Terminator: Dark Fate

“I’ll be back,” has turned out to be more than simply an iconic movie line. Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) are indeed back to save humanity from a dystopian future in this latest installment of the Terminator franchise. James Cameron is back on board, as well, with writing and producing credits. Terminator: Dark Fate is in essence Cameron’s sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Tim Miller (Deadpool) is at the helm to direct the tale. It’s roughly two decades after the time of T2 and a new Rev-9 machine has been sent from an alternate future to kill Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), an unsuspecting auto plant worker in Mexico. But the new future’s resistance has sent back Grace (Mackenzie Davis), an enhanced super-soldier, to combat the Rev-9 and save her. They cross paths with Connor and the story sets off for a mad dash to the finale at Hoover Dam.

Miller brought back much of his Deadpool team, including his VFX shop Blur, DP Ken Seng, and editor Julian Clarke. This is also the second pairing of Miller and Clarke with Adobe. Both Deadpool and Terminator: Dark Fate were edited using Premiere Pro. In fact, Adobe was also happy to tie in with the film’s promotion through their own CreateYourFate trailer remix challenge. Participants could re-edit their own trailer using supplied content from the film.

I recently spoke with Julian Clarke about the challenges and fun of cutting this latest iteration of such an iconic film franchise.

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[OP] The Terminator: Dark Fate picks up two decades after Terminator 2, leaving out the timelines of the subsequent sequels. Was that always the plan or did it evolve out of the process of making the film?

[JC] That had to do with the screenplay. You were written into a corner by the various sequels. We really wanted to bring Linda Hamilton’s character back. With Jim involved, we wanted to get back to first principles and have it based on Cameron’s mythology alone. To get back to the Linda/Arnold character arcs and then add some new stuff to that.

[OP] Many fans were attracted to the franchise by Cameron’s two original Terminator films. Was there a conscious effort at integrating that nostalgia?

[JC] I come from a place of deep fandom for Terminator 2. As a teenager I had VHS copies of Aliens and Terminator 2 and watched them on repeat after school! Those films are deeply embedded in my psyche and both of them have aged well – they still hold up. I watched the sequels and they just didn’t feel like a Terminator film to me. So the goal was definitely to make it of the DNA of those first two movies. There’s going to be a chase. It’s going to be more grounded. It’s going to get back into the Sarah Connor character and have more heart.

[OP] This film tends to have elements of humor unlike most other action films. That must have posed a challenge to set the right tone without getting campy.

[JC] The humor thing is interesting. Terminator 2 has a lot of humor throughout. We have a little bit of humor in the first half and then more once Arnold shows up, but that’s really the way it had to be. The Dani Ramos character – who’s your entry point into the movie – is devastated when her whole family is killed. The idea that you can have a lot of jokes happening would be terrible. It’s not the same in Terminator 2, because John Connor’s step-parents get very little screen time and they don’t seem that nice. You feel bad for them, but it’s OK that you get into this funny stuff right off the bat. On this one we had to ease into the humor so you could live into the gravity of the situation at the start of the movie.

[OP] Did you have to do much to alter that balance during the edit?

[JC] There were one or two jokes that we nipped out, but it wasn’t like that whole first act was chock full of jokes. The tone of the first act is more like Terminator, which is more of a thriller or horror movie. Then it becomes more like T2 as the action gets bigger and the jokes come in. So the first half is like a bigger Terminator and the second half more like T2.

[OP] Deadpool, which Tim Miller also directed, used a very nonlinear story structure, balancing action, comedic moments, and drama. Terminator was always designed with a linear, straight-forward storyline. Right?

[JC] A movie hands you certain editing tools. Deadpool was designed to be nonlinear with characters in different places, so there are a whole bunch of options for you. Terminator: Dark Fate is more like a road movie. The detonation of certain paths along the road are predetermined. You can’t be in Texas before Mexico. So the structural options you had were where to check in with the Rev-9, as well as, the inter-scene structure. Once you are in the detention center, where are you cutting to Sarah or where to cut to Dani? However, where that is placed in the movie is pretty much set. All you can do is pace it up, pace it down, adjust how to get there. There aren’t a lot of mobile pieces that can be swapped around.

