And if you’re more of a video user, check out my companion writeup with video export performance tests for the 16″ MBP in FCPx and Premiere Pro.

I have always found Lightroom Classic on my 2017 Macbook Pro to be painfully slow while working with Fuji X-T3 raw files. Lightroom is particularly laggy when navigating between photos in Develop view, and can also be a bit of dog when brushing or spot-healing. Exporting large numbers of photos can take a very long time. I often work with hundreds of XT3 .RAF images in a retouch session, so I was keen to speed up that workflow with this new 16″ Apple laptop.

My raw photo processing workflow generally looks something like this; first I import images, making first-pass selects while rating shots and marking bad shots for deletion. As long as you don’t apply any adjustments to the images and are reviewing them in Library view, Lightroom will show you the low-res sidecar preview that imports with each RAF raw file. This means that selects can be made with almost no lag. Once I’ve trimmed down the stack of photos to something manageable, only then I will begin customizing Develop settings. Those develop settings will then get pasted to groups of similar images, adjusting individual shots to taste. This is the point where Lightroom performance will begin to lag…navigating between images takes a moment for the develop settings to render and display. It’s nearly a 2 second lag. Because of that, at this time I’ll generally render 1:1 previews while stepping away for coffee, so that navigating between shots is snappier. From there I narrow selects down further, fine-tune my favorite images, and then export out final jpgs at the very end.

Firstly, here are the configurations we’re comparing.

Old and Busted:
2017 15″ Macbook Pro
4-core 3.1GHz i7 w/ 16GB DDR3, 500GB SSD
Radeon Pro 560 4GB / Intel HD 630
MacOS 10.13.6 High Sierra

New Hotness:
2019 16″ Macbook Pro
8-core 2.4GHz i9 w/ 64GB DDR4, 1TB SSD
Radeon Pro 5500M 8GB / Intel UHD 630
MacOS 10.15.2 Catalina

Now on to some speed tests. Here are my results showing how Lightroom performs on Apple’s new larger MBP.

Notes: For 1:1 Preview render times, I made sure to apply the same recipe of image adjustments to each photo first. Those settings included exposure, color, grain, noise reduction, optical corrections/transforms, and radial/grad filters. Raw Fuji X-T3 image files were stored on a Samsung T5 external SSD. Lightroom Classic was version 9.1 of the application. Lightroom GPU processing was enabled on both machines, preview storage was on the internal SSD, and the Camera Raw Cache preference was set to 24GB. These are all based on Adobe’s recommendations on how to optimize Lightroom.

As you can see from the table above, Lightroom rendered 1:1 previews 2.58x faster on the new hardware, and exporting is improved by 1.79x. Those are very impressive gains. Navigating between images in Develop mode is noticeably snappier, and now takes just over a second by my count. Spot-healing and brushing performance is also improved and much less prone to lagging.

Additionally, the first step of the importing process is significantly faster on the new 16-inch, but fetching previews still takes a while…so in the end the importing numbers end up being pretty similar between models. It’s my understanding that preview-fetching is more about disk speed than processing power, so the same note about fast storage as above applies here.

Finally, I suspect that storing images and previews on a faster drive would improve all these numbers further. Something like the OWC Thunderblade, perhaps. But all in all, a well-equipped 16″ Macbook Pro makes a significant difference in Lightroom performance and usability right out of the box. I hope you’ve found this information useful.

While carefully deciding on this new laptop and the specifications, I was frustrated by the lack of speed tests and performance examples that addressed my specific workflow needs for video. Clearly the new model is much faster than previous generation Macbooks, standard benchmark tests prove that out. And the always informative folks over at Barefeats have some tests with the entry-level 16″ MBP, if you are considering that configuration.

In my case, I wasn’t able to find anything that told me in concrete terms what difference a well-spec’d 16″ Macbook Pro would make vs the 2017 15″ model I wanted to replace. Ultimately I made some educated guesses while building out a configuration. And after comparison testing, here are some tangible results. I’m hoping this will be helpful to others considering the rather steep cost of a new 16″ MBP, and what build configuration to go with.

There are two specific video editing tasks that are time-consuming for me:
– Exporting 8K Red .R3D clips into ProRes or H.264 formats from Final Cut Pro.
– Exporting 8K Red .R3D clips into ProRes or H.264 formats from Premiere Pro.

I am not a video editor by trade, but I do edit regularly enough that I need a speedy machine both in the office and on the road. I often have to prep and share shots for directors, editors, and colorists, sometimes on a very quick turnaround. Generally speaking, Final Cut Pro runs fine on my trusty 2017 machine for playback and basic editing tasks, even when working with 8K source material. It’s snappy and realtime enough for general editing tasks because FCPx automatically lowers the playback quality of RED footage to maintain playback and skimming speed.

My experience has been that if you are a Mac editor, FCPx is the least painful way to work with 8K source material without creating proxies or doing an offline workflow. And it does this rather well, even on older hardware. But the 4K and 8K slow-down happens when you finally export your project. I was keen to see speed improvements on final export with this new MBP model. I don’t personally use Premiere Pro as much these days, but I’m including the same export tests done in Premiere Pro as a point of comparison.

Specs of the two contenders follow.

Old and Busted:
2017 15″ Macbook Pro
4-core 3.1GHz i7 w/ 16GB DDR3, 500GB SSD
Radeon Pro 560 4GB / Intel HD 630
MacOS 10.13.6 High Sierra

New Hotness:
2019 16″ Macbook Pro
8-core 2.4GHz i9 w/ 64GB DDR4, 1TB SSD
Radeon Pro 5500M 8GB / Intel UHD 630
MacOS 10.15.2 Catalina

If you just want the results, read this: in my video render tests, I have found my particular configuration of the 2019 16″ Macbook Pro to be about 1.5x to 1.7x faster than my 2017 machine, depending on the task. For instance, Final Cut Pro rendered 8K ProRes 422 HQ masters at 1.69x faster, and 1080p H.264’s were quicker by 1.55x. Premiere Pro rendered the same Prores settings at 1.61x speedier, and the H.264’s at 1.77x faster than my older MBP. Here is a detailed table of render timings.

Tech notes: for the above comparisons I used video source files stored on a 2TB Samsung T5 SSD connected via USB-C, as this is a typical workflow setup for me. Media cache & export locations were set to the internal Macbook SSD. Both are very speedy SSDs, but you would likely see performance improvements by using faster media. In my tests, I ensured that all timelines were un-rendered, and sources and outputs were 16:9 aspect ratio. My FCP H.264 exports used the 1080p “Faster Encode” share preset. PPro preferences were set to GPU Metal acceleration, and the H.264 export was a 1080p 1-pass VBR, Hardware Encoding, with all other export options left at defaults, exported directly from Premiere and not sent to Media Encoder. Application versions used were Final Cut Pro version 10.4.8 and Premiere Pro version 14.0.1.

At the risk of turning this into a full-blown Macbook review, here are a few general notes on the new design. The larger screen doesn’t really seem much bigger to me in my use, that point itself is not a compelling reason to upgrade. The new keyboard (which is based on the older design that vanished for a few years) is so much better for the way my fingers work. I’m delighted to have it back. And as we all know, Apple giveth and Apple taketh away, so it’s nice to have that physical escape key also come back in this revision.

The touchbar is essentially the same on this model…that is to say vestigial and generally useless. The new 16-inch model is slightly larger, but not significantly so. It fits in my Thule backpack, and likely will still fit into most standard backpacks designed for 15-inch models. Fit and finish is exactly what I’ve come expect from an Apple notebook…excellent and rock solid. In summary, the 16″ Macbook Pro feels like every other Apple laptop I’ve used and abused and trusted for years, just faster.

The above performance results have all translated into meaningful and significant time savings in my real-world use. If you’re an Apple notebook user who has been making do with an older model while eyeing the latest revision, I think you’ll find that a well-equipped 16″ Macbook Pro is a worthy upgrade and may well be worth the spend. That equation is highly dependent on your situation, of course. In any case, I hope you’ve found this information helpful in making your own decisions. And if you also work with Adobe Lightroom, check out my companion article Lightroom Performance on the 16-inch Macbook Pro.

Now, if you’ve got a studio dolly with an offset and riser (or a really solid short jib), you might be good to go. But if not, here’s a quick and dirty recipe for an overhead filming rig that a reasonably well-equipped grip truck likely has the parts for. And you can hack in replacement components if you’re missing anything.

