Behind the Seen

by Charles Koppelman

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  INT. CHAPEL, COLD MOUNTAIN TOWN. DAY. SPRING 1861

  A BIRD IS CAUGHT INSIDE THE NEWLY COMPLETED CHAPEL.

  It flies in short, terrified bursts, hitting windows.

  Ada is there, then Inman enters. Gradually she and

  Inman close in one the bird; Inman removing his coat

  to use as a net.

  There is still a lot Murch must do in terms of making the decision to use Final Cut Pro as his editing system. And he hasn’t even tried the system yet with his own hands. Although Steve Jobs indicated support for Murch in that earlier email, Murch’s working relationship with Apple and its Final Cut Pro development and support teams is still up in the air. At this time the Cold Mountain producers and studio people handling budgeting and logistics are not even aware Murch is thinking of alternatives to the Avid system they assume he will use. Murch does not want to broach the subject until he is sure he himself wants to make that change. And then he will do so only when he has answers about cost savings, creative benefits, and workflow effects on the other film departments. Meanwhile, Ramy and DigitalFilm Tree are feeding Murch results of their ongoing research and investigation of FCP. They’re also preparing a list of help items Murch and Cullen will ask from Apple at the upcoming meeting in Berkeley.

  What did Minghella think about Murch using Final Cut Pro as his new editing system? Many months later Minghella summarizes his attitude: “I have such trust in Walter that if he’d said he was going to cut the film on an adapted bicycle, I would say, well, okay. Because I would just rely on him to understand the implications.”

  June 10, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Talked to Ramy K: Things are boiling. Some at Apple are with us, some are not—they are working on FCP 4, and this would take effort away. Ramy working on a short list of fundamental issues, drawbacks, which are keeping FCP from being all it could be. Foot draggers at Apple are people facing immediate reality, but this (CM) is bigger than all of them, says Ramy. OMF is a moving target right now, Brooks one of the designers, could fix everything in a week if the API [application programming interface] is there. If it isn’t, it could take three months. He was very happy to hear about Brad and Iron Giant pushing Steve J. from the Pixar angle. “That’s it then, it’s a done deal,” said Ramy. I had the idea of bringing TC and LS to the meeting on the 18th if they are available, God willing.

  Ramy and Sean continue talking nearly every day about systems and technical concerns even while Sean is on vacation with his family in Germany and Italy. The drive toward making the technical decision about using FCP continues at full speed but Walter needs to spend more time with mouse in hand to be comfortable with it creatively. For that he goes to the “home office”—the Saul Zaentz Film Center in West Berkeley, where Murch spent much of the previous 15 years film editing and sound mixing. This is where he just finished mixing sound for K-19: The Widowmaker, where he edited and mixed The Talented Mr. Ripley, The English Patient, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and prepared the re-cut of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil.

  When Saul Zaentz took over Fantasy Records in 1967, it was a small, quirky San Francisco jazz label with artists such as Dave Brubeck, Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamaria, and satirist Lenny Bruce. The company’s catalogue grew to be one of the world’s largest for jazz, rhythm and blues, gospel, and soul after Zaentz and his partners acquired record companies such as Riverside, Contemporary, Prestige, Stax, and Specialty.

  The company had a rock-and-roll label, Scorpio, that recorded local bands, including The Golliwogs, four guys with a distinctly down-home sound. Before Fantasy released their first album, the group and its lead singer, John Fogerty, came up with a new name for the band, Creedence Clearwater Revival. They blew the roof off the place. Zaentz soon got involved with motion pictures, helping to produce Payday (as executive producer without screen credit). Released in 1972, starring Rip Torn, it didn’t go too far. But a few years later, with Michael Douglas, Zaentz produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and he had a hit the second time out.