[OP] When we had talked after Deadpool, you discussed how you liked the assistants to build string-outs – what some call a KEM roll. Similar action is assembled back-to-back in order from every take into a sequence. Did you use that same organizational method on Terminator: Dark Fate?

[JC] Sometimes we were so swamped with material that there wasn’t time to create string-outs. I still like to have those. It’s a nice way to quickly see all the pieces that cover a moment. If you are trying to find the one take or action that’s five percent better than another, then it’s good to see them all in a row, rather than trying to keep it all in your head for a five minute take. There was a lot of footage that we shot in the action scenes, but we didn’t do 11 or 12 takes for a dialogue scene. I didn’t feel like I needed some tool to quickly navigate through the dialogue takes. We would string-out the ones that were more complicated.

[OP] Depending on the directing style, a series of takes may have increasingly calibrated performances with successive takes. With other directors, each take might be a lot different than the one before and after it. What is your approach to evaluating which is the best take to use?

[JC] It’s interesting when you use the earlier takes versus the later takes and what you get from them. The later takes are usually the ones that are most directed. The actors are warmed up and most closely nail what the director has in mind. So they are strong in that regard. But sometimes they can become more self-conscious. And so sometimes the first take is more thrown away and may have less power, but feels more real – more off the cuff. Sometimes a delivered dialogue line feels less written and you’ll buy it more. Other times you’ll want that more dramatic quality of the later takes. My instinct is to first use the later takes, but as you start to revise a scene, you often go back to pieces of the earlier takes to ground it a little more.

[OP] Hold long did the production and post take?

[JC] It took a little over 100 days of shooting with a lot of units. I work on a lot of mid-budget films, so this seemed like a really long shoot. It was a little relentless for everyone – even squeezing it into those 100 days. Shooting action with a lot of VFX is slow, due to the reset time needed between takes. The ending of the movie is 30 minutes of action in a row. That’s a big job shooting all of that stuff. When they have a couple of units cranking through the dialogue scenes plus shooting action sequences – that’s when I have to really work hard to keep up. Once you hit the roadblocks of shooting just those little action pieces, you get a little time to catch up.

We had the usual director’s cut period and finished by the end of this September. The original plan was to finish by the beginning of September, but we needed the time for VFX. So everything piled up with the DI and the mix in order to still hit the release date. September got a little crazy.  It seems like a long time – a total of 13 or 14 months – but it still was an absolute sprint to get the movie in shape and get the VFX into the film in time. This is maybe normal for some of these film, but compared to the other VFX movies I’ve done, it was definitely turning things up a notch!

[OP] I imagine that there was a fair amount of pre-viz required to layout the action for the large VFX and CG scenes. Did you have that to work with as placeholder shots? How did you handle adjusting the cut as the interim and final shots were delivered?

[JC] Tim is big into pre-viz with his background in VFX and animation and owning his own VFX company. We had very detailed animatics going into production. Depending on a lot of factors, you still abandon a lot of things. For example, the freeway chases are quite a bit different, because when you go there and do it with real cars, they do different things. Or only part of the cars look like they are going fast enough. Those scenes became quite different than the pre-viz.

Others are almost 100% CG, so you can drop in the pre-viz as placeholders. Although, even in those cases, sometimes the finished shot doesn’t feel real enough. In the “cartoon” world of pre-viz you can do wild camera moves and say, “Wow, that seems cool!” But when you start doing it at photoreal quality, then you go, “This seems really fake.” And so we tried to get ahead of that stuff and find what to do with the camera to ground it. Kind of mess it up so it’s not too dynamic and perfect.

[OP] How involved were you with shaping the music? Did you use previous Terminator films scores as a temp track to cut with?

[JC] I was very involved with the music production. I definitely used a lot of temp music. Some of it ripped from old Terminator movies, but there’s only so much Terminator 2 music you can put in. Those scores used a lot of synthesizers that date the sound. I did use “Desert Suite” from Terminator 2 when Sarah is in the hotel room. I loved having a very direct homage to a Sarah Connor moment while she’s talking about John. Then I begged our composer, Tom Holkenborg [Junkie XL], to consider doing a version of it for our movie. So it is essentially the same chord progression.