Note that this setup only works for lockoff shots. It’s a really good fit for simple top-down tabletop work, but would also work for narrative or anything else as long as the frames don’t need to be very wide, and you don’t need to operate the camera. With the right gear on hand, you can build this rig in 15 minutes or less. Here’s a rough list of the parts that you need:

Take a look at these rough overhead sketches. If your table is short, you could certainly span it on the x-axis. But after doing a few of these videos, I find that spanning with 8ft speedrail on the y-axis tends to work better. For one, that allows you to frame up a fairly wide shot, taking full advantage of a 16:9 aspect ratio without showing the legs of the stands. Combo stands allow you to quickly raise and lower the rig to make adjustments or change the framing, and they are rock-solid once locked down. And if you put the combos on wheels, you will find that this simplifies fine tuning the final frame. Here are a few rig pictures with a very simple camera setup, using an FS5 camera tethered to an Odyssey 7Q recorder.

I like to hang the monitor on an arm close to the hand model so that they can see the frame for themselves. Most of the time, you can get away with locked-off focus on these types of shoots, as long as you can get an f/5.6 stop or deeper. The camera shown here is super lightweight, but you can easily support 30-40lbs without any issue on this rig. Just ensure you have a good solid cheeseplate w/ locking ballhead, the type you’ll often find in a basic car rigging kit. You’ll also want to make sure you have a remote trigger for the camera within reach, and some way of playing clips back without having to climb up on a ladder.

One last tip for these type of shoots: have a few white and black v-flats on hand. If you aren’t familiar, these are simple 4×8 foamcore panels taped together on the long edge to create a flexible hinge, so that you can stand them up in a v-shape. It’s a quick and easy way to fly in some bounce or negative as needed. Easy to make, and ridiculously handy on studio shoots! They’re big enough to affect lighting even when you position them away from the table (to allow crew access), and they’re easy to adjust simply by walking the vee around. You can see several of them in the background of these bts photos.

If you film enough of these overhead setups to buy the parts, here are the bits that I would purchase:
2x 8ft Schedule 40 Speedrail Pipe
1x 2ft Schedule 40 Speedrail Pipe
2x Ladder Truss w/ Jr Pin for 1-1/4 pipe
1x Ball Camera Leveling Mount w/ cheese base
2x 90-degree Fixed Grid Clamps
2x Grid Clamp w/ 3/8″ female thread
2x 3/8 bolts from any hardware store
2x combo stands with Jr receiver
6x wheels for the combos

Season and adjust to taste. Hope this helps, happy shooting!

We also discuss some alternative reasons (besides the obvious ones) why you might want to take the time to create a DP reel or Production Company reel, and how to leverage that and your client relationships to get the type of work that you want to do. And we talk about doing work that isn’t exactly what you want to do, and how to handle that on a creatively-satisfying level. Watch below.

In general, I don’t love custom-cut solutions like what Jason Cases offers…they don’t give you flexibility to modify the kit over time. And at $479 for the Misfit case, they are a bit pricey. Bright Tangerine’s Misfit hard case is even more, at $547. I tend to lean towards a Pelican case with Trekpak dividers, as they give you flexibility to re-arrange the kit and add and remove components over time. So I was all set to buy a Pelican 1520 with Trekpak kit (about $223 total), until I came across the $243 Pelican 1526 Combo Case kit. Boom…the heavens opened up and angels sang.

The Pelican 1526 kit is pretty clever, it gives you a 1527 soft bag with shoulder strap that fits perfectly inside a Pelican 1520 case. This system works well for me, as sometimes you want a soft bag that you can sling over your shoulder and move quickly with. It will fit nicely onto an AC’s cart, and it doesn’t require your AC to make a bunch of space in their often-overflowing ditty bag for the mattebox kit. So you get the advantages of a soft bag, with the protection of a hard case when production is moving locations.

The soft bag feels robust and secure, with good zippers and buckles. It has an upper and a lower section with separate zipper openings, and an interior divider between the two that can be removed. There are side entry zippers as well. It comes with a bunch of interior dividers that would work well for lenses, but I removed most of them from the center section, and the Misfit mattebox and french flag fits nicely right in the middle. It would be a little tight if you leave the rod support on your mattebox, but you can adjust that lower compartment divider to make it fit.

The upper right and left sides are big enough to hold filters and accessories…I’m using them for extra filter trays, the BT rod support, and clamp-on rings for various size lens fronts.

In the lower compartment I’ve got all my filters.

Both upper and lower compartments are accessible when the bag is inside the 1520 hard case, so you can use it as a traditional hard case and just remove the soft bag when needed. And if you had only a few filters in your kit, you could probably reconfigure the bag to leave room for a couple prime lenses, and treat it like a very basic AC/ditty bag in a pinch. Interior dimensions are 12.5 x 6.3 x 17.5″ or 31.7 x 16 x 44cm.

So there you have it. A reasonably affordable case solution for the Bright Tangerine Misfit, with the added flexibility of everything in a go-bag. I’m really happy with this solution, maybe it will work for you too. Happy filming!

PVC: What is your background in docs?

Gutierrez: I’ve been editing for the past 12 years. This is my fourth time at Sundance with a film that I’ve edited. So, I’ve been editing documentaries for a while.

PVC: How did you get involved in the RBG project? At what point did they bring you in?

Gutierrez: It was a recommendation from somebody else, I believe from somebody at CNN Films. They were interviewing people, and I showed them some of my work. I was working on a film that also was made out of interviews and archival, and I got the job. I was ecstatic! They had already filmed the bulk of a bunch of interviews, and had gathered a lot of archival material, especially a lot of talks that the Justice had given at various times. Mainly in law schools, academic talks, and key archival; her confirmation hearings for example. But there were still a number of interviews to be done, and they hadn’t done the main interview with her yet.

PVC: What’s your approach when you begin editing a documentary? It’s a mountain of footage I’m sure…how do you start?

Gutierrez: When I interview for jobs, I’m very clear that I’m the type of editor who wants to watch everything. I love to discover the gems in the footage, and, obviously with a lot of interviews I want to look at transcripts and be able to highlight transcripts. But, I love to take the time to see what the potential of the footage is and then come together with the directors to really compare notes. To find out what they’re reacting to so that maybe I can take a look at something in a different way, and also to get a very, very clear understanding of what the vision of their film is. With Betsy and Julie the vision was very clear. Their research was amazing! These are very experienced journalists, they knew the big strokes of the story they really wanted to tell. And then, I come in also with ideas of things that really kind of jumped at me in the footage, and then we start a discussion. I am the type of editor that likes to have something planned. I like to have an idea of where we’re going. Like, this is what I’m seeing in the material, the potential of really strong arcs or the really great moments that we should explore, and let’s have an idea of a structure. It changes quite a bit later on, but I feel like that conversation with the directors allows me to then delve into the actual editing of segments with a true focus of what the story is about, so that we don’t get lost or distracted by tangents. You know, because it is overwhelming. Like, oh, we can do all this stuff! And like, can I edit this film, can it be a film? So, that idea of an outline, it’s very useful for me.

PVC: What was the co-director relationship like? How did that work?

Gutierrez: It was very much a share in terms of the way that I communicated with them. They were great. We had that big conversation at the beginning, then I would take some time doing the first pass of the segments, based on our conversations, and then I showed it to them, and then we just kept going. You know, you’re building a lot at the beginning, so you do get big idea notes at the beginning, and then it starts getting more detail. And hard structural conversations and index cards, but it was all great. I really love working with them, and I learned a lot from them. And I was kind of surprised because I tend to let go of things sometimes a little too fast, like, oh, we can cut down … Like, I always feel like films that are tight, the drama moves.

PVC: You’re quicker to throw something away than to keep it?

Gutierrez: Yeah. To see how that changes the structure, the dramatic arc of the film, and a lot of times I feel like letting go of things that are lovely and that are amazing, but sometimes you let go of them, it makes the film stronger, so I’m willing to go there quickly. With Betsy and Julie, I had to stop that from getting there too fast. For me, it’s normally the directors, sometimes it takes them a little longer to let go. But not with them. They’re very quick to, like, “Oh, we don’t need this. Let’s try it without that,” and sometimes I had to be “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Maybe, let’s just keep that for a little bit longer, and let’s try it in the next pass.” So, I loved that because I’ve never had to do that before and convince people to keep things in these early stages. But, no, these women were fierce with that stuff, and I loved it. Never had to do that before, so that was a treat.

PVC: So, in practical terms, what does your Premiere Pro workflow look like? When you ingest this footage, do you have an assistant, do you have log notes? How did you manage all of the disparate sources that came in?