  Being committed now to producing more films, and also being a good businessman, Zaentz expanded his post-production editing and sound-mixing facility. The two-story offices grew into a seven-story building, still the tallest in that part of Berkeley. Its preformed concrete walls embedded with river rocks house the Zaentz Film Center, the record company, and state-of-the-art recording studios. When the Film Center isn’t being used for Zaentz’s own films, like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Mosquito Coast, or The English Patient, clients from Hollywood make the trip north to work in the center and use its talented band of sound editors, engineers, and mixers.

  The Fantasy Building in Berkeley, California, location of the Saul Zaentz Film Center.

  Saul Zaentz, film producer and winner of Best Picture Oscar awards for The English Patient, Amadeus, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  It is appropriate for Murch to come back to the Film Center for his first test drive on Final Cut. Not only had he edited and mixed some great pictures here, he likes the people and the place. And the feelings are mutual. The staff, house editors, mixers, and engineers appreciate Murch and his approach to filmmaking. Michael Kelly, director of special projects at the Film Center, says having Murch working on a project in the Film Center means doing things “way different” from when other film personnel come in to use the place.

  “If he decides he wants to figure out problems or a process, you’re in for it, because he’s going to ultimately figure it out at philosophical and subatomic levels. With Walter, if you can’t answer his questions, you’ll end up questioning your own assumptions—discover the limits of your own understanding. He doesn’t do this to get at you but to find the boundaries of logic around systems. It’s Socratic. In small or large ways the Film Center changes the way we do our work because Walter finds better ways to do things. New functions are discovered. They get adapted permanently—or at least temporarily, to appease him.”

  Actor Rip Torn in Payday, the first motion picture Saul Zaentz produced.

  Jack Nicholsen in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, produced by Saul Zaentz and Michael Douglas.

  Tom Christopher, a film editor and early user of Final Cut Pro.

  The third floor at the Saul Zaentz Film Center, where Walter Murch frequently works.

  One week after visiting Grahamjones and Bullock at Pixar, Murch goes to Berkeley to see Tom Christopher, a sandy-haired film editor in his late 40s with the agile bearing of a shortstop. Christopher began in post production as an MRO—machine room operator—at Coppola’s Zoetrope facility in San Francisco. He first worked there in 1980, on Dragonslayer, the film co-written and directed by Murch’s college friend, Matthew Robbins. Murch also mixed Dragonslayer. Being comfortable with computers and high technology, Christopher found himself in more demand as editing and mixing began to move toward digitally based systems. “Walter and I have been talking about non-linear editing—forever.” Indeed, Christopher gave Murch his first introduction to EditDroid, the laser disc-based non-linear editing system that George Lucas developed in 1984.

  “Walter was here in the Film Center in the spring of 2002,” recounts Christopher. “It was in the kitchen on the third floor, during a mix break on K-19. I mentioned I was looking into this new Final Cut Pro software. I had already used Adobe Premiere on a few projects. I told him I was very impressed with Final Cut Pro, and he went, ‘Ahhh.’ That registered with him.” Murch asked Christopher for his contact information. Not long afterward an acquaintance of Murch’s was looking for someone to edit a PBS special on local restaurant owner and celebrity chef Alice Waters. Murch referred Tom Christopher, he got the job, and the program became the first American Masters show edited on Apple’s Final Cut Pro.

  Murch later called Christopher about the FCP lab of sorts he had going at the Film Center. “We were very hot on it at that point,” Christopher says later, “and we were hearing from other editors
, ‘Yeah, yeah it’s an interesting toy.’ But we were seeing it differently; it wasn’t a toy. I had a think tank up here, had the Apple people up here, along with other editors, and had roundtable discussions and talked with the Apple Development Team about what our needs were and how we wanted to use this new technology.”

  “I received a call in June 2002 from Walter saying he was very interested in using FCP as his next platform. He had worked out a plan and he had contacted Apple and he wanted to have a meeting up here with me and go over what I was doing. I set up the room so we could have a little platform for him to get warmed up on. What was evident that day Walter came in by himself was he hadn’t really mastered the software at all. But the fact it was new to him didn’t matter.”