That was an interesting musical and general question about how much do you lean into the homage thing. It’s powerful when you do it, but if you do it too much, it starts to feel artificial or pandering. And so, I tried to hit the sweet spot so you knew you were watching a Terminator movie, but not so much that it felt like Terminator karaoke. How many times can you go da-dum-dum-da-da-dum? You have to pick your moments for those Terminator motifs. It’s diminishing returns if you do it too much.

Another inspirational moment for me was another part in Terminator 2. There’s a disturbing industrial sound for the T-1000. It sounds more like a foghorn or something in a factory rather than music and it created this unnerving quality to the T-1000 scenes when he’s just scoping things out. So we came up with a modern day electronic equivalent for the Rev-9 character and that was very potent.

[OP] Was James Cameron involved much in the post-production?

[JC] He’s quite busy with his Avatar movies. Some of the time he was in New Zealand, some of the time he was in Los Angeles. Depending on where he was and where we were in the process, we would hit milestones, like screenings or the first cut. We would send him versions and download a bunch of his thoughts.

Editing is very much a part of his wheelhouse. Unlike many other directors, he really thinks about this shot, then that shot, then the next shot. His mind really works that way. Sometimes he would give us pretty specific, dialed-in notes on things. Sometimes it would just be bigger suggestions, like, “Maybe the action cutting pattern could be more like this…” So we’d get his thoughts – and, of course, he’s Jim Cameron and he knows the business and the Terminator franchise – so I listened pretty carefully to that input.

[OP] This is the second film that you’ve cut with Premiere Pro. Deadpool was first and there were challenges using it on such a complex project. What was the experience like this time around?

[JC] Whenever you set out to use a new workflow – – Not to say Premiere is new. It’s been around a long time and has millions of users, but it’s unusual to use it on large VFX movies for specific reasons. On Deadpool, that led to certain challenges and that’s just what happens when you try to do something new. The fact that we had to split the movie into separate projects for each reel, instead of one large project. Even so, the size of our project files made it tough. They were so full of media that they would take five minutes to open. Nevertheless, we made it work and there are lots of benefits to using Adobe over other applications.

In comparison, the interface to Avid [Media Composer] looks like it was designed 20 years ago; but they have multi-user collaboration nailed and I love the trim tool. Yet, some things are old and creaky. Adobe’s not that at all. It’s nice and elegant in terms of the actual editing process. We got through it and sat down with Adobe to point out things that needed work and they worked on them. When we started up Terminator, they had a whole new build for us. Project files now opened in 15 seconds. They are about halfway there in terms of multi-user editing. Now everyone can go into a big shared project and you can move bins back and forth. Although only one user at a time has write access to the master project.

This is not simple software they are writing. Adobe is putting a lot of work into making it a more fitting tool for this type of movie. Even though this film was exponentially larger than Deadpool, from the Adobe side it was a smoother process. Props to them for doing that! The cool part about pioneering this stuff is the amount of work that Adobe is on board to do. They’ll have people work on stuff that is helpful to us, so we get to participate a little in how Adobe’s software gets made.

[OP] With two large Premiere Pro projects under your belt, what sort of new features would you like to see Adobe add to the application to make it even better for feature film editors?

[JC] They’ve built out the software from being a single-user application to being a multi-user software, but the inherent software at the base level is still single-user. Sometimes your render files get unlinked when you go back and forth between multiple users. There’s probably stuff where they have to dig deep into the code to make those minor annoyances go away. Other items I’d like to see – let’s not use third party software to send change lists to the mix stage.

I know Premiere Pro integrates beautifully with After Effects, but for me, After Effects is this precise tool for executing shots. I don’t want a fine tool for compositing – I want to work in broad strokes and then have someone come back and clean it up. I would love to have a tracking tool to composite two shots together for a seamless, split screen of two combined takes – features like that.

The After Effects integration and the color correction are awesome features for a single user to execute the film, but I don’t have the time to be the guy to execute the film at that high level. I just have to keep going. I want to be able to do a fast and dirty version so I know it’s not a terrible idea and then turn to someone else, “OK, make that good.” After Effects is cool, but it’s more for the VFX editor or the single-user who is trying to make a film on their own.