Gutierrez: We transcoded everything. Which makes the archival much bigger, but it makes it a lot more stable. Adobe Premiere Pro has been really great at it, you can throw everything at it, but again, we’re talking about hours and hours of footage. I usually have an assistant because this was just such a massive project that media management, besides just organizing media management, had to be very careful. But, with all the projects, because I’m working with a lot of really low-budget films, I do tell the directors, it’s better for you to hire somebody because you don’t want to pay a editor’s rate to do media management. And I talked with the assistant editor about the type of material, so if it’s interview and archival, then I just kind of tell them how I’d like it, and then I’ll move things around if it makes more sense as I’m watching the footage. After that, I’d like to really get in touch with the stuff. I do markers a lot on the footage itself within the bins. So, I click on the master clips, and as I’m watching it I put markers, sometimes with notes. If it’s just a marker it’s because there’s something good there so that makes me make sure that I don’t miss it when I’m building that scene. I recently finished watching footage for the new project I’m working on, and on that one I ended up taking notes on a Word document just because there was a lot of vérité, and it just made more sense for me to know what’s in each scene.

PVC: How do you find the heart of a documentary? What is that process for you, in practical terms?

Gutierrez: I think it goes back to this planning thing, but the planning early on has to be informed by you becoming one with the material. For example, the film that I’m working on right now, it’s a film that there’s a lot of on-the-fly interviews, and the on-the-fly interviews are really helpful. It allowed me to understand what they were feeling or what they were thinking, these characters, but then the beauty of the emotions really lights on the vérité, right? So, it’s really easy. I mean, it’s really easy to fall in the trap of doing the easiest thing. Like, you can just say how they feel, right? And it’s more of a challenge and difficult to really start hacking away and hacking away at the vérité, but you know that that emotional truth is also there, right? So, that’s something that I react to when I’m watching the material, so now I watch all the material. The material has interviews, the material has vérité, but I know that the heart of the story, that’s how I felt when I was watching, the heart of the story lies in the vérité. So then that’s what I react to when I plan. Like, we’re going to restrict ourselves, we’re going to be very disciplined, let’s try to tell this story on the vérité. And then if there’s something that we need to say that just can not be told by the vérité, then we’ll start exploring the different elements. So, that particular film is being edited in a very different way where I’m starting just vérité scenes in the middle of the film, like, the third of the film, but also kind of having an idea of what their arc can be. Because then if you’re working on scenes that are on your third act, you’re going to have to set it up and you need to know when you’re going to land. So that outline that you have in your mind gives you a little bit of focus of how to edit those third act scenes. But all really good vérité is in the third act, so let’s start there, right?

With RBG, that was kind of like a puzzle made out of a lot of little pieces. It was kind of like being a thief, stealing from all these different elements to create some kind of intimacy with her. And a lot of the archival is her talking about herself but in public speech settings. Like law students. And they’re asking her about Harvard Law, for instance. So she tells one anecdote. There’s a lot of those. So, we took a little piece from here, we took another piece from there, and then suddenly you have her really talking about Harvard Law School. Early on I spent a lot of hours watching her confirmation hearings, and a lot of it is the senators. They like to hear themselves talk. They’re kind of talking through the TV. They’re talking to their voters. And she’s listening to a lot of it. They ask very specific legal questions, and she’s answering in very specific ways, but there was something about those confirmation hearings that I hadn’t seen in any other material of her that was just jumping out, and the way that she was defending her way of thinking, the way that she was talking about her inspiration for becoming a lawyer…there was just something about those hearings where the rawness of her experience was coming through. Even the stuff that she read of her life that was prepared, but there was something about the energy that just made it really special, and that became a thing that we really used in the film.

In RBG, we have interviews of people talking about her, they’ve got a lot of interviews of people that share her experiences, which is great, people that were there, that worked with her, so that’s amazing work that the directors do, right? It’s my job to get a little bit of personality even though it’s an interview and the person’s talking about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you can inject personality, you can use the personality, the energy of the person to help tell the story of somebody else. Some people are really difficult to edit because they don’t finish a thought or stuff like that…but they’re just so rich in terms of how they’re saying things or the details that they choose to share with you, so I never really just take what’s the actual exposition. It’s about reveal of character. Even if the film is not about them as a character, that’s still really important. Like, how are you mixing the energy of the interviews with the archival that you’re choosing? How are you building a scene with archival to really paint an emotional picture of something, to take the viewer emotionally there? And it takes a few passes to get there. Because if you have a film that is just exposition, you can read that film on an article. That’s what makes film special. And it’s all about a feeling that you get, right? The interviews read very differently on paper than they do on screen. A lot of times, the notes from the field or the reactions that the directors had on the interviews, they’re very surprised as to how the interviews come across once we edit them. Interviews that that they are really excited about, sometimes they don’t come across as exciting with the cuts.

PVC: My friend Peter Nicoll worked on the film, but I understand that RBG was primarily created with a team of female creatives?

Gutierrez: Pretty much. There was the cinematographer, myself the editor, two female directors, our associate producer, our archival researcher, our associate editor, and then also the CNN Films team, the two other producers on the film are also female. We also had a few other DPs coming in to help out, and some of those people were male. But the core team was all female, which was pretty cool.

PVC: I understand that the Justice will be here at the Sundance premiere?

Gutierrez: Yes, and there’s going to be a luncheon with her that the Sundance Institute. So, I’ll be there, and that’s where I’ll meet her. And I’ll look at her really weirdly…like, “I know how you talk and your pauses.” And she’ll think I’m a stalker, and the marshals will be like, “Hey.”

PVC: Is there a lesson that you learned from this project that will change the way you approach future projects?

Gutierrez: Lots of lessons. I think the biggest lesson I learned over and over again is to try to be open to how all the people are reacting to the material. Because there’s definitely something that attracts me, special moments that attract me, and I just really have to remind myself always to be listening to the directors and how they are reacting to the material. So, I think that that’s something that we just have to re-learn over, and over, and over again. I love watching other editors work, and I can tell sometimes, oh, “this was done by this person,” and you can tell a style…so we definitely tend to react to things in one way.

PVC: If you had any advice for a new editor, what would you tell them?

Gutierrez: To ask a lot from other editors. I had a great mentor at the very beginning of my career, and I’ve been lucky enough to meet people with a lot more experience than me throughout the years. So I study their work, and there’s a really strong community that we have. I find documentary editors are incredibly generous. I would say to be curious and to want to be there. Because the hard part is thinking about long-format structure, the big picture of storytelling, and that’s not something that you can learn by media management or cutting something to music in a cool way. So, to just ask to be present, ask other editors to allow them to be around when those conversations are happening. The worst thing that you will get is a no. But I know a lot of experienced documentary editors like to get those questions, and for them it’s also important to mentor the next generation. And I’ve mentioned this before, but the Sundance Institute is incredibly supportive of the art of editing and the craft for documentaries, and they’re really supportive of mentorship of young voices. It’s applying for jobs and then being very respectful of who they’re working with. But also asking, tell them that you want to learn, and tell them “I’ll just be quiet, taking notes on the side, but I want to be around. Please include me if you can.”

On RBG we had this very technically savvy assistant editor that made everything run really smoothly, and then because it was a massive project, and we were going against deadlines, she came onboard full time, and I just gave her scenes to do. And we would discuss what was the point of the scene before she started, then she would do a pass at it, and then we would watch it together, and then I would give her notes, and then she would do another pass at it. And there’s a couple of short scenes that she has in the film, and she’s an associate editor. But also, there’s a great organization in New York called the Karen Schmeer Editing Fellowship that supports young emerging editors. They have a fellowship that grants one person and does mentorship for them, but they also have Editor’s Center events where they invite editors to talk about their craft, and show their work. And young editors, they need to look for that stuff because hearing how other editors do problem solving, or the way that they approach thinking about archival, or thinking about vérité…for me it feeds me and shakes me up a little bit, and then maybe I will approach a scene in a different way. Young editors can definitely learn from that. And the Sundance Institute has a partnership with them now. There’s support out there, and then there’s some drinking things happening in the city. Editors come together.

RBG is now in theaters, you can find a screening near you here.

PVC: I haven’t yet had a chance to see this film, so give me the elevator pitch.

Vashi: Sure. 6 Below is the story of a professional hockey player who is also a snowboarder. He goes up to Mammoth Mountain, gets lost during a huge snow storm, and for seven or eight days he survives without food or water. He’s also suffering from drug addiction, so he literally has a bag of crystal meth and nothing else. And ultimately he survives the ordeal but has to face his demons along the way, and comes out a different person for many different reasons. It’s based on the true story of Eric Lemarque, who went through this experience about 15 years ago, and is now a motivational speaker.

