It is very important to determine what you are looking for in the recording from the post-production, knowing in advance how you want to handle it, what you are going to do with that material, where you plan to edit it, among others.
Luis Pinto*
Content producers currently have two possibilities for the management of their files: one is to record a product on an HD format and maintain this environment throughout the post-production process or record it in a larger format such as 2K, 3K, Ultra HD, or 4K and manage it according to their requirements and their technical possibilities of operation to finish it in HD.
It is here where we must make a chronological alteration as in the film directed by Robert Zemeckis, Forrest Gump (1994), where Gump (Tom Hanks) narrates in retrospect, sitting on a public bench, the Napoleonic deeds that led him to be in that place despite his cognitive limitations, in this same way, we must establish how production should be seen from post-production, the technical scripts must almost be pre-prepared from the post-production.
In Colombia the market is marked by large foreign chains who have implemented Avid Media Composer systems that work with ISIS (now Nexis), within an equation with variables of the number of users, work codec, and number of chassis available for use. These chassis what they do is that together and hand in hand with the Nexis software, they establish the bandwidth need of each user, they make a buffer of the information, they package it and send it to each of its users according to the work they are doing, which can at any given time overflow their bandwidth if they worked in a format such as 4k, it would be requiring about 1.5 GB/s -per user- of capacity to do its operation.
This bandwidth is the minimum that a system must hold, regardless of the one that is to work in "raw" RAW formats (Arri, Phantom, Red, DNG), in order to hold a playback so that the card and the software can process all the information of these formats. The larger the format, the larger the performance and consequently the storages. If these chains wanted to process their products in 4K without compression, they should multiply by four the number of chassis for each system and thus provide the minimum transmission bandwidth required by each station and be able to manipulate this format, or reduce the number of users for existing chassis and thus balance the equation.
When we conceive an HD production, there are a lot of formats in which to support us for recording (ProRes, avi, raw, h.264, DNxHD 220, others), we have many editing software on the market on which to work on them, I will name only four references known to many; Avid MC, Final X, Sony Vegas and Adobe Premiere and to have any of these professional editors in a conventional editing room, you require a computer that has a good processor, ample RAM, good video accelerator card, good audio card, system disks of good speed and capacity, in short, "powerful", that has an array that supports the format to make playback of the material as they bring it.
For each of these formats, the machine requires certain specifications that cannot be ignored, otherwise it simply cannot manipulate it within the editor and will have to, if necessary, manipulate the original file sacrificing quality in color and its resolution. Ideally, it should maintain the format in which they are working from the beginning and what the deliveries or deliverables that the client or the final recipient asks for.
In summary, it is very important to determine what you are looking for in the recording from the post-production, knowing in advance how you want to handle it, what is going to be done with that material, where you plan to edit it, what machines it has, all the possible details of the post-production, to who or who is going to manipulate it, do not deceive or deceive others, or spend money unofficially.
To you, Mr. Producer, I ask you: why are you going to shoot in 4K if you are going to end up in HD? Unless you want to do a Master in 4K and from there extract the deliveries that are necessary, according to the negotiation that has been reached or the pretension of the scenarios or screens that you want to reach with your audiovisual material, but this is expensive at the level of infrastructure, keep it in mind at all times. That they roll it in 4k and finish it in DNx HD 220 is not 4K, this is a matter that concerns the producers.
I want to consider a procedure that could guarantee the quality of the work that is being done and what the client asks for, I clarify, this is not the formula of the most popular soft drink and I do not want to say that some or many are not implementing it, I only share with you my research on the subject. At the moment the Off-Line / On-Line edition plays a very important role and the differentiation between them may disappear when the digital edition covers all areas of audiovisual production; let's define these terms.
In the On-line edition the original material is used in all stages of the process while for the Off-line edition, a copy of the original material is made and used in the post-production as a guide, to then create the final version (On-line).
If the producer after making his Field Recording (field recording) in 4K, takes the material and downloads it in his Data Center or centralized storage, the Media Access Manager sees it in the Watch Folder and immediately converts it into DNx HD 220 MB / s and once the conversion is finished, the original material deposits it in the LTO tapes (Linear Tape-Open) destining the copy for the editors to work within the NEXIS or any other system that the company has.
In a talk with Andrés Muñoz, Senior Editor certified in SGO Mistika and Senior user of Avid MC, Maestro Jorge Ali Triana (almost 20 years ago) told him that his dream was to work with three independent cameras, to be able to count on all the reactions of the actors at all times. This translates into today, that for each scene three recordings are generated from three different angles and these are repeated in three different planes (open, medium and closed planes), which gives us a total of nine video tracks in the post-production.
This material is received by the first editor and synchronizes it with the clapperboard, remember that most of the time there is no MultiTC (Time Code), then he makes a multi camera giving some temporary punches that become backing, he makes his play where he must mount the scene with the existing layers, he returns and corrects what he must correct, this with each shot. A conceptual editor gives you the second pass of the material and makes the changes you consider, giving play to 9 tracks with the possibility of changing what you want and at the end there may be a finisher who makes the necessary retouches and creates the final file.
Once the Off-line version has been approved by the director and others, the Edit Decision List (EDL) file is called, to move to a high-quality editing team, preferably that does handle 4K, where the final On-line version will be assembled (conform). In this part of the process, transitions, special effects, color corrections, audio synchronization, etc. are executed in the on-line editor. This process is known as conformation, which we could talk about at another time.
The improper practices of some production houses or some producers - because this should not be done - have led them to record on 4K, take these files and convert them into HD to be able to work on their workstations that do not support a 4k stream, edit it and other work they require, and then take the file that the editor creates on HD and export it with some 4K program. This gentlemen is by no means 4K.
I also find that in the market, there are equipment created to upconvert in real time to terrestrial or satellite transmitter systems, logically I can not pretend to play a whole programming on 4K to upload it to satellite ... unthinkable!
However, some give them uses that should not be, I explain, they do not take the 4K files of the data media in camera but capture directly (by baseband) in a portable recorder, and convert in this way their files, losing all the image quality, with its consequent problems. Bad for them, so I just ask you to think about what you want to do and what your production process should look like, seen from post-production.
*Luis Pinto is an advisor to TVyVideo+Radio magazine.
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