[OP] After all of these action films, are you ready to do a different type of film, like a period drama?

[JC] Funny you should say that. After Deadpool I worked on The Handmaid’s Tale pilot and it was exactly that. I was working on this beautifully acted, elegant project with tons of women characters and almost everything was done in camera. It was a lot of parlor room drama and power dynamics. And that was wonderful to work on after all of this VFX/action stuff. Periodically it’s nice to flex a different creative muscle.

It’s not that I only work on science fiction/VFX projects – which I love – but, in part, people start associating you with a certain genre and then that becomes an easy thing to pursue and get work for. Much like acting, if you want to be known for doing a lot of different things you have to actively pursue it. It’s easy to go with where momentum will take you. If you want to be the editor who can cut any genre, you have to make it a mission to pursue those projects that will keep your resume looking diverse. For a brief moment after Deadpool, I might have been able to pivot to a comedy career (laughs). That was a real hybrid, so it was challenging to thread the needle of the different tones of the film and making it feel like one piece.

[OP] Any final thoughts on the challenges of editing Terminator: Dark Fate?

[JC] The biggest challenge of the film was that in a way the film was an ensemble with the Dani character, the Grace character,  the Sarah character, and Arnold’s character – the T-800. All of these characters are protagonists that all have their individual arcs. Feeling that you were adequately servicing those arcs without grinding the movie to a halt or not touching bases with a character often enough – finding out how to dial that in was the major challenge of the movie, plus the scale of the VFX and finessing all the action scenes. I learned a lot.

The article also available at postPerspective.

And more from Julian Clarke in this interview with Steve Hullfish.

©2019 Oliver Peters

A Conversation with Steve Bayes

As an early adopter of Avid systems at a highly visible facility, I first got to know Steve Bayes through his on-site visits. He was the one taking notes about how a customer used the product and what workflow improvements they’d like to see. Over the years, as an editor and tech writer, we’ve kept in touch through his travels from Avid to Media 100 and on to Apple. It was always good to get together and decompress at the end of a long NAB week.

With a career of using as well as helping to design and shepherd a wide range of post-production products, Steve probably knows more about a diverse field of editing systems than most other company managers at editing systems manufacturers. Naturally many readers will know him as Apple’s Senior Product Manager for Final Cut Pro X, a position he held until last year. But most users have little understanding of what a product manager actually does or how the products they love and use every day get from the drawing board into their hands. So I decided to sit down with Steve over Skype and pull back the curtain just a little on this very complex process.

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[OP]  Let’s start this off with a deep dive into how a software product gets to the user. What part does a product manager play in developing new features and where does engineering fit into that process?

[SB]  I’m a little unconventional. I like to work closely with the engineers during their design and development, because I have a strong technical and industry background. More traditional product managers are product marketing managers who take a more hands-off, marketing-oriented approach. That’s important, but I never worked liked that.

My rule of thumb is that I will tell the engineers what the problem is, but I won’t tell them how to solve it. In many cases the engineers will come back and say, “You’ve told us that customers need to do this ‘thing.’ What do they really want to achieve? Are you telling us that they need to achieve it exactly like this?” And so you talk that out a bit. Maybe this is exactly what the customers really want to do, because that’s what they’ve always done or the way everyone else does it. Maybe the best way to do it is based on three other things in emerging technology that I don’t know about.

In some cases the engineers come back and say, “Because of these other three things you don’t know about, we have some new ideas about how to do that. What do you think?” If their solution doesn’t work, then you have to be very clear about why and be consistent throughout the discussion, while still staying open to new ways of doing things. If there is a legitimate opportunity to innovate, then that is always worth exploring.

Traveling around the world talking to post-production people for almost 30 years allowed me to act as the central hub for that information and an advocate for the user. I look at it as working closely in partnership with engineering to represent the customer and to represent the company in the bigger picture. For instance, what is interesting for Apple? Maybe those awesome cameras that happen to be attached to a phone. Apple has this great hardware and wonderful tactile devices. How would you solve these issues and incorporate all that? Apple has an advantage with all these products that are already out in the world and they can think about cool ways to combine those with professional editing.