PVC: How did you get involved in the project?

Vashi: Scotty Waugh, who directed Need for Speed, Act of Valor, and Dust to Glory brought me on. After Dust to Glory, Scotty hired me as an editor at his production company Bandito Brothers. When this project came around, he approached me and gave me the pitch for the film. I said “You know that I know Eric Lemarque? I’ve played hockey with Eric Lemarque.” I played professional hockey for 10 years myself before I retired, and I would train with Eric in the summers in LA. Scotty had played hockey with Eric as well in their own circle, but the whole thing emerged with him not knowing that I knew Eric.

PVC: Did that create some tension for you, being so close to the character?

It did pose a really interesting challenge. I’m gonna tell the story, I’m going to edit it, but it’s also I know the lead character, and it’s a true story. It’s not a based on true story. Everything that happens in the film, actually happened. So there is distinction between “based on” where you have leeway to do anything you want vs “this is what really happened.” I had a commitment to Eric as a friend, but as a filmmaker how am I gonna portray him? How far am I allowed to go? Do I not go too far? Is he gonna be pissed at me? Is Scotty gonna be pissed at me cause I didn’t do it justice? So I had to balance not only the technical, which we’ll get into, but the emotional content of the story.

PVC: So talk to me about the technical challenges you faced.

Vashi: The second major challenge we faced was that we were gonna shoot this at 6K, and edit and do all of post production natively with the 6K R3D files. No transcoding, no proxies, no nothing. Like we’re onlining from day one basically.

PVC: What drove the decision for a 6K native edit?

Vashi: The decision to use the 6K native files was two-fold. One, Scotty is always pushing the boundaries as a director and as a filmmaker. Secondly, one of the delivery formats for this film was Barco Escape, a three-screen immersive wrap-around cinematic experience. Star Trek Beyond did it, that film had like 20 minutes of certain key scenes where the other two screens would light up with complementary content that is telling the story. Maze Runner did the same thing.

So Barco Escape is three 2K screens. Their requirement was you have to capture in 6K to cover that, and Dragon was the only camera at the time that could do that. We tested with all these lenses, and we got some amazing 65mm film glass from Panavision that had been used on Guardians of the Galaxy and like one other film. Those lenses were good in resolution capture capabilities and the inherent quality was insane. So it was because of the Barco Escape requirements, and because Scotty likes pushing boundaries, and because the other main delivery format was one screen at a 2.76:1 aspect ratio. So we shot at 6K, edited it in a 4K sequence, but still with the 6K Red files in the timeline. And so, those are the challenges we faced going in. We didn’t know if it’s gonna work, honestly, because no one’s ever done this.

PVC: Is this the first time?

Vashi: This is the first 6K natively edited feature in the history of Hollywood or anywhere else. No one’s ever done that. They’ve done short form or a short film, but we shot almost 100 hours of footage and all that content had to live in one project, with three edit stations hitting that all day long through our RAID. You could get into trouble.

PVC: Were you editing as they shot the film?

Vashi: Yeah, we were based out of Park City where we are sitting right now, my edit bay was at the bottom of the hill. They were shooting half an hour from here, up in the mountains. So to be back two years later in the place that we shot it, and tonight we’re about to get two feet of snow. Our first day on the shot was March 14th 2016. On March 13th all the mountains were brown, they were just rocks, there was no snow. It was like the least snowy winter ever. On March 14th, day one of shooting it dumped like three feet on us. And there’s no way to work around that. Had it not snowed, we would have had to paint in snow, and it would have been a VFX nightmare. We got the real stuff and in our entire film, I think there’s maybe three shots where we added VFX snow. Everything else is real.

PVC: Talk me through the tools and process.

Vashi: We used Adobe Premiere Pro, it was the only software that could do the two deliverables. Avid could not cut at that high resolution, that was a no-go, and we didn’t have time to offline it. That was the other thing, I’m editing and I would get five to six hours of dailies at night time when they would come down from the mountain. It took an hour and half to get up there to location. Everyday, up and down for the cast and crew. The only people that didn’t do that were Scotty, Josh Hartnett, and the DP Michael Svitak who stayed in a cabin up there the whole time. They stayed on the mountain because they could gain three hours every day, for rehearsal and to review footage. So they got that extra time, but there’s no cell coverage up there, so I would look at the footage at night. I’d dump it right into Premiere Pro, look at it, give my notes, like “everything’s great, I’d love it if you can get me this shot maybe.” And they’d have those notes early the next morning when their drives came back up the mountain.

PVC: It’s like old-fashioned sneakernet.

Vashi: Old school, offline, handwritten, but we didn’t have a choice with our budget and our time, shooting schedule, and the kicker was that there’s no way I could have transcoded that stuff at night to look at it, and then make those notes and dump the drives and give it back to the DIT on the way up. We would have been a day behind. So for us, that was not gonna be an option. We decided to just try and do 6K from scratch.

PVC: You must need a lot of horsepower to pump through native 6K material, so what hardware did you use?

Vashi: We tested all the software and hardware out there and found the only one that worked on getting realtime play back. It was Premiere Pro running on a Dell 7910 workstation with some nVidia P6000 parts. So it’s a hefty system, and it’s rather expensive. But what we learned is it’s best to front-load if you can, front-load with your money, your hardware, your software, because downstream you’re gonna save time and money. For instance, by onlining, there’s never a conform, there’s never a matching of the VFX. And each one of those steps could allow for a mistake, an error, if something slips through the cracks. So we’re basically onlining the whole time and so everyone can share that project. Back in LA, they had a master copy of all our R3D files. We had people working the FX there, we’re like “go ahead, let’s just do it right on the 6K.” So we did all of the effects at 6K as well, which is unheard of. Studios do it at 2K. Deadpool, which I worked on, used 2K effects for the 4K DCP…they bump it up to 4K. But we did all our effects at 6K.

PVC: So it’s one of those hidden investment things. If you put a little bit more money on the front end, you might save some on the back end.

Vashi: It’ll pay off big time, because if you get the cheapest computer that you can or something that does moderate, automatically you’re offline, you’re automatically redoing VFX somewhere else. That’s money and time that you’re paying somewhere in another system. Make your A-system your all-system, make it do everything. So we had three Dell edit bays setup with Premiere Pro and After Effects. We used dynamic link for our 205 VFX shots, so we can update and do all that stuff in-house using the same system. It’s all under one roof. You can rock room to room, checking audio, vfx, and new edits. Scotty can get instant feedback from everyone as opposed to sending a shot away and waiting for days and see if it works. So many times that one vfx shot might be good, but it’s maybe 1% off. So you have to send it out again for a fix. I think moving forward, using Premiere Pro as hub and using all the other Adobe components, you can instantaneously say like “all right, well just make it a little brighter.” Perfect, great, sign off.

PVC: Would you say that editing online frees you up to work more creatively?

Vashi: Absolutely, because once something is working, you can tweak with it and when you know that you’re not gonna have to do those extra steps of bringing it back online or going to the masters or conforming. We edited here for six weeks, and when we left I had almost 60 minutes cut, all in one timeline. I was pushing Premiere Pro all the way, to see how much 6K footage can I put in one timeline without a crash, hangup or whatever. Thinking that at some point it’s gonna break. Scotty’s like “did it break yet?” I’m like “it hasn’t broken yet, it hasn’t broken yet.” The first cut of the film that we all watched, our inner group of the DP, Scotty, myself, and our VFX editor, it was 2 hours and 49 minutes long, and we put it on one timeline. All 6K R3Ds, hit play, watched the whole thing all the way through. Halfway through the sync started sliding on the audio, so you had spacebar to stop, spacebar to start, and then it was fine. So we watched almost three hours of one native 6K timeline.

PVC: Have you had a chance to screen it on those Barco Escape systems?

Vashi: We’ve screened on a Barco system, yeah. The first time we did that, we played it out of Premiere Pro onto the three screens in Culver City. I’ve also seen it in Palm Springs at the Barco theater there. Looks fantastic, and it really helps when you’re watching it and it’s all three screens at all times. On the other four or five films that this projection experience has been used, the side screens go away and your focus is on the middle screen. And then they pop up again and you’re like “oh that’s right, there’s two other screens.” So even if it’s compelling or visually awesome, having it all complete in one film, always there, you really do feel like you’re in the middle of it.

PVC: Sound design has to play a big part of that immersive experience as well, right?

