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I was very deeply involved in the entire production process of the short film by Philipp Käßbohrer, a fellow student of mine. I did the main part of the post production including the editing and grading. During the pre production phase we decided to shoot the film on super 16mm film and try a full HD post production.
First I had no idea how to handle all the data. In SD it would have been no problem because nowadays the sata disks can handle the datarate easily. But in HD the datarate goes up to 140MB/sec [10bit, 25fps,1080p]. Finally I discovered Apple's ProRes codec which reduces the datarate to 25.8MB/sec [HQ, 25fps, 1080p]. I did some tests about image quality and generation losses but the results were very good. So we decided to work completely in 1080p 25fps throughout the whole post production.
Because we are all students we do not own all the high end equipment, but we still know people who do. So I drove to my friend Till and borrowed his Decklink HD card and built it into my mac. I did not have the chance to test the system before we went scanning to the SWR, but everything worked without the tiniest little problem. At the SWR we directly connected the Spirit 2K via BNC to the HD input of the Decklink card and captured all of the 16mm negative via ProRes to my mac. We did not even need some kind of expensive fast storage system.
My capturing system at the SWR. In the back the Spirit 2k film scanner.
After we recorded to footage to Final Cut Pro, I began editing. Due to our crazy professional sound guys Casi and Andy I had to work with 14 audio channels in my timeline. But that tourned out to be no problem, because you can link audio to clips in FCP. We finished editing in September and I started working on the grading. For the grading we decided to use Apple's Color, because it easily works with FCP and the KHM owns licenses. Before I exported to Color I collapsed the clips in my timeline to one video track to avoid export and import issues I discovered during a music video I worked on.
Finally the movie was complete and received well be our test audience. Throughout the entire post production we worked in ProRes HQ and it was easy to handle and there were no performance problems. The film had it's premiere at the 30th Biberach Film Festival and the images looked great on the big screen!