In all the companies I’ve worked for, we work through a list of prioritized customer requests, bug fixes, and things that we saw on the horizon within the timeframe of the release date or shortly thereafter. You never want to be surprised by something coming down the road, so we were always looking farther out than most people. All of this is put together in a product requirements document (PRD), which lays out everything you’d like to achieve for the next release. It lists features and how they all fit together well, plus a little bit about how you would market that. The PRD creates the starting point for development and will be updated based on engineering feedback.

You can’t do anything without getting sign-off by quality assurance (QA). For example, you might want to support all 10,000 of the formats coming out, but QA says, “Excuse me? I don’t think so!” [laughs] So it has to be achievable in that sense – the art of the possible. Some of that has to do with their resources and schedule. Once the engineers “put their pencils down,” then QA starts seriously. Can you hit your dates? You also have to think about the QA of third parties, Apple hardware, or potentially a new operating system (OS). You never, ever want to release a new version of Final Cut and two weeks later a new OS comes out and breaks everything. I find it useful to think about the three points of the development triangle as: the number of features, the time that you have, and the level of stability. You can’t say, “I’m going to make a really unstable release, but it’s going to have more features than you’ve ever seen!” [laughs] That’s probably a bad decision.

Then I start working with the software in alpha. How does it really work? Are there any required changes? For the demo, I go off and shoot something cool that is designed specifically to show the features. In many ways you are shooting things with typical problems that are then solved by whatever is in the new software. And there’s got to be a little something in there for the power users, as well as the new users.

As you get closer to the release, you have to make decisions about whether things are stable enough. If some feature is not going to be ready, then you could delay it to a future release — never ideal, but better than a terrible user experience. Then you have to re-evaluate the messaging. I think FCP X has been remarkably stable for all the releases of the last eight years.

You also have to bring in the third parties, like developers, trainers, or authors, who provide feedback so we can make sure we haven’t broken anything for them. If there was a particularly important feature that required third parties to help out, I would reach out to them individually and give them a little more attention, making sure that their product worked as it should. Then I would potentially use it in my own presentation. I worked closely with SpeedScriber transcription software when Apple introduced subtitling and I talked every day with Atomos while they were shooting the demo in Australia on ProRes RAW. 

[OP]  What’s the typical time frame for a new feature or release – from the germ of an idea until it gets to the user?

[SB]  Industry-wide, companies tend to have a big release and then a series of smaller releases afterwards that come relatively quickly. Smaller releases might be to fix minor, but annoying bugs that weren’t bad enough to stop the larger release. You never ship with “priority one” (P1) bugs, so if there are some P2s or P3s, then you want to get to them in a follow-up. Or maybe there was a new device, codec, camera, or piece of hardware that you couldn’t test in time, because it wasn’t ready. Of course, the OS is changing while you are developing your application, as well. One of my metaphors is that “you are building the plane while you are flying it.” [laughs]

I can’t talk about the future or Apple specifically, but historically, you can see a big release might take most of a year. By the time it’s agreed upon, designed, developed, “pencils down – let’s test it” – the actual development time is not as long as you might think. Remember, you have to back-time for quality assurance. But, there are deeper functions that you can’t develop in that relatively short period of time. Features that go beyond a single release are being worked on in the background and might be out in two or three releases. You don’t want to restrict very important features just to hit a release date, but instead, work on them a bit longer.

Final Cut is an excellent application to demonstrate the capabilities of Apple hardware, ease of use, and third party ecosystem. So you want to tie all these things together as much as you can. And every now and then you get to time things so they hit a big trade show! [laughs]

[OP]  Obviously this is the work of a larger team. Are the romanticized tales of a couple of engineers coming out of the back room with a fully-cooked product more myth than reality?

[SB]  Software development is definitely a team effort. There are certain individuals that stand out, because they are good at what they do and have areas of specialty. They’ll come back and always give you more than you asked for and surprise you with amazing results. But, it’s much more of a coordinated effort – the customer feedback, the design, a team of managers who sign off on all that, and then initial development.