Vashi: The sonic worldscape that we designed into our edit was so important. Our music editorial and sound design team has like 20 Oscar nominations, they were amazing. And for a film that has someone stranded, there’s not that much dialog besides some of the flashbacks and stuff, you needed an encompassing audio experience. The design team came up with things like the sound of the far away explosions when they trigger avalanches, that thumpy low throbbing, and things like the sound of snow falling off Evergreens. There’s a lot of sounds in nature that you don’t think of, but when you do hear it it sounds real. I did have a secret weapon though, I had Arctic Wind Number Nine, which was a stock audio file that at one point I had in every scene. It was really good wind, and even in the tense stuff we have to have it there. Without that it’s a guy walking in the snow.

PVC: Do you often present edits with temp audio like that to help people get the feel?

Vashi: I think it’s every editor’s duty to present to the director, to the producer, to anyone that’s gonna watch it, the most complete version you can at that point given the constraints of time. I hate showing something that’s not ready, because I know they’re gonna pick apart the stuff that you already know. Of course I can cut something without audio and VFX, I know if it’s working or not. As an editor you can see the piece, and you feel it, you’re filling in all that stuff as you’re editing. But other people don’t and that’s not their fault. You can’t blame them for that. My job is make them so comfortable, they’re like “yeah that’s great, it’s working great.” But it can go the other way where you just put music everywhere, and you’re like “oh this is amazing, look at all this music,” and that’s fooling yourself. I never cut with music, because you can fool yourself, which is an even bigger problem. Once I have the cut working, then I’ll drop it in.

PVC: This has been a really fun chat, thanks for the making the time!

“6 Below: Miracle on the Mountain” had a theatrical release in the fall of 2017, and is now available to rent. You can catch up with Vashi at vashivisuals.com

Firstly, I found the 858D a lot simpler to pick up and learn. The 758Cine was an excellent meter, but I personally never really found it to be very intuitive. Anyone who has used the 758 will recall the multi-button dance it takes to modify settings…there was a fairly steep learning curve. Not so with this new model…the touchscreen interface and menus make it quick to discover the features you need.

You get all the standard stuff you got in the 758Cine…a retractable incident metering lumisphere which can be rotated 270-degrees, a 1-degree spot meter for reflected metering, and a 1/4-20 mount point on the base. The screen is bright and readable in full sun, and you have options for setting screen brightness in the custom settings menu. While metering, the screen automatically dims to avoid impacting your readings with screen brightness. Sekonic says this meter is three-stops more sensitive than prior models, offering sensitivity as low as 0.1 lux for those of you who may be shooting by candlelight on Kubrick’s old lenses.

The first question I get when people see the new 858D is “does the touchscreen work with gloves?” Happily, it does. The touch interface is not capacative-touch like a smartphone, the screen requires actual physical pressure. It’s not quite as accurate as a smartphone touchscreen, but the interface icons and dialogs are sized well to accommodate this, and I find it very simple and reliable to use. The touchscreen can be locked by holding down the physical menu button for a few seconds. This allows you to meter without worry that your settings will be bumped.

High-framerate shooters will be happy to know that framerates from 1-1000 are easily selectable on the touchscreen, and you can quickly jump into the Menu to add presets for any framerates beyond 1000fps. Shutter angles can be adjusted from 1 to 358 right on the main screen, and a 360-degree shutter angle can be added as a preset in the Menu. You can make up to 20 shutter angle presets, including decimal options like 172.8. These presets are then accessible from the main screen, so it’s fast to pop between your regularly-used settings. The ISO range on the meter can go as high as 13-million-and-something, so you’re future-proofed there. It also gives you that funky Canon 850 ISO as an option in between 800 and 1000.

By far my favorite feature on this new meter is the filter packs. You can define an exposure compensation offset manually, or build packs of filters which are summed together and applied as a single exposure compensation. For example, let’s say you’ve got 2 stops of ND in the mattebox in the form of a .6 filter, and there’s a polarizer in there as well. I know that this particular polarizer loses about 1 1/3 stops of light, so I’ve entered that as a custom filter with a -1.3 exposure correction, and added it to the filter pack.

Now when I select that filter pack, the meter displays a -3.3 indicator on the top right of the main screen. Any measurements I take with the meter automatically calculate that -3.3 stop light loss for me, and simply display the correct stop on the lens. The math of everything that is cutting light in the mattebox gets out of the way, and I can just work with stop readings that match my lens.

Another handy feature is AVE/EV…I find this very useful for maintaining consistent lighting ratios. So for instance, take a measurement on your key light. Then tap the AVE/EV icon, and take another reading on the fill side of the subject, holding the measurement button down. While holding the measurement button down, the meter will indicate the stop difference between your first measurement and your second measurement. Let’s say I want a 4:1 ratio to establish some contrast. I know that a 4:1 ratio is a two-stop difference between key and fill, so this feature does the math for me, reading out the stop difference very clearly. Simply toggle off AVE/EV to go back to standard metering.

One feature that I am looking forward to diving into is custom camera profiles. You can edit, save, and recall camera exposure profiles, which are midpoints and under/overexposure ranges tuned to specific cameras (it requires shooting a special chart and loading the data in through Sekonic’s software). And of course you have the ability to name the profile (unlike the 758’s arcane 1, 2, 3 options), so you can easily recall that odd camera you prepped on that project last year. I hope to explore that feature in a future writeup.

Finally, Sekonic wisely built the 858D to run on standard AA batteries. No more carrying around that weird special-order battery! That’s one less thing for me to worry about.

There are tons of other features in the meter which I have yet to explore, including some special sauce for flash photography users. Firmware upgrades and custom camera profiles can loaded via the USB port, and the meter is nicely weatherproofed with rubber boots to be splash-resistant. All in all, I am very pleased with this update and look forward to using the 858D for years to come.

The L-858D is available at your favorite gear shop, and retails for around $600.

PVC: So I’m trying to wrap my head around the pitch for this film. It’s layers on layers on layers. Help me out.

Lawrence: Clara’s Ghost is a mix of comedy, family drama and spooky horror film. It’s set in Old Lime, Connecticut, and it’s based around this acting family called the Reynolds family, which is played by the Elliott family. If you’re familiar, the Elliott family are Chris Elliot, who goes way back in people’s minds and you’ve seen him in Groundhog Day, There’s Something About Mary, Letterman, Saturday Night Live, and then his two daughters; Abby Elliott, who was also on Saturday Night Live, and Bridey Elliott, who is the writer/director of this film. The star of the movie is Chris’s wife, Bridey’s mother, Paula Niedert Elliott, and this is her first acting experience. The film is loosely inspired by their real life. Bridey has written this story where the Reynolds are caricatures of the Elliott family, cut down to their core and then emphasized.

So, Clara, who’s the main character, she’s kind of the fifth wheel in the family. She’s not an actor, is constantly separate from their lives because Ted is a famous actor, he’s been around for a while, he’s well known. The two daughters, Julie and Riley, were child stars in the vein of the Olsen twins, and they’re called the Sweet Sisters. So, all of them have their own success in their own right, but Clara’s just kind of been along for all of that. The setting of the movie takes place on their dog’s birthday, which the family is all getting together to celebrate.

PVC: That’s a lot to unpack…

Lawrence: Yeah, and so in the midst of it, it turns into this big drunken mess in the vein of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and Clara opens herself up to being possessed by the ghost of the house. And all of this, not only the Elliott family, but also the ghost, the house, are based on real things in Bridey’s life. They say “write what you know,” and she’s definitely written this story based around real life experiences. So, we shot the film in the Elliott home, in Old Lime, Connecticut, and that house was built by an old sea captain. He built it for his daughter, and she eventually went crazy and the town had her committed, and the house was basically in limbo for years. At one point it was a museum. It was the Old Lime Nut Museum, where a lady basically opened up her doors to people coming in and seeing different types of nuts from around the world.

PVC: I have to ask, do we know if there are any other nut museums in the world?

Lawrence: I don’t know, but this is so farfetched, we had to look it up on YouTube, and sure enough, we found a video of the house and this old lady singing a song about her nut museum.

PVC: That sounds like a parody.

Lawrence: Yeah, so the house just basically went through owners before it ended up in the Elliott hands, but as I was editing the film, I had my own room in the house, and I constantly felt like somebody was standing behind me. I would turn around and nobody was there, so I had to ask Bridey. I her if there was something here, and she’s like “oh yeah, oh yeah, for sure.” I felt that. It’s not benevolent in any sort of way, but it’s here.

