand what people think about the quality of ‘bang for your buck’ conversion hardware is.  It is great that we have these tools, but is it wiser to use the best available in certain situations?

Now for my rant about in house editing:

Continuing on from my statement above about ever increasingly complicated delivery requirements, at the moment there is a culture which is moving the editorial onus onto the producers.  I fear for the poor sod sitting on an FCP trying to get out a broadcast master with no broadcast technical experience and no engineers to help when it all goes tits up. Producers must be asking if this is what they signed on for!? Yeah, the concept is great. Save money and have the flexibility to make the film they want. But the technical aggravation combined with the lack of support makes the savings hardly worth it. Cleaver Producers will utilise this new responsibility with an air of caution. They can use this to their benefit as well, but only by knowing their limitations and how to shift responsibility. Post houses can benefit too. A clever producer in today’s market would look seriously at the following workflow:

1. Consult post house.


2. Shoot.


3. Deliver rushes to post house for digitising.


4. Take away firewire drive with formatted rushes and project file.


5. Offline in house.


6. Deliver cut film to post house .


7. Post house does Conform, Online, Grade and Dub.

This may seem straight forward or perhaps not really saving money. Whatever. In my mind this is the clearest and best way as a producer to eliminate blame from yourself, satisfy the cost saving requirement (thousands by offlining in house), and ensure the best is achieved for the production technically and creatively. The post house will be pleased as well because the finishing is where the lion share of profit against time is. Post houses lose money on offline editing. They make up for it on digitising and creative staff. Offline suites are a loss leader. Take it away. Do it yourself. It saves production money and help your post house be more cost effective in their operations which may save you money as well.

Now, producers may say ‘I pretty much do that anyway’. You don’t do it though. Most of you fuck up on the important bit. You go off and digitise yourself. What happens is you fuck up your file structure and poorly manage your media and the conform takes twice as long, eating up half the money you save not to mention causing aggravation to all those involved and delaying the rest of your final post. Some producers even go one step further and try to playout their own masters and suffer the cost of failing tech review repeatedly.

I will say there are producers out there who can manage DIY post. But from where I sit the majority of producers I work with should not be lumbered with this responsibility.