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Home » Talented Post Team Makes Adobe Premiere Pro Choice for Fincher’s ‘Gone Girl’

Talented Post Team Makes Adobe Premiere Pro Choice for Fincher’s ‘Gone Girl’

I attended a screening Wednesday of David Fincher’s Gone Girl. Sure, it was shown in 4K and looked great. But that’s not big news, of course. Afterward I heard how the film was edited with Adobe’s Premiere Pro, an app that never seemed so ready for the big time as now. Now that impressed me.

I heard the details on the postproduction from part of the talented editorial team that worked with Fincher for years on this and other of his movies. I heard how they developed a highly scalable, incredibly fast  storage system that integrated Adobe Premiere Pro CC and After Effects CC,  giving me insights into how the NLE’s rapid development cycle is taking it ever higher into the high-stakes feature market.

The screening and talk, held at the big Loews near Lincoln Center, brought together post-production supervisor Peter Mavromates, assistant editor Tyler Nelson and post-production engineer Jeff Brue (Brue is also a co-founder of Open Drives, a high-end, storage developer crucial to the design of the system used on the film).

MC’ing was Michael Kanfer, a senior solutions consultant for Adobe’s professional film and video team. HP came in as another sponsor of the tour – the company’s workstations were used extensively during post. Hosting it all was Tekserve, which happens to provide HP systems (along with Apple) running Adobe products to post houses throughout the city.

Kanfer notes that Gone Girl was the first mainstream Hollywood feature posted entirely on Adobe’s Premiere Pro CC. Fincher’s team also made extensive use of Adobe After Effects CC during post. The director is a firm believer that compositing-and in the future visual effects-are integral to the future of postproduction. Both effects and compositing should be as quickly and easily available from the timeline as the image.

Mavromates, who has worked on practically all of Fincher’s features, noted that the director was a great innovator, never making “two movies in a row the same way”.

Why Adobe’s NLE? The team noted Premiere Pro’s flexibility, how its architecture lets it integrate with a wide range of post technology. Also noted: Adobe’s willingness to incorporate their suggestions as soon as they could. The company’s constant aim to make a better product ensures that Fincher will be using Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite into the future. HP was also involved as an active part of the post team; beyond workstations, they support a wide array of networking and storage.

As many know, Fincher geeks out on the latest advances in image technology, eager to push his productions to full 6K resolutions, for example, with an eye 8K and even beyond. Mavromates, however, disagrees here. He feels that their digital budget would be better spent by developing greater color bit depth during capture and keeping it intact through post.

“The resolution argument is over,” says Mavromates. “If you’re having problems with your digital production and think it’s a resolution problem, it’s not, it’s with the glass (i.e. lenses).”

 

Postproduction engineer Jeff Brue, assistant editor Tyler Nelson, postproduction supervisor Peter Mavromates, and MC Michael Kanfer, senior solutions consultant for Adobe’s pro film and video group. Photo: Dan Ochiva

 

Another first of the film: DP Jeff Cronenweth shot entirely in 6K with the Red Epic Dragon camera system. Shooting at that resolution meant that he could set his frame markers at 5K, giving him room for stabilization and repositioning later.

Tyler Nelson has worked as an assistant editor for editor Kirk Baxter ACE – a two-time Academy Award winner – for quite some time. “When we edited ‘Social Network’, David saw how he could stabilize the image by round tripping with After Effects. We used the overscan to extract the clean 1920 x 800 pixel image.”

Making full use of a full loaded RAM cache on the HP machines with Premiere Pro and After Effects, Baxter could quickly split the screen and, for example, in a close-up of stars Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, quickly and seamlessly melding the best takes of the actors.

Actively using some 342 TB of image and effects, and making all that instantly available to the editors, proved another challenge. That’s where Jeff Brue, a head engineer at Open Systems, came in. “I really enjoyed the process of developing a system that would work with all of the Premiere Pro seats seamlessly,” says Brue. “David gave me instructions to “build whatever you need” to pull all of this off. That flexibility lead us to create new ways to better work with Adobe’s software.”

The tight integration between Premiere Pro and After Effects enabled the post team to create a “huge number” of effects shots in-house says Mavromates. HP and Adobe both provided significant technical support, which allowed Mavromates, the postproduction supervisor, and engineering talent Brue, to suggest specific changes to the software and tweaks to the hardware.

The result? Pro-level capabilities that push these systems further into the realm of top-flight solutions for feature films.

Another disclosure from the discussion: expect to see the results of suggestions by top editorial teams such as Fincher’s on the development of SpeedGrade, Adobe’s color management system. A fairly recent acquisition of Adobe’s, the color app is finally getting the full Creative Suite treatment. Color grading will be more powerful, better integrated and much more intuitive to use, said Michael Kanfer. Expect to see these results at NAB 2015.