  “You sit down in front of one of these machines and you’re clueless for the first few minutes, an hour, even days, because you’ve just come off something else, a different editing system. You have to get in the zone. I had Final Cut set up the way I liked to work: the video monitor in the center, and two computer monitors flanking left and right. Walter took charge, as he is wont to do, starting to sculpt the digital environment so it was the way he wanted it to be. Walter got into the zone pretty quick. He started to adjust things. For example, he reset the parameters of the trim window—changing the default parameters.”

  “It was a couple of hours and then he wanted to just work on his own. I left him alone, backed off, checked in with him every once in a while. He was fine. He got as far as he wanted and then he took off.”

  June 13, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Good session with TC on FCP. Made me nervous about changing “instruments” but... flushed out some questions but some answers too.

  Got windshield fixed on Subaru.

  Walter later described the anxiety he felt that day in Room 305 at the Film Center, his old editing room during The English Patient, trying Tom Christopher’s Final Cut Pro edit system. “I had the tiniest whiff of ‘uh-oh.’ I was confronted with the fact that I was going to do it—here it is. I was metabolizing that information. If I were a pianist, it’d be as if I were changing instruments and found the pedals were in a different position on this piano. In the middle of the third movement would I have a wrong reflex—go for the pedal here but find it was now over there?”

  So far so good. None of the editors he met with—Bullock, Grahamjones, and Christopher—are giving him a make-or-break reason not to use Final Cut Pro on Cold Mountain. While Sean and DFT are finding handholds for systems and workflow issues such as change lists and EDLs, networking workstations, integrating audio files with ProTools, and managing the high volume of film material, Walter is getting more accustomed to the interface, keyboard, and functionality of Final Cut Pro. In ten days Murch will leave for Europe.

  June 15, 2002, Murch’s Journal

  Timing the script: It took me three hours to get to 1/5th—so it will take fifteen hours total. At any rate, I timed the first fifth, and the mpp [minutes per page] is 1.66, which makes for a total over three hours: 3.06 fast, 3.20 slow. I wonder what it will work out to be in the end?

  [WM’s later insert here: It was 2.52 fast, 3.10 slow.]

  Didn’t finish timing today—takes about 12 hours to do it (timing each scene twice)—will finish tomorrow

  Dan Fort helped create the Cinema Tools application used with Final Cut Pro for film editing.

  The meeting in Berkeley with Hudson and Meaney of Apple is three days away. Sean Cullen returns from vacation, giving him and Murch just enough time to make a one-day trip to Los Angeles on Monday, June 17, for their final visit to DigitalFilm Tree. Cullen prepares a background document for the session at DFT—a two-page description of the workflow he plans to use on Cold Mountain to prepare dailies every morning during production. Based on how he works using the Avid editing system, it’s a step-by-step process that begins with receiving just-printed film rolls from the lab and ends with digitized media on Walter’s desktop ready to edit. In his introduction to the document Sean writes, “There are a number of workarounds that I have to use to trick the Avid into behaving...” which are so extensive he leaves them out, for brevity’s sake.

  John Taylor, film editor and one of the DigitalFilm Tree’s stable of experts.

  When Sean and Walter sit down in DFT’s training room the following day, they learn more perhaps than they ever wanted to know about the kinds of workarounds Final Cut Pro would soon be demanding from them. They each sit at one of the ten Final Cut Pro stations outfitted with Cinema Display monitors normally occupied by pupils of DFT’s Final Cut Pro training classes. Beside Ramy Katrib, the others are chief technology officer, Tim Serda, who will be responsible for integrating and testing the Cold Mountain editing systems; managers Henry Santos and Edvin Mehrabyan; trainer and then DFT president, Walt Shires, FCP and Cinema Tools editor/consultant Dan Fort; and DFT editor John Taylor, who is especially versed in the differences and similarities between the Avid and FCP systems. Serda and Shires are from the original Final Cut team when it was being developed at Macromedia, before the program was sold to Apple. So for Murch and Cullen, sitting in this room with some of the editing system’s original planners and designers is an opportunity to range freely through Final Cut’s nervous system. Similarly, Dan Fort was influential in the development of Cinema Tools—the additional application that allowed FCP to be used for film editing.

