It was 1968 when fellow film student George Lucas first
introduced Walter Murch to Francis Ford Coppola. The trio was later invited to
a demo of CBS and Memorex’s then-new CMX-600 nonlinear editing system. This
early computer workstation was one precursor to modern NLEs, but could only
store and handle several minutes’ worth of black-and-white footage at a time. In
spite of that limitation, they boldly predicted this device would sweep the
industry within five years.
That prediction proved to be off the mark, of course.
Nevertheless, this meeting led Coppola to give Murch his start in feature film
editing, first as a sound editor and mixer on The Rain People and later as a picture editor for The
Conversation. Fast forward nearly 40 years
to find Coppola and Murch reunited on Youth Without Youth—the director’s first film in 10 years and his
first shot digitally.
Murch spoke on the project’s unique workflow at this year’s
NAB Final Cut Pro Users Group SuperMeet and was kind enough to elaborate more
about it with me recently. When you think of Coppola or Murch and the
big-budget films they’ve done together or separately, such as The Godfather series, Apocalypse Now, Cold Mountain or Jarhead, it’s hard to
fathom that the approach taken on Youth Without Youth provides a perfect roadmap for the indie filmmaker
determined to use desktop tools to tell the story.
Coppola financed the production himself for a limited
budget—under $10 million—so it became important to own or control
as much of the process as possible
. The digital parts of Youth Without Youth were shot with Coppola’s two Sony F900 CineAlta
camcorders, which in turn were fed to an HDCAM-SR field recorder. The onboard
HDCAM recorders of the F900 cameras actually record the 1920x1080 HD signal
with a sampling of 1440x1080 pixels in 3:1:1 color space. By sending the
uncompressed, full raster 4:2:2 signal from the camera to the SR recorder, the
team was able to preserve more of the camera’s inherent image quality. In
addition, the SR deck features the unique ability to record two simultaneous
4:2:2 A- and B-camera inputs onto a single tape. These recordings became the
equivalent of the film negative and were used for the final digital
intermediate. The onboard HDCAM tapes were used as back-up tapes for reviewing
footage and to create DVCAM copies for ingest into the Final Cut Pro editing
station.
Production started in Bucharest in October of 2005, with the
Coppola team working out of a rented Romanian villa that served as a
combination of production offices, post facility and living quarters. At the
time, Murch was wrapping up the mix on Jarhead, so the initial assembly of Youth
Without Youth was handled by Romanian
editor Corina Stavila and her assistant, Andrei Dascalescu, working on a single
Final Cut Pro station with media in the DVCAM format. Coppola shot a total of
162 hours—the equivalent of nearly 900,000 feet of 35mm film—so the
first assembly came in at about 210 minutes. Stavila and Coppola’s next cut
brought that down to 170 minutes. Murch joined the team in April 2006, along
with Sean Cullen (long-time first assistant and associate editor), Kevin Bailey
(a postproduction intern) and Pete Horner (sound designer and rerecording
mixer, with whom Murch had worked on Apocalypse Now Redux). The crew screened an HDCAM version on a Christie
2K digital cinema projector, and breathed a collective sigh of relief at the
sight of the crisp and striking images on the 50-inch screen.
Over the next few months, Murch set about the task of
reviewing the dailies and recutting the film. His initial version trimmed a
further 30 minutes (including restoring ten minutes of scenes that had been
cut); however, the target was to bring in the film at two hours.
“I have found you can only cut out about 30 percent from a
first assembly by tightening,” Murch offers. “If that gets you down to the
target length, then every scene in the assembly is going to be in the finished
film. But if the film has to be even shorter, you can’t just use ‘dieting and
exercise.’ You have to start making more drastic surgical changes and lose some
major parts of the film.
“Francis is a process-oriented director. He has a powerful
overall vision of what he wants, but welcomes experimentation and collaboration
and loves to see the film continue to reveal itself through all stages of the
filmmaking process. So he encouraged us to try dropping scenes and rearranging
the structure where it seemed appropriate.”
One of the advantages that Murch found to the digital image
was a greater ability to manipulate it when compared with film. “Film has grain
that’s fixed in size at the molecular level, but pixels are different. When you
magnify a digitally sourced image, pixels are recalculated and averaged
mathematically, so the image stays sharper longer. You don’t have grain getting
in the way and shots can be blown up far more than with film.
“The rule of thumb with 35mm is that the grain starts to
become obvious when the image is blown up more than 20 percent. Some shots in Youth
Without Youth, however, were resized more
than 120 percent with no visible artifacts. Arranging shots along a timeline
would be considered horizontal editing, so I guess you could call this vertical
editing: editing the image within the frame.”
Murch notes that Coppola deliberately shot most of the film
with locked-off cameras, limiting camera movement to specific moments for
maximum impact. “So sometimes, I would need to adjust a shot for headroom, but
we also modified framing in cinematically playful ways. About a third of the
shots had something done to them in post as part of the storytelling language.
I was slightly apprehensive before I started doing this, thinking that it might
become a time-suck, but it was quickly obvious that Final Cut Pro could handle
this kind of work effortlessly, and it became second-nature.”