Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1542296
P H OT O : F X IT'S ALIVE: Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh in "Alien: Earth." 58 C I N E M O N T A G E T E C H levels: an Avid keyboard on the upper level for editing, and a standard keyboard on the lower level for typing emails and indexing. He has a laptop setup for virtual meetings and review sessions, which he also uses to continue working while away from his home studio. Cote said, "This setup is a comfort for me. I can work standing or sitting, depending on what I'm doing. Some days I don't sit down all day because we're slamming away. I like to keep my setup simple because fewer things can go wrong. That's especially important on a show like 'Alien: Earth' that has thousands of visual effects shots and a very defined schedule." C o t e ' s A v i d ( a c c e s s e d v i a J u m p D e s k t o p ) w a s c o n n e c t e d t o t h e Av i d N E X I S w h i l e e d i to r K i m b l e wa s u s i n g Resilio for remote editing. "Regis and our visual effects production team were look- ing at higher-quality, higher-resolution images. Everybody else was remoting in, so unfortunately, the resolution is going to take a hit, depending on your internet connection, which is sometimes fabulous but often not. We relied on them as another set of eyes to judge the shots if we had a bad connection," he said. Cote worked with two assistants, indus- try veteran and ILM alum Jim Milton and one of Kimble's "Fargo" assistant editors, Inëz Czymbor, dividing the duties among them to keep pace with the show's demand- ing schedule. He said, "As a visual effects editor, I serve two masters. I'm working to get shots in the latest cut and in front of Regis as quickly as possible, and also pre- paring for our vendor meetings." For remote review sessions with the visual effects vendors — which happened quite often — they used two solutions: SyncSketch (now part of Unity Technolo- gies) and ScreenIt (a proprietary program by Atlas Digital, which is no longer support- ed). Cote explained, "We were one of the last shows to use ScreenIt. It allowed us to stream from our Avids. SyncSketch was for higher-resolution clips, and it required up- loading to their server. As you can imagine, our days were pretty packed with almost back-to-back vendor meetings. There were over 2,100 shots for the show, and we didn't do a whole lot of pre-viz during filming because they were scrambling just to get it shot. It really fell on our department to pick up the pace and run with it in post. We were 'jumping on the box' — having a remote review session — constantly. It was an everyday essential." Cote's now finely tuned remote work- flow took years to develop. It all started with Marvel's "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier," which had to switch to remote editing due to the COVID lockdown. "We had to figure out — as did the rest of the industry — how to work remotely. Marvel went through numerous iterations of soft- ware, trying three or four different types of SEE PAGE 68