PVC: I presume what you felt was the ghost of the daughter of the sea captain?

Lawrence: Yeah, possibly. In the film, her name is Adelia, but she is based off of a real thing. She’s based off of a real sea captain’s daughter who went crazy and walked naked through the town, and the town had her committed, and the sea captain was so distraught about it, he ended up killing himself.

PVC: Wild. Ok, so when did you get involved in the project?

Lawrence: I first worked with Bridey two years on her short film “Affections.” That was was her directorial debut, and it ended up going to the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. So, we had already established a working relationship together. I was real early in the talks, and I remember hearing whispers of Bridey writing this movie where like her family is all in it and the mom gets haunted by a ghost…and I was like “well that sounds weird but okay,” and so we started talking seriously about doing this around December 2015. Bridey was putting together a Kickstarter campaign, and I helped put together the pitch video. The pitch was brilliantly shaped in this way where it was like Bridey with a handheld DV camera filming her family sitting on the couch like “hey guys, I’m making a movie, do you want to be in it?” kind of thing, and Chris looks so annoyed. He’s like “oh yeah, whatever, I’m not giving money, I don’t have money to give to your campaign.” In this way, it was like a microcosm of what the film was going to be. We made the film with a big production crew, but it was essentially Bridey making a movie about her family. And Chris I’ve known since I was a kid. I watched him when he was on Get a Life, and Groundhog Day, obviously. Abby I was a little familiar with from Saturday Night Live, and Paula hasn’t really acted before, but she had some stints on Letterman.

That video that we did, the Kickstarter video, really helped me understand who the Elliotts were. So when I finally got the script for Clara’s Ghost and read it, I read all of the characters of the Reynolds in their voices. It really sold the film to me, because it was like the characters were leaping off the page. From then on, I’ve been involved loosely for about two years.

Patrick Lawrence at the Adobe House, Sundance 2018

PVC: Were you editing onsite throughout production?

Lawrence: Yeah. Originally, the film was going to be shot last Spring, but because of funding, they shifted it to September. The weather had to be a certain way in Connecticut. We knew that we wanted to submit to Sundance, so it was going to be a real quick turnaround. Luckily for me, when I read the script, it’s very conversational, very dialogue-heavy, and that’s easy. There’s no super special effects or action scenes. I knew that I could keep a certain pace, and as an editor, this is my ninth feature film that I’ve done. Probably on four of them, I’ve edited on set.

PVC: Do you find that editing on set helps in certain ways, like knowing to ask for things that you couldn’t have got, or having immediate feedback for the director? What’s the advantage for you being there?

Lawrence: Yeah, absolutely. I become more a part of the production itself. I know there are a lot of editors that they have, on bigger budget stuff, they might work remotely from California, or wherever, and they can basically look at dailies and say hey, we don’t have this angle or whatever. I’m able to do that on set. The blessing on Clara’s Ghost is that we shot at the Elliott home for two and a half weeks, so if something was missed or we didn’t have an angle that we needed, I could basically go to the AD, I could go to Bridey and I could say “I think we need a shot of Joe walking up the steps, because we don’t have it. And everybody I worked with on this movie, we had a great working relationship. Markus Mentzer, who was the DP on Clara’s Ghost, we basically got together every night, we looked through shot lists, we looked at the scripts, and I would look at his shot list and suggest shots we might need.

PVC: You’re pre-editing.

Lawrence: Yeah, exactly. We would talk about where things might have been missed or overlooked, and why they’re important to the story. That really helped, because we would go into the next day with a list to give to the AD of shots we needed. Because when you’re shooting like 15 days, a lot gets missed. Especially on low budget Indie projects, and it’s moving fast. I’ve done a couple of other films where sometimes I don’t see footage in time. If I get footage at the end of the day, then I don’t view those dailies until the next day, and we’re already on to another location. And I’m doing a lot. I’m doing DIT, assistant editing, and editing at the same time. Now, if the budget was different, I would be able to have different people doing different things.

PVC: What does that workflow look like?

Lawrence: I get the footage and I ingest it using Shotput Pro. Once it’s ingested, I transcode it using Davinci Resolve so I can begin editing. I just did ProRes LT, I think, on this film.

PVC: Are you doing a one-light, or are you just transcoding it?

Lawrence: On this film, a lot of the color was tweaked in camera. But occasionally when I’m doing that process on other projects, I will talk with the DP and try to get a basic LUT to apply. Because a lot of times, when you’re dealing with producers and clients, they want to see the footage closer to what it will be after the color grade.

PVC: What did they shoot this film on, and how did the footage come to you?

Lawrence: These were shot on Red Epic Dragons.

PVC: Okay, so you take the R3Ds, you ingest them into your computer, you push them through Resolve, and output ProRes LT files for an offline edit workflow.

Lawrence: Yeah. The film was shot in 6K, so that was heavy on the system. So I transcoded it down to 1080p for the edit. But having 6K was great, because we were able to punch in. There’s a scene in the movie where Clara’s going through this town scrapbook of all the history they’ve kept on the house, and so those shots, you’re looking at it, and you can only get so much detail from it. I was able to really push in on some of the words so you see “woman walks naked through town,” and stuff like that, so that was really nice having it in 6K. Also, I should mention that the film is in 4:3.

PVC: What drove the decision to go with that particular aspect ratio?

Lawrence: That has to do with Bridey’s aesthetic. She’s a huge fan of 70s films. She wanted to have this kind of vintage aesthetic to it. The movie has heavy grain, which, I think it was 2000 ISO.

PVC: They shot a Dragon at 2000 ISO on purpose?

Lawrence: Yeah, it had some grain from the camera. I think there was a little more grain added in the coloring process, but I personally didn’t handle that. From day one when brought the footage in, it looked vintage. It looked like it was almost on film. But I definitely wanted it shot 16:9 for 4:3 because I didn’t want to be held down to anything in terms of shifting frames or punching in. So there is a version of the movie that is mostly 16:9. I had a 4:3 matte that I threw over it, so I could constantly shift and blow things up.

The 4:3 thing all has to do with Bridey’s aesthetic. She’s a big fan of older cinema, she’s definitely a cinefile. When you go to see the film, you don’t expect it to just be this kind of normal, everyday narrative, and I think that’s why we’re part of the Sundance Next program here because it’s just so different. It’s not what you’d expect. And Bridey makes a big point of faces in the film. She loves seeing faces framed up in that way, so having 4:3 gives you real tight frame.

PVC: What is your workflow in Premiere Pro like when you start a film like this?

Lawrence: So I get two footage dumps per day; lunch and at the end of the day. And whatever I get at the end of the day usually starts at the beginning of the next day. I just tackle those dumps one at a time. Hopefully everything is synced, the time code is synced, that makes my transcoding process a little easier. Once it’s synced and transcoded, then I bring it into Premiere Pro. I string everything out in a scene, and then I make markers so I know where each different angle is. I can go through and I can see the top of each angle, and I become kind of familiar with what I’m working with, and then I can visualize the scene in my mind.

Usually, I start with just an establishing wide to see how it plays out. Then, I just start building on top of there, so I know I need to be tight here, I need to be over the shoulder here, this is an insert in the shot. I use the script as a blueprint, but whatever curve ball happened on set, I have to look at that and realize, okay, this is not … throw this out the window. As long as the dialogue is the same, I know I’m working with that. I tackle each scene at a time, and so I really rough cut everything and I try to get it to where this is good, I’m happy with it. If I revisit this in two weeks, it’s still going to be okay.

PVC: So, you’re actually trimming, you’re actually tightening things up.

Lawrence: I’m making audio adjustments, everything. Because especially in an accelerated workflow like this, I need to know that I can go back on a scene and feel good about it.

PVC: So as you edit, each scene is a separate timeline? Do you then nest the scenes, or are you copying and pasting into a master timeline ?

Lawrence: On a feature, I group the scenes together by like 1-10, 11-20, and I just start kind of filling in these bins that I know that when I put together an assembly cut, I can just start copying those files, burning them into one big master timeline.

PVC: So you don’t actually drag that scene sequence into another sequence. You go into that sequence, copy the stuff that you want, and drop it into a master sequence?

Lawrence: Exactly. Yeah, and so I just string it all out, and if my scenes are in a rough cut form the way I like them, then I know that this isn’t going to be far off. I can essentially show this to a director and say “hey, just so you know, this scene is a little rough, but the rest of this is really good.” With Clara’s Ghost, being on set, it was nice because Bridey could come in and see what I was working with, so she was confident that we were getting the right stuff. We have some very complex scenes in this movie. There’s a very frenetic scene where the family’s doing an ice-dunking challenge where they’re putting their face in the ice bowl, and it’s just a drunken mess. But the way that was shot was handheld, and really just no lines of establishment. It was just the cameras all over the room, so it just feels like craziness. It feels like a drunken mess.