If it doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, you may call in extra engineers to deal with the issues or to help solve those problems. Maybe you had a feature that turned out more complicated than first thought. It’s load balancing – taking your resources and moving them to where they do the most good for the product. Plus, you are still getting excellent feedback from the QA team. “Hey, this didn’t work the way we expected it to work. Why does it work like that?” It’s very much an effort with those three parts: design, engineering, and QA. There are project managers, as well, who coordinate those teams and manage the physical release of the software. Are people hitting their dates for turning things in? They are the people banging on your door saying, “Where’s the ‘thing with the stuff?'” [laughs]

There are shining stars in each of these areas or groups. They have a world of experience, but can also channel the customer – especially during the testing phase. And once you go to beta, you get feedback from customers. At that point, though, you are late in the process, so it’s meant to fix bugs, not add features. It’s good to get that feature feedback, but it won’t be in the release at that point.

[OP]  Throughout your time at various companies, color correction seems to be dear to you. Avid Symphony, Apple Color when it was in the package, not to mention the color tools in Final Cut Pro X. Now nearly every NLE can do color grading and the advanced tools like DaVinci Resolve are affordable to any user. Yet, there’s still that very high-end market for systems like Filmlight’s Baselight. Where do you see the process of color correction and grading headed?

[SB]  Color has always meant the difference for me between an OK project and a stellar project. Good color grading can turn your straw into gold. I think it’s an incredibly valuable talent to have. It’s an aesthetic sense first, but it’s also the ability to look at an image and say, “I know what will fix that image and it will look great.” It’s a specialized skill that shouldn’t be underrated. But, you just don’t need complex gear anymore to make your project better through color grading.

Will you make it look as good as a feature film or a high-end Netflix series? Now you’re talking about personnel decisions as much as technology. Colorists have the aesthetic and the ability to problem-solve, but are also very fast and consistent. They work well with customers in that realm. There’s always going to be a need for people like that, but the question is what chunk of the market requires that level of skill once the tools get easier to use?

I just think there’s a part of the market that’s growing quickly – potentially much more quickly – that could use the skills of a colorist, but won’t go through a separate grading step. Now you have look-up tables, presets, and plug-ins. And the color grading tools in Final Cut Pro X are pretty powerful for getting awesome results even if you’re not a colorist. The business model is that the more you can do in the app, the easier it is to “sell the cut.” The client has to see it in as close to the finished form as possible. Sometimes a bad color mismatch can make a cut feel rough and color correction can help smooth that out and get the cut signed off. As you get better using the color grading tools in FCP X, you can improve your aesthetic and learn how to be consistent across hundreds of shots. You can even add a Tangent Wave controller if you want to go faster. We find ourselves doing more in less time and the full range of color grading tools in FCP X and the FX Plug plug-ins can play a very strong roll in improving any production. 

[OP]  During your time at Apple, the ProRes codec was also developed. Since Apple was supplying post-production hardware and software and no professional production cameras, what was the point in developing your own codec?

[SB]  At the time there were all of these camera codecs coming out, which were going to be a very bad user experience for editing – even on the fastest Mac Pros at the time. The camera manufacturers were using compression algorithms that were high quality, but highly compressed, because camera cards weren’t that fast or that big. That compression was difficult to decode and play back. It took more processing power than you could get from any PC at that time to get the same number of video streams compared with digitizing from tape. In some cases you couldn’t even play the camera original video files at all, so you needed to transcode before you could start editing. All of the available transcoding codecs weren’t that high in quality or they had similar playback problems.

Apple wanted to make a better user experience, so ProRes was originally designed as an intermediate codec. It worked so well that the camera manufacturers wanted to put it into their cameras, which was fine with Apple, as long as you met the quality standards. Everyone has to submit samples and work with the Apple engineers to get it to the standard that Apple expects. ProRes doesn’t encode into as small file sizes as some of the other camera codecs; but given the choice between file size, quality, and performance, then quality and performance were more important. As camera cards and hard drives get bigger, faster, and cheaper, it’s less of an issue and so it was the right decision.

[OP]  The launch of Final Cut Pro X turned out to be controversial. Was the ProApps team prepared for the industry backlash that happened?

