What to do when you lock picture...

Okay, so now the editor, the director, the producers have all agreed-- the edit is perfect (or as perfect as it's going to get), so the edit is deemed "locked." In an earlier post, I describe what a locked picture is, so if you haven't read that, go back a bit.

Once the Producer told me Rising Stars was locked, I duplicated the sequence in Final Cut Pro (FCP). By that time, I had put universal leader at the head with a two pop for sound. With the duplicated sequence, I nest all the video so that I can drop a timecode reader filter on the whole thing. This give a timecode window for reference to all the players who now need it.

Next I export that as a Quicktime. The Sound Designer and the Composer will need this quicktime to load into their ProTools system for easy reference.

For the Sound Designer, I also now need to export all the audio as an OMF file. I dump the QT and the OMF files to a Hard Drive. I'm also going to drop all the original location sound files and dig up the sound logs for him.

The Composer gets the QT. I'll call him after he has a chance to watch it, then we'll talk about where music cues need to be. Then he'll get busy.

I also send it out to the CGI person. We've got a few CG shots and opening credits to do. He needs to see the movie to get a good reference.

And finally, I'm going to break the movie down into "reels." Back on my first three movies, we shot 35mm and we had to break it down into reels, because the biggest length of film we work with is 2000 feet, which is about 22 minutes. Nowadays, the program Color, which many use to "color" the movie, can only handle about 200 clips. So we have to break the sequence down for that.

The colorist will get to work next week. Through the process, the longest will be sound design- there's just so much more work to do in that department. That's what we'll be waiting for. In the meantime, we make sure coloring happens over the next three weeks and that the music gets done. We estimate bringing picture and sound back together in 6 to 8 weeks.