And then we have a few kind of musical moments where the family’s getting drunk and sloppy and singing this song and dancing in their ballroom, and those are scenes where we had to know they were working. We have another scene where Clara is dancing by herself to the song Georgie Girl, and it’s supposed to be in her head, but the song’s playing, so for a few minutes, the audience thinks we’re just sitting here listening to the song, but then it cuts out and she’s sitting there dancing and singing it to herself because it’s all in her head. I cut that like a music video. So when you’re dealing with wondering if this is going to sell that it’s playing in her head, and I’m able to sit there and cut that scene together and then show it to them the next day and say “yeah, we got it. This isn’t a problem.”

PVC: After you get your cut, what was the online process like, and who did the grade and finishing?

Lawrence: The color grade was Kyle Kropinski, who is a good friend of mine. He is also a DP and he has shot two of my three short films and almost all of the music videos that I’ve directed. We have a great working relationship, and he also colored Affections, which was Bridey’s short film. He was definitely part of the process early on, and he and I have a smooth workflow that we’ve developed. We have an Avid workflow, and we have a Premiere Pro workflow, so turning things over to him is very easy. I just basically kick out an XML. I don’t do any onlining myself. I just have my reels, and I kick out an XML and he brings it into Davinci Resolve. I also send him a reference with time code, and then he onlines everything himself, and we sit there and we double check every shot. It’s a very simple process, and we’ve done it so many times that it’s painless.

It’s always a pleasure to work with somebody like Kyle, where it’s just so easy to send something out and not worry. Because I’m a narrative mind, I’m a storytelling editor, you know? I don’t have the technical brain for it, which is why I don’t work a lot as an assistant editor. And when the budget doesn’t allow for an assistant editor, I have to know how to do some of these things myself. So it’s very easy for me to just kick out these exports, which Premiere Pro allows you to do pretty seamlessly. The colorist can just bring it in, and everything comes online. It’s amazing.

You can find more information about Clara’s Ghost at www.smudge-films.com/claras-ghost/

PVC: So how did you both get involved in this film?

Merrick: Our film tells the story of a father (played by John Cho) who when his daughter goes missing decides to look in the place nobody else has looked, on her computer screen. The entire film unfolds on his computer screen and other screens. I got on the film because I met the director Aneesh through USC. He had just left his job on the creative film team at Google, and he rang me up with a movie possibility.

Johnson: I went to USC with Aneesh, I knew him from classes, and we were friends. Then he went off to New York to work at Google, and I hadn’t seen him in years. Then I got a call from him asking me to edit “Search,” and asking me to meet up with Will. Will and I met up because we didn’t know each other previously. Then we decided it would work, we could work together.

Merrick: Aneesh was hired at Google after directing a spec spot for Google Glass, and they brought him on to the creative film team. I had edited the spot that got him that job.

Johnson: I think there’s something where you want to find people that are ambitious and are going to put everything they have into a project. I think Aneesh felt comfortable that we’re creative people, Will and I, and we are also hard workers. I think there was this understanding that we were going to go 100 percent the whole time.

Will, Nick, and Aneesh in the edit bay

PVC: How do co-editors work on a project like this, how does that collaboration work?

Johnson: It’s perfect for this project. There was actually very little discussion about our dynamic. It just kind of organically happened. Because this is such an unusual film, it’s essentially an animated film. The script was incredible, but it was kind of unusual because of it being told entirely on screens. You couldn’t quite break it down into scenes like you traditionally would, so what we did was we just drew lines in the script and broke it into 26 sections. We lettered the sections alphabetically, and Will took section A, I took section B, and then we just moved that way through the movie. Then when we went into start doing the second passes, we just swapped so that we were constantly refining each other’s work.

Merrick: This happened enough times that we really can’t even remember who started what anymore. We both worked on every sequence.

Johnson: Yeah. It got to the point where it’s like, “L has a bunch of notes but Q really needs some work.” Like, “I have Q open, I’m going to take Q, you take L.”

PVC: Were you guys editing side-by-side or the same location?

Merrick: We were working pretty much in the same room.

Johnson: There was a door you could close, so it was actually perfect. What would happen is Sev, Aneesh and Natalie would come in, and they might be doing notes with Will, and meanwhile I would be implementing some notes in the other room. Then they’d come over work with me.

Search filmmakers at an ASC event at Sundance 2018. Left to right: Associate Producer Congyu E, Cinematographer Juan Sebastian Baron, Editor Will Merrick, Editor Nick Johnson, and a friend.

PVC: So the film takes place entirely on computer screens. Can you explain that?

Merrick: Telling a movie through a computer screen is not an entirely new idea. There have been movies like “Unfriended” by Bazelevs, the same company that did ours. Those films tend to be told in real time and in wides of the screen, kind of “Paranormal Activity” style. What we wanted to do with our film was in the same way that early movies were wide shots like theatrical vaudeville acts. We wanted to go in and sort of discover what coverage is in the computer world. We will, for instance, have a FaceTime call where we’ll cut to one person…say John Cho is talking to his daughter, then we cut down to her sort of like a reverse.

Merrick: At first, we didn’t think it would work. We thought it would be against the rules, but we found out we could make a shot reverse work by punching into the small screen where you see yourself and then punching back out to the wide.

Johnson: It was a lot like DP’ing, and we actually have a “directors of screen photography” credit on the movie.

PVC: Is that a thing?

Johnson: It is now. It really was like shooting a movie. It’s challenging because unlike a three dimensional world where you can kind of get off-axis and do your coverage that way, we were all on a two dimensional plane. So the tricky part was the shot sizes had to be significantly different when you were cutting, which gets really hard when you’ve got camera movements happening, and you might find yourself in a little middle area.

Merrick: One of the most mind blowing things we discovered was that in some cases we could cut from one punched-in area of the computer screen to another punched-in shot, without going back out to a wide. You don’t think it will work, but you just try it and you discover you have almost as much film language in there as you do in real life.

Johnson: “Unfriended” is really effective, it’s wide real-time, but we wanted to punch in. We had seen this in a “Modern Family” episode, and in “Noah,” it’s a great short film. “Nerve” did this, but all of those movies wouldn’t cut.

Merrick: They do a fast zoom. “Voosh, voosh, voosh.”

PVC: They were doing that to try to retain the geometry of the scene for the audience?

Johnson: Exactly.

Merrick: Our first cut was like that. It was actually Sev who came in and watched our first cut and told us, “Guys, what are you doing? Just cut.” We were like, “Whoa,” when we started trying it, and it worked.

PVC: So as a DP, one of the tools I can use for covering a conversation is the OTS. It’s a simple way of establishing the geometry of each person in the scene in relation to each other. But you don’t have an OTS on a flat 2D screen.

Merrick: Even when we’re almost showing a video full bleed, we usually show the edges of the video. We’ll frame with edges of browsers or videos.

Johnson: We felt like full bleed was kind of visually uninteresting, and just didn’t keep you grounded in what you’re looking at. In FaceTime calls, it’s nice because you have the little face in the bottom, so when you’re cutting to the one shot, you’ve got both people.

Merrick: It’s like a wide. That wasn’t fun to edit.

Johnson: Those are extremely difficult because unlike a shot reverse, you always have both shots playing at the same time. They have to be timed up exactly right.

PVC: Were those conversations shot in real-time on both subjects? Or were they shot separately?

Johnson: They did in most cases. I think it was helpful for the actors and for pacing, but what we found was even in those situations, the pacing was off a little bit.

Merrick: Like you always want to make the little tweaks while you’re cutting and we didn’t have the freedom to do those at first until we came up with the cutting idea. Because no matter how good your actors are, you do want to play with it.

PVC: Do you do any morph cuts or anything like that?

Johnson: We did some morph cuts. We also used one trick that gave us a lot of, I don’t know, consternation …

Merrick: We were very nervous about it, but we tried “glitching” as a transition. We tested it on a lot of people and we found you can glitch between multiple shots if you’re very subtle about it.

PVC: What do you mean?

Merrick: I almost feel weird even talking to you about it. Occasionally, it freezes up for just a little bit and it’s organic. We data moshed it slightly, just slightly, not crazy.