[SB] We knew that it would be disruptive, of course. It was a whole new interface and approach. It integrated a bunch of cutting edge technology that people weren’t familiar with. A complete rewrite of  the codebase was a huge step forward as you can see in the speed and fluidity that is so crucial during the creative process. Metadata driven workflows, background processing, magnetic timeline — in many ways people are still trying to catch up eight years later. And now FCP X is the best selling version of Final Cut Pro ever.

[OP]  When Walter Murch used Final Cut Pro to edit the film, Cold Mountain, it gained a lot of attention. Is there going to be another “Cold Mountain moment” for anyone or is that even important anymore?

[SB]  Post Cold Mountain? [chuckle] You have to be careful — the production you are trying to emulate might have nothing to do with your needs on an everyday basis. It may be aspirational, but by adopting Hollywood techniques, you aren’t doing yourself any favors. Those are designed with budgets, timeframes, and a huge crew that you don’t have. Adopt a workflow that is designed for the kind of work you actually do.

When we came up in the industry, you couldn’t make a good-looking video without going to a post house. Then NLEs came along and you could do a bunch of work in your attic, or on a boat, or in a hotel room. That creative, rough-cut market fractured, but you still had to go to an online edit house. That was a limited world that took capital to build and it was an expense by the hour. Imagine how many videos didn’t get made, because a good post house cost hundreds of dollars an hour.

Now the video market has fractured into all these different outlets – streaming platforms, social media, corporate messaging, fast-turnaround events, and mobile apps. And these guys have a ton of powerful equipment, like drones, gimbals, and Atomos ProRes RAW recorders – and it looks great! But, they’re not going to a post house. They’re going to pick up whatever works for them and at the end of the day impress their clients or customers. Each one is figuring out new ways to take advantage of this new technology.

One of the things Sam Mestman teaches in his mobile filmmaking class is that you can make really high-quality stuff for a fraction of the cost and time, as long as you are going to be flexible enough to work in a non-traditional way. That is the driving force that’s going to create more videos for all of these different outlets. When I started out, the only way you could distribute directly to the consumer was by mailing someone a VHS tape. That’s just long gone, so why are we using the same editing techniques and workflows?

I can’t remember the last time I watched something on broadcast TV. The traditional ways of doing things are a sort of assembly line — every step is very compartmentalized. This doesn’t stand to benefit from new efficiencies and technological advances, because it requires merging traditional roles, eliminating steps, and challenging the way things are charged for. The rules are a little less strict when you are working for these new distribution platforms. You still have to meet the deliverable requirements, of course. But if you do it the way you’ve always done it, then you won’t be able to bring it in on time or on budget in this emerging world. If you want to stay competitive, then you are forced to make these changes — your competition maybe already has. How can you tell when your phone doesn’t ring? And that’s why I would say there are Cold Mountain moments all the time when something gets made in a way that didn’t exist a few years ago. But, it happens across this new, much wider range of markets and doesn’t get so much attention.

[OP]  Final Cut Pro X seems to have gained more professional users internationally than in the US. In your writings, you’ve mentioned that efficiency is the way local producers can compete for viewers and maintain quality within budget. Would you expand upon that?

[SB]  There are a range of reasons why FCP X and new metadata-driven workflows are expanding in Europe faster than the US. One reason is that European crews tend to be smaller and there are fewer steps between the creatives and decision-making execs. The editor has more say in picking their editing system. I see over and over that editors are forced to use systems they don’t like in larger projects and they love to use FCP X on their own projects. When the facilities listen to and trust the editors, then they see the benefits pretty quickly. If you have government funded TV (like in many countries in Europe), then they are always under public pressure to justify the costs. Although they are inherently conservative, they are incentivized to always be looking for new ways to improve and that involves risks. With smaller crews, Europeans can be more flexible as to what being “an editor” really means and don’t have such strict rules that keep them from creating motion graphics – or the photographer from doing the rough cut. This means there is less pressure to operate like an assembly line and the entire production can benefit from efficiencies.

I think there’s a huge amount of money sloshing around in Europe and they have to figure out how to do these local-language productions for the high quality that will compete with the existing broadcasters, major features, and the American and British big-budget shows. So how are you going to do that? If you follow the rules, you lose. You have to look at different methods of production. 