  The initial discussion is about logging footage in Final Cut Pro: film measurement (feet and frames) versus video measurement (timecode). Timecode is the electronic indexing system used in video that encodes unique time stamps on every frame using a system of hours, minutes, seconds, and frames (30 per second). It is video’s equivalent of key code numbers used on film. Cold Mountain will live in both video and film worlds, so they want to have an easy way to convert between the two logging systems. And while Cinema Tools is the basis for translating the film numbering database to video timecode, and back again, there are process issues about when to convert timecode material into feet and frames, and how to track both. This is Sean’s primary area of responsibility, so Walter stays quiet for the most part, injecting questions occasionally. The conversation is brisk, focused, and serious.

  Apropos the topic at hand, Ramy mentions that Star Trek, the television show, had just sent its entire post-production team, including all the editors, to DFT to learn Final Cut Pro. “Walt was training all nine of them,” Ramy says, “until this ‘bug’ came up about 24 frame film versus 30 frame video.” Star Trek uses many short bits of visual effects that originate in film, so conversion from feet/frames into timecode requires a labor-intensive, cumbersome, manual data-entry process for the assistant editors. “Because of this ‘bug,’ Star Trek didn’t go with FCP,” Ramy says, “and we reported to Apple because they wanted to know why it didn’t happen.”

  Walter breaks in to ask if Apple’s Final Cut Pro managers are up to date on the problem—a window into the computer company’s sensitivities to entertainment industry needs.

  “To the extent they understand anything about 24 frame,” Ramy says sardonically. “They’ve never worked on a film project. See, 99 percent of FCP users aren’t affected by something like this. It’s such an infinitesimal thing. But it could be addressed in an afternoon if they [Apple] have the will to do it.”

  Murch is all too familiar with the film business being a tiny drop of economic demand as far as major manufacturers and suppliers are concerned. “We have needs for very fine tolerances in equipment and gear, but the capital base is tiny compared to medical products or ski equipment,” he says.

  Walt Shires believes Murch’s involvement will trigger changes to Final Cut Pro, based simply on his status in the movie business. Murch tells the group about his emails to and from Steve Jobs—that his friend Brad Bird, a film director at Pixar, is also contacting Jobs. “I think there is some heat on solving some of these problems,” Walter tells the group.

  The discussion continues. Sean is informed that when he
first opens a newly digitized clip from film dailies, he should expect to find the timecode numbers to always be wrong.

  “Always?” Murch asks. “Good. A reliable bug—that’s much better.”

  “This is a rock-solid bug!” Ramy says, to much laughter.

  The discussion continues about another sticking point: there is no counter built into Final Cut Pro for keeping track of elapsed time in feet and frames. In Avid it’s a simple toggle to reset the counter from feet and frames, to timecode. “But Final Cut will only count timecode,” John Taylor says. “Sean will have to maintain two separate databases in his log book: one for negative key codes and the other for workprint ink numbers.”

  Dan Fort volunteers he could write a filter, or mini-program that would do that conversion for Sean.

  “It would be easy for Apple to write something and decode feet and frames,” Walt says, “but it is a matter of this being a very niche-y toolset for someone like Apple.”

  Fort also points out such a workaround would have to operate on OS 9.

  “Then you’re going to run into the fact that Steve [Jobs] officially pronounced OS 9 dead,” Shires says. “No work or budgets will be spent on OS 9.”

  Later, after lunch, the group reconvenes in one of DFT’s small edit rooms where Sean starts putting Final Cut Pro through its paces. He asks if the font size on the interface can be enlarged since Murch edits standing up, is farther from the screen, and needs larger type.

  “No!” someone says, mockingly, a dig at intransigent software designers. But of course it can.