Biscardi Creative Blog

We took delivery of our first 27″ iMac today and in just 5 minutes, we had it connected to our 32TB SAN and playing back our latest timeline of Foul Water, Fiery Serpent documentary. After reading the specs on these machines when they were announced, I immediately planned to install them in some of our new suites when the new building opens up.

Why? We run an Ethernet based SAN so any computer with an ethernet port can connect to, interface with and edit from that SAN. Laptop, iMac, Mac Pro, Mac Mini, you name it. Apple Pro Res 720p and 1080i HD all day, every day. For the Foul Water project, I’ve had an Edit Assist working with me for the past four months or so and she’s been cutting on a 21″ iMac while I work on a Mac Pro.

That 21″ iMac has worked so well, after seeing the specs on the 27″ iMac I knew we had a full editing system just perfectly tailored for long form work that is the backbone of our projects these days. See with long form, you don’t need to worry about being properly connected to a critical color display during the initial editing phase, which can take anywhere from 1 to 10 months or more. It’s when you get into the final polish edit that you really need the Mac Pro, AJA Kona 3, Flanders Scientific monitor and such to make your final decisions and color grade. So my idea is to outfit two or three suites solely with these 27″ iMacs for all the storytelling process of the edit and when it’s time to finish a project, move it into one of our AJA Kona based suites. Everybody’s connected via the SAN so it’s as easy as closing the project on the iMac and opening it on the AJA system.

In fact, as we develop some original television series, we just might do the same thing. Cut the primary shows on the iMac and then finish on the AJA based systems. The Ethernet based SAN has been a bit of a bear to wrangle and get to operate correctly, and we have invested about $30,000 into it, but now we’re really starting to see the cost savings on the back end. More iMac editing workstations will feed into a few “high end” finishing stations.

I’ll definitely update you guys as we move along with this experiment, but so far so good. Next week we’re going to test out a Matrox MXO feeding out to a Flanders Scientific 1770W just to see how accurate that feed truly is.

The iMac is the 27″ 2.83GHz Intel Core i7 with 8GB RAM. We’ve installed Final Cut Studio 3 on it and I’m not sure if we’ll go ahead and purchase CS4. We’ll make that decision as we move forward.

When we started editing Foul Water, Fiery Serpent in March of 2009, I never anticipated it would be a 1 year project. We expected maybe 4 to 6 months at maximum. But with over 100 hours of material, more like 150 hours, and just a 2 page outline to start with, the project moved along at a pretty slow pace.

One of the really REALLY neat things about Producer Gary Strieker is that he loves to let the editors tell the story, especially when we get into these long form projects. He likes to give us guidelines, an outline and then let us dig into the story. The editor becomes a true collaborator with Gary rather than just filling in the blanks according to his scripts.

With Foul Water, the story went one way according to Gary’s original outline and then after initial screenings, we literally tore up the playbook and re-cut the story in about a month. Now we’re in the final tweaks and about ready to send it on to Patrick Belden for sound design and Ron Anderson for coloring.

What’s that? You’re surprised I’m sending the show off for coloring when I do a lot of Color work myself? This project has a lot of challenges and it’s the first project I’ve worked on that will be sent for either a film out or a digital theatrical file. So I want someone who has done feature film outs handling the color enhancement for this first project. Ron Anderson has about 30 years experience doing nothing but color enhancement so I know my project is in good hands.

A revised website will be launching in the next week or so and we’re excited about getting this film out to some film festivals and hopefully a theatrical release.

Tools used in the edit: Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Maxx Digital Final Share SAN, Mac Pro and iMac editing workstations, After Effects, Photoshop, Motion, Apple Pages, Apple Numbers. Soon to be used, Apple Color, ProTools, Logic.

Just had to post a quick note on an awesome client session today. As you know we’ve been posting the Foul Water, Fiery Serpent documentary since March of ‘09. And then in December it was decided to completely re-work all the material in the piece. So during the Christmas Break, the client and I did a long distance iChat edit session to do a rough re-blocking of the timeline.

For the past three weeks, I’ve been working to rebuild the entire 90 minute timeline. Well today, the client was here in the suite and we blew right through the first 54 minutes. The main structure I had completed served us well as we really only had to do a major re-working of about a 10 minute section.

We are really getting close now to putting locking this documentary down and getting it off to sound and color design. Days like today I flat out love my job!

We’ve been working on “Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” in Post since March of ‘09. We have a very good 1 hour, 23 minute documentary. But we know it can be better.

After two weeks of screening we’re going to take a new turn and re-organize the doc based on feedback. It’s funny how watching it four times over two days will change even my perspective on the show. I could see a lot of what the folks were talking about, especially on the last running of the film.

The changes are not earth shattering. We have all the elements, they just need to be finessed more to make the film that much more enjoyable for the audience. Even after all this time editing and massaging, we’re not offended, we’re taking the notes we agree with and working to make this thing the absolute best film we can create.

More soon!