Subscription is a different business model of continuing revenue. How many productions will the subscription model pay for? Netflix is taking out $2 billion in bonds on top of the $1 billion they already did to fund production and develop for the local languages. I’ve been watching the series Criminal on Netflix. It’s a crime drama based on police interrogations, with separate versions done in four different countries. English, French, German, and Spanish. Each one has its own cultural biases in getting to a confession (and that’s why I watched them all!). I’ve never seen anything like it before.

The guys at Metronome in Denmark used this moment as an opportunity to take some big chances with creating new workflows with FCP X and shared storage. They are using 1.5 petabytes of storage, six Synology servers, and 30 shows being edited right now in FCP X. They use the LumaForge Jellyfish for on-location post-production. If someone says it can’t be done, you need to talk to these guys and I’m happy to make the introduction.

I’m working with another company in France that shot a series on the firefighters of Marseilles. They shot most of it with iPhones, but they also used other cameras with longer lenses to get farther away from the fires. They’re looking at a series of these types of productions with a unique mobile look. If you put a bunch of iPhones on gimbals, you’ve got a high-quality, multi-cam shoot, with angles and performances that you could never get any other way. Or a bunch of DSLRs with Atomos devices and the Atomos sync modules for perfect timecode sync. And then how quickly can you turn out a full series? Producers need to generate a huge amount of material in a wide range of languages for a wide range of markets and they need to keep the quality up. They have to use new post-production talent and methods and, to me, that’s exciting.

[OP]  Looking forward, where do you see production and post technology headed?

[SB]  The tools that we’ve developed over the last 30 years have made such a huge difference in our industry that there’s a part of me that wants to go back and be a film student again. [laughs] The ability for people to turn out compelling material that expresses a point of view, that helps raise money for a worthy cause, that helps to explain a difficult subject, that raises consciousness, that creates an emotional engagement – those things are so much easier these days. It’s encouraging to me to see it being used like this.

The quality of the iPhone 11 is stunning. With awesome applications, like Mavis and FiLMiC Pro, these are great filmmaking tools. I’ve been playing around with the DJI Osmo Pocket, too, which I like a lot, because it’s a 4K sensor on a gimbal. So it’s not like putting an iPhone on a gimbal – it’s all-in-one. Although you can connect an iPhone to it for the bigger screen. 

Camera technology is going in the direction of more pixels and bigger sensors, more RAW and HDR, but I’d really like to see the next big change come in audio. It’s the one place where small productions still have problems. They don’t hire the full-time sound guy or they think they can shoot just with the mic attached to the hot shoe of the camera. That may be OK when using only a DSLR, but the minute you want to take that into a higher-end production, you’re going to need to think about it more.

Again, it’s a personnel issue. I can point a camera at a subject and get a pretty good recording, but to get a good sound recording – that’s much harder for me at this point. In that area, Apogee has done a great job with MetaRecorder for iOS. It’s not just generating iXML to automatically name the audio channels when you import into FCP X — you can actually label the FCP X roles in the app. It uses Timecode Systems (now Atomos) for multiple iOS recording devices to sync with rock-solid timecode and you can control those multiple recorders from a single iOS device. I would like to see more people adopt multiple microphones synced together wirelessly and controlled by an iPad.

One of the things I love about being “semi-retired” is if something’s interesting to me, I just dig into it. It’s exciting that you can edit from an iPad Pro, you can back up to a Gnarbox, you can shoot high-quality video with your iPhone or a DJI Osmo Pocket, and that opens the world up to new voices. If you were to graph it – the cost of videos is going down and to the right, the number of videos being created in going up and to the right, and at some point they cross over. That promises a huge increase in the potential work for those who can benefit from these new tools. We are close to that point.

It used to be that if your client went to another post house, you lost that client. It was a zero sum game — I win — you lose. Now there are so many potential needs for video we would never have imagined. Those clients are coming out of the woodwork and saying, “Now I can do a video. I’ll do some of it myself, but at some point I’ll hand it off to you, because you are the expert.” Or they feel they can afford your talent, because the rest of the production is so much more efficient. That’s a growing demand that you might not see until your market hits that crossover point.

This article also appears at FCPco.

©2019 Oliver Peters