Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/22819
edit this Around the world in 80,000 clips L By KEN McGORRY Life in a Daywas made by some heavy hitters... about 400 unknowns with cameras. ONDON — What if Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald, each armed with directing Oscars, entrusted shooting their new film to literally thousands of unknowns? And what if they also distrib- uted hundreds of cameras to people around the world who lacked computers and Inter- net access? The result could be, no, should be total chaos. Instead Life in a Day is now headed for Sundance 2011 all buttoned up and ready for professional scrutiny. Besides the consid- erable professional chops of producer Scott and director Macdonald, the editing team, headed by Avid veteran Joe Walker, deserves a salute for imposing order on chaos.The in- numerable different cameras and frame rates alone would be enough to send fainter hearts for the door. But Walker made some good decisions while winnowing down the 81,000 clips posted on YouTube (www.youtube.com/ lifeinaday) from 4,500 hours to “only” about 300 hours of content. One was latching onto Twixtor, an inexpensive soft- ware product from RE:Vision Effects that, among other things, uses optical flow tech- nology to interpolate frames of HD video and impart the look of 24p to footage of differing frame rates The free cameras the production sent out — typically to non-technical people in rugged locales such as Afghanistan — turned out to be a brainstorm.Walker set- tled on Fujifilm still cameras he liked (they shoot video), retailing at around $120, and distributed 470 of them. Afghanistan turns out to be a starkly beautiful locale in which to shoot (video),Walker later discovered. The Fujifilm camera recipients got to keep their cameras while returning two SD cards — with as much as 16 Gigs of 1920x1080p 24fps video — to the production team.“It blows up beautifully,”Walker says, though the “sound is not fantastic.” Most chosen contributors used their own Skydive, 24/7: People all over the world contributed video clips of intense (and mellow) moments for Ridley Scott’s Life in a Day,documenting July 24, 2010. cameras and, once contacted by the produc- tion team, placed their original clips on an FTP site.Walker feels “the most successful camera on this show is the Canon 5D Mark II — absolutely outstanding in terms of the quality of the material.” NECESSARY INVENTIONS Walker used ContentAgent from Root6 as the front-end hub for managing the ingest and export of the gargantuan amount of 12 Post • January 2011 user-generated content that flooded Life in a Day’s YouTube site. ContentAgent promises to free up editors for more creative story- telling — a must in this case. YouTube furnishes typical descriptive text for all videos, but the production team needed a more searchable database for cate- gorization purposes.They used CatDV from SquareBox to customize clips with additional text panes, including: country of origin; time of day; type of camera; plus a production re- searchers’ description of a clip’s content. “Twixtor did an amazing job with the downconverting,” he says, “and made in many places a seamless image that would be hard for most people to identify as a differ- ent frame rate than our native 24. In the end it was several methods that helped us reach our final product, but 92 percent of our problems were solved with Twixtor.” “I’m a major fan,” adds assistant editor Marc McDermott. “I’ve already told friends in post production houses about our ex- perience.We had 60 different frame rates Editor Joe Walker: expecting 15,000 video clips — and getting over 80,000. HELP FROM TWIXTOR In Walker’s YouTube messages to the video-shooting troops, his key point was that the production wanted a frame rate of 24 when at all possible.“They completely ig- nored me,”Walker chuckles,“we actually got 60 different frame rates!” Gwillym Hewetson,Walker’s first-assis- tant editor on Life in a Day, found Twixtor in- valuable in solving the movie’s multiple- frame-rate issues. “Every piece of software we applied to our images still created blended frames when we downconverted,” Hewetson laments.“We needed clean, un- blended frames to work from. Like a normal effects workflow, we went with TIFFs. All the TIFF sequences were exported at their na- tive clip frame rate and frame size, and im- ported into our 24-frame HD project.This way we got a clean frame in our Avid to work with.We then applied the Twixtor ef- fect and replaced artifact frames with clean frames wherever we could — Twixtor did the rest.” Hewetson adds that in the few cases where Twixtor couldn’t fix a clip’s is- sues they used Avid motion effects. www.postmagazine.com to deal with!” Walker also used Twixtor sometimes for a little trick it’s become well known for — slowing things down. For instance, when he had finished a speaker’s on-camera sound bite but the lip flap continued,Walker would slow down the frames to still the lips. STORY OF A DAY But what was the story? Can thousands of people — mostly amateurs — tell any kind of cohesive story? Walker says they can — and the team often chose very emotional, personal mater- ial. Still, just imagine the sheer weight of 81,000 videos, albeit resting on the experi- enced shoulders of talent like Scott, Mac- donald and Walker. Entries were given a star rating and some are of very high quality.The content “is not the typical YouTube experi- ence,”Walker says. “I think, the way the ap- peal was made by Kevin and Ridley in their trailers, they attracted a lot of filmmakers,” including Red camera users.“Some shots are continued on page 45