The nice part? All these changes and improvements will turn up soon in updates to Adobe’s Creative Suite CC. The same one you and I use.

 

About Dan Ochiva

New York City-based journalist and NYCPPNEWS founder Dan Ochiva writes and consults on film, video, and digital media technology.

Community & Partner Links

How Sony’s New Virtual Sound Technology Can Change How We Hear Films

Kami Asgar and Jessica Parks are post-production heavyweights who work with major studios, namely Sony. As a sound designer (Asgar) and as a post executive (Parks), their collective resume touches on everything from Apocalypto to Grandma’s Boy to Venom.

Parks has recently shifted her focus from supervisor to hands-on sound design, and we talk about how it’s never too late to pivot on your career path and find the thing you love doing wherever you are in life.

Click on this link to read the rest of the article on No Film School’s site.

NJ – Governor Murphy signs $14B Incentive Program Bill – the NJ Economic Recovery Act of 2020

 Film tax credits — amending existing programs to include provisions for so-called New Jersey film partners and New Jersey film-lease partners and allowing an additional $200 million of tax credits annually over 13 years.

Click this link if you want to read the full article on the Lexology site. http://bit.ly/35NtDx6

Film Commish announces date for production restart

In her December 18, 2020 news update, MOME Commissioner Anne del Castillo announced that the Film Office is now accepting permit applications for production activity that begins on July 27th.

She also announced awards now (Awkwafina) and more. To read all of the Film Commish’s bloggy sort of news column, click here.

Stimulus Offers $15 Billion in Relief for Struggling Arts Venues

The coronavirus relief package that Congressional leaders agreed to this week includes grant money that many small proprietors described as a last hope for survival.

For the music venue owners, theater producers and cultural institutions that have suffered through the pandemic with no business, the coronavirus relief package that Congress passed on Monday night offers the prospect of aid at last.

To read the full article on The New York Times’ site, click here.

If you want to start production, here’s the latest news from the Mayor’s Office

Phase 4 production guidance is available on the Film Permit website. All production activity, whether it requires a Film Permit or not, must comply with New York Forward Industry Guidance.

For more information see, please refer to the State Department of Health’s Interim Guidance for Media Production During the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency. Please review the guidelines and FAQ before submitting permit applications. The Film Office is operating remotely, so please allow additional time for Film Permit processing.

The above paragraphs contain links to the various FAQ – just mouse over the relevant words.

Nikon to Stop Making Cameras in Japan

Nikon has fallen on hard times as of late as its camera sales have cratered, and now there’s a new indicator of how dire its financial situation is: the company is reportedly pulling the plug on making cameras in Japan after over 70 years of doing so.

To read the full article on Petapixel’s site, click here.

NVIDIA Uses AI to Slash Bandwidth on Video Calls

NVIDIA Research has invented a way to use AI to dramatically reduce video call bandwidth while simultaneously improving quality

What the researchers have achieved has remarkable results: by replacing the traditional h.264 video codec with a neural network, they have managed to reduce the required bandwidth for a video call by an order of magnitude. In one example, the required data rate fell from 97.28 KB/frame to a measly 0.1165 KB/frame – a reduction to 0.1% of required bandwidth.

To read the rest of this article on Petapixel, click this link.

 

 

 

Union Health Plan Dodges Film Workers’ Suit Over Virus Relief

Law360 (October 9, 2020, 5:22 PM EDT) — The Motion Picture Industry Health Plan’s board can’t be sued under ERISA for allegedly flouting its duties when it relaxed plan rules in response to COVID-19, a California federal judge has ruled, nixing a proposed class action filed by two cinematographers who still couldn’t qualify for benefits.

In an order entered Thursday, U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner granted the board of directors’ motion to dismiss Greg Endries and Dee Nichols’ Employee Retirement Income Security Act suit accusing board members of breaching their duty to treat all plan participants fairly.

Endries and Nichols, members of Local 600 of the International Cinematographers Guild, said in July that the board left them and others “out in the cold” in its attempts to address the problems COVID-19 caused for plan participants.

But Judge Klausner agreed with the board’s contention that the case, which alleged a fiduciary breach, should be tossed because plan administrators don’t act as fiduciaries when they amend health care plans.

Read the full article on the Law360 site by clicking here.

Russo Brothers Received Close to $50 Million From Saudi Bank

Anthony Russo and Joseph Russo photographed at the PMC Studio in Los Angeles for the Variety Playback Podcast.

The Russo brothers, directors of the all-time top grossing film “Avengers: Endgame,” quietly secured a roughly $50 million cash infusion for their production company AGBO from Saudi Arabia earlier this year, multiple sources tell Variety.

In a deal brokered and closed at the beginning of the pandemic, the Russos received the investment from an undisclosed Saudi bank in exchange for a minority stake in the brothers’ Los Angeles-based shop.

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