The DVD is complete and the first meeting has been held. It went down well, but this is just the first tiny step in what will doubtless be an epic process.
Getting the edited 2K (full resolution) pilot onto DVD proved to be an epic process in itself. Due to the system at MFX being crammed to bursting point with other projects, we were unable to view the online with sound, so it wasn’t until I got it home and played it with the soundtrack that I realised that a shot here and shot there were out of sync. No-one was to blame – it was a combination of technical factors born of a complex edit, filled with flopped shots, reversed shots, upside-down shots, anamorphic, non-anamorphic, artwork sequences and of course the FX.
But every time I watched the online, I noticed another shot that was out. In the end, about a dozen needed fixing. Now, my poor old PowerMac G5 isn’t too hot on playing back 2K material, and I certainly don’t have the software or hardware needed to edit DPX – a format commonly used for scanned film footage, in which each frame is an individual still image file. So the only way to re-edit the online was by moving, copying, deleting and/or renaming these image files. With a bit of help from Shake (an application designed for compositing with DPX files, amongst others), I eventually got the online to match the offline. I was then able to convert it to Quicktime and give it a basic grade, before burning it to DVD.