You don't have to be an expert in motion picture technology to appreciate that whoever gets to work with Walter Murch as first assistant editor must take pleasure in pushing forward the boundaries of the possible. Murch, it should be remembered, won unheard-of double Oscars for sound and film editing on The English Patient in 1996 and was also the first editor to use an Avid system on a major feature film.

That said, it comes as some surprise to discover that Cold Mountain's first assistant editor Sean Cullen, not only accepted the idea of giving Final Cut Pro its major feature film debut, he actively encouraged it. Then again, Cullen has been working with Murch for a long time, starting as a trainee on The English Patient and helping to set up The Talented Mr Ripley. More recently, the pair have worked together on Touch of Evil, Apocalypse Now Redux and K19: The Widowmaker. Small wonder that the two men share a fearless approach to technological advance.

"I was interested in the idea of using software that took advantage of the computer paradigms not just the editing paradigms," Cullen offers as his opening gambit. "The Avid was very good at taking linear editing to the non-linear phase by saying 'here's a bin as you're used to it, now let's make a bin in the Avid – we're going to put the clips there.' Everything's named the same and the whole methodology of the Avid is very similar to the methodology of a Moviola or a Steenbeck.

"Although Avid allowed us to do things with non-linear editing that made things easier and more efficient, it really didn't change the way we think about non-linear editing," Cullen considers. "I was looking for something that was really going to allow me to think more creatively and take advantage of what computers could do."

Cullen kept an eye on Final Cut Pro from its release and evaluated its suitability in the run up to K19. At the time, FCP was in version 2 and it was not until the release of FCP3 that Cullen considered that the software might truly be ready for a large-scale production.

"One of the things that really attracted me was that it was an open-standards system. The media you used was a QuickTime movie and it was a QuickTime movie that anyone can use, whereas Avid is proprietary," Cullen explains.

"The fact that Final Cut was going to be storing media in an open format meant that not only could I use it, I would be able to send my clips and my raw material and my finished cuts to anybody with a computer. Anybody with a PC or a Mac would be able to view it."

With Murch's blessing Cullen started talking to FCP editors, many of whom had migrated from Avid systems. The consensus seemed to be that there was a learning curve but that it was a transition worth making. But was it worth the risk?

"I knew from experience that Walter is the kind of person who doesn't back down from a challenge and doesn't use technology as a crutch. He's very facile with technology and tools," says Cullen. "When we did the English Patient. It was the first time he had cut on an Avid. He just said, Okay I'm ready to go, and he did it. That's one of the reasons I really like working with Walter. He is very adventurous and talented. He understands the limitations of technology, as well as the advantages and liberation."

As the idea of using FCP became firmer, Cullen approached California based non-linear training facility Digital Film Tree, who worked with the pair to identify "three potential project-stoppers". These were: could Final Cut digest 600,000 feet of film, how would change lists be done and how sequence information would be conveyed to the sound department

"With each of the problems, we figured out what the ideal solution was – typically that Apple would deliver us a tool," Cullen explains. "Then we looked at what we would do if Apple didn't come through."

Scaling up from smaller tests suggested that the system would cope with the amount of film; a conclusion that turned out to be completely correct. The team identified a number of ways the change lists might be generated but this turned out to be an academic issue as Apple itself created the appropriate tool in time for the project.

When it came to the sound, the team was confident that it could draw on a depth of knowledge that would make it possible to translate the FCP sequence information into OMF, with the secondary possibility of using EDLs. The team's conclusion was that it could successfully complete the film, even if Apple offered no further support or development, and it was on this basis that the decision was taken to go ahead.

The next stop was Romania, where location shooting for Cold Mountain took place. Murch and Cullen's editing room was based on four Power Mac/1GHz/Dual G4s, with Aurora Ignitor hardware for telecine and reverse telecine, plus 1.2TB of Rorke Data StudioNet storage shared through a fibre network.

"Walter had one machine and I had three machines," Cullen explains. "Walter did all of his cutting and creative work on one machine. Then I did all of my syncing of dailies, organising media, cutting clips – all the first assistant work – on another machine. But then I had two other machines that I could use for other tasks.

"One of them I used for digitising and for re-exporting material, because I would digitise a whole video tape at a time, sync it up with the sound and then re-export all of the media by clip, so that I had 4,900 clips rather than 800 clips. I wanted to have these 'bite-sized chunks'.

"Another machine was making DVDs, both doing the compression and burning the DVDs," Cullen recalls. We were able to output four DVDs a day of the dailies, so we sent them to LA. This was good for the producers because it was quick, they didn't have a pile of tapes to get rid of at the end. They could skip forward and back on the DVD, it was easier for shipping..."

Not only did the systems perform almost flawlessly, the structure of FCP and its use of QuickTime soon produced dividends. In particular, FCP is less 'fussy' than Avid about projects, accepting substitute QuickTime files as being correct, providing they have the same file name and location as the earlier version.

"As long as you've got your media organised, it has some great advantages," Cullen enthuses. "We had our visual effects supervisor working during production. He was making sure that the shots went well and that we had what we needed. He also had his whole system on a PC running Combustion. We frequently sent him QuickTime clips that he could work on in their native NTSC 24fps JPEG-A compression format, and he was able to do things like take wires out, or put explosions in the background – all the things that he was going to be doing when we got to the final stages.

"He would save them in that same format, send them back to me and I would simply replace the media. From that point on, every time anybody opened a sequence – even an old one – it would access the correct media. There was no colour shift, there was no scale shift... it was indistinguishable apart from the work that had been done.

Similarly, the use of QuickTime made it easy to show the music supervisor how the film was developing, even though he was not part of the team as such at that point in time.

The only part of the process that was disproportionately time consuming was the way that picture editing interfaced with the sound department. Cullen is quick to explain that the situation was no more difficult than any other film he has worked on.

"One of the things that people who aren't involved in features often don't realise is that editorial – both in production and post – is full of problems and creative solutions," he says. "Nobody has a turnkey system. Certainly there are systems that are turnkey in themselves. For instance, the method of digitising a tape is fairly well established – you don't have to work that one out. But how you convey your sequences to the sound department – even on an Avid – is something that is different every time.

"How you get codebook information into your bins is always different. And the resolutions you going to digitise at will be different, so we knew that there would be problems, but we also knew that we were the kind of editorial team that is always solving problems, whether it's on Avid or Final Cut.

"So, although for Final Cut it was a 'weakness', relative to what I had always done on an Avid, there was no change," Cullen concludes. "The system of Final Cut and how we went about our work was 10 times as easy than on the Avid. We really had very few crashes, very little media off-line. We never lost the whole network. If you wanted to do something, you just did it. It was just transparent, the process of being creative."

For further information please visit:
Cold Mountain
Walter Murch - Apple Pro