Johnson: We were watching it and we’re like, “This is super obvious.” I kept telling the producers, “Please ask this in our test screenings.” They were like, “It doesn’t bother anyone.”

Merrick: Everyone in the test screening were like, “What glitches?”

Johnson: We actually ended up compressing it and like pumping out super tiny H.264s to get that kind of blockiness.

Merrick: Yeah, we’d export in H.264 at like .5 bit rate, then export another one from that at like .2 bit rate. Because we used glitch software, but it’s too obvious.

PVC: Okay, so on the live action thing, I’m just trying to wrap my head around this. When they filmed the live action footage for these conversations on screen, did they film it with the actors facing each other? Or were the cameras in separate rooms?

Johnson: Well, the system that they rigged, we had nothing to do with. It was our DP, Juan Sebastian Baron. It’s like genius. I think Bazelevs has kind of slowly created this process.

Merrick: Sebastian rigged a system where basically the actors could look at each other on a FaceTime call while a GoPro is doing the actual filming. They were getting a live feed from each other so they can perform, but they’re in separate spaces.

Johnson: We actually created a full animatic seven weeks before they shot, and we pumped out wides for every scene with information like “Here’s the finder window. Here’s where John Cho will be.” Then the script supervisor was able to show them “This is where your eye line is.” The animatic helped us a lot because the actors’ eye lines were always, for the most part, pretty accurate.

PVC: This sounds like an incredibly post-heavy film. Talk to me about some of the tools you used.

Johnson: Our overall process was in three stages essentially. There was pre-post-production, post-production and post-post-production.

PVC: Oh god.

Johnson: We had rehearsals with Aneesh before we actually got in the room. Then once when we got in the room, we spent seven weeks with Sev and Aneesh, creating an animatic that was used then as a model for shooting. We were using Adobe Premiere Pro for everything at this point.

PVC: For the animatics? How do you do that in Premiere Pro?

Johnson: What we were doing was, we were using ScreenFlow. None of this movie ultimately was screen recorded but we were using ScreenFlow and taking screenshots, and then bringing those assets into Premiere Pro.

Merrick: There’s like no other place where you start with a totally blank slate as an editor. Like we didn’t even have storyboard slides.

Johnson: You take the script and you’re like, “Well, let’s make this thing.” So we opened Finder, we start screenshotting. We opened FaceTime, Aneesh would take pictures of his face, kind of performing the scenes. He would record a voiceover until we built a full cut that was shown to the crew. They were all sort of like, “Oh god, we have so much work to do to make this play.” The animatic was all these jumbled pieces, screen recordings, like screenshots of Aneesh’s face making faces with his lines underneath it. We nested everything. We decided early on that nesting was the way we had to go.

PVC: Why is that?

Johnson: We needed to be able to shoot around the desktop, so we decided in the nest, we would production design, essentially, a wide of the desktop, put all the icons, we would do all the movements, all the blocking and staging in the wide and then we would nest it and then cover it with the scale and position attributes. Every time we had a timing change, we had to go into the nest, change the time, punch back out of the nest, and move the camera moves for everything.

Merrick: This was one of the weirdest things to get my head wrapped around, because we were editing not only temporally, we were editing spatially in a way. If we moved anything, rearranged anything on the desktop, we would have to then adjust all the timing. Then we also had almost parallel sequences going on in a weird way, because we had the macro edits on the nest.

Johnson: We would duplicate our edit, and we’d have to duplicate every nest inside the edit, or else we would destroy those nests if we made changes. So we had all these macro edits and then if we wanted to make this five frames shorter, we’d have to go into the nest, move everything in the nest over five frames, then step back out and move all the other edits over five frames.

Merrick: A “Null Object” in Premiere Pro would be great. We could have parented everything to a Null Object and been able to just keyframe that around it.

Johnson: Which is how we did it in after effects.

Merrick: The animatic became our foundation for the movie, so as they were shooting we cut the live action into the animatic. Then refined that with Aneesh, Sev and Natalie into like a director’s cut and a producer’s cut, and we showed those to audiences because we knew once we moved to After Effects, we’d be talking months for small edits. So we did a hard picture lock, and moved everything into After Effects where we, with our VFX company Neon Robotic, created Adobe Illustrator files of almost everything in the computer interface.

PVC: Everything was recreated? You did the screenshots, you put the video and all those assets on top of that, you keyframed rough moves, then recreated everything again? Is there a faster way?

Merrick: We always thought there would be. We never found it.

Johnson: If there was a better way to screen record your desktop in Vector, or screen record on a 16K monitor.

Merrick: Bazelevs is actually working on a software that will do this, but it’s just, it’s so extremely hard to create that it just wasn’t ready by the time we needed to use it. Basically, the decision that made us have to recreate everything was they were punching in for so much coverage that even if we had gone for the pixelated look, which we just creatively didn’t want to, it just wouldn’t work.

PVC: So you had to recreate the interfaces themselves in Illustrator, to avoid pixelation when you punch in for coverage. It’s icons and toolbars and all that kind of stuff, right?

Johnson: Yeah, and button states.

Merrick: We have like a Google Chrome bar that has five possible tabs, because we figured out that was the most we ever needed in the movie. It has all the button states for when you close it, click a new tab, we can add new data. Basically, the VFX company we were working with, Neon Robotic, created that large asset with all the tabs and fully customizable. Then we would take it, cut it in After Effects for every scene and make it what it needed to be for that scene.

Johnson: We basically would have like in a folder, 35 Illustrator files numbered in order. So when the the mouse goes up, you got the hover state. He clicks it, and it’s foregrounded. Then also, we had to worry about drop shadows.

Merrick: A funny thing that will never make the movie or the interview is the pixel aspect ratio of the Illustrator files is the same as the size on the computer. Like if there’s a 10 pixel bevel, we just made it 10 pixels in Illustrator, and so we could make things exactly … We made it happen in like a 2048 by 1152 screen, and you could just make it that size in Illustrator and it comes in perfectly.

PVC: Would you have signed up for this if you knew that it was going to be this hard?

Merrick: Barely, but yes.

Johnson: I would say yes. But I was constantly telling myself this could not possibly be the best way to do this. I was like, “There’s got to be a better way.” I would spend maybe a couple of hours digging around, playing, experimenting, trying to find a different way and I’d always just inevitably come back to “This is the way we have to do it. We have to just animate every single state with Illustrator files.”

Merrick: I didn’t even think it would be half as hard as it was but, also I’m really proud because I think we did something that hasn’t been done before.

PVC: Well, that’s the thing. This film is unique it its time, but I think it might also be unique going forward just because the barrier for entry to make a project like this is so much freaking work.

Johnson: To be honest though, as far as if you compare this to animated movies, it’s like probably nothing. It was just the fact that it was me and Will doing all this I think. It was just a two-man sort of job with the help of Neon Robotic on the technical side. Creatively, we had a whole team, but that’s what made it so challenging. So we discovered you can find all of the icons in your computer in a folder in Mac, but they’re maxed out at like 125×125 pixels. And in our punch-ins, sometimes we’re like right on icons.

Merrick: There’s some icons that have never been as big as they are, until this movie.

PVC: I haven’t had a chance to see the film yet, but you’ve got FaceTime calls, you’ve got Finder interfaces, and texting I imagine? I’m just trying to think of how many different communication techniques can you use on a computer? What options did you have to tell this story?

Johnson: I think that’s where Aneesh and Sev, their original script was brilliant. Because I think whenever anyone watches a screen movie, you’re kind of waiting for like, “Okay, how are they going to get away with this? How are they going to cheat?” Sev and Aneesh worked really hard in making a really good narrative and a really good thriller with a great story. Then they worked to find ways to put that on the screen that didn’t feel contrived in any way.

Merrick: Yeah. I think it would be okay to say that at one point in the film, we moved to say news footage, things like that, and you can actually see the actors in there as well. We do have options kind of using video streaming occasionally. They use FaceTime a lot, but the texting…honestly, you can have a compelling scene just all on text messages.

Johnson: That was pretty surprising to us. That was a big challenge, rhythmically you would have a whole dialog scene taking place on chat, and there’s like a whole rhythm that is very foreign. As an editor, you don’t really edit chats like that, like go back and forth.

Merrick: Like if you cut in, and then a message appears, it’s weird. It’s like drawing. You have to like do all these weird tricks.

Johnson: We had a lot of tricks with cutting, because you want to cut on motion a lot of times, but everything happens on one frame in a computer. We didn’t have motion.

PVC: Don’t texts kind of “bloop” in a little bit?

Merrick: They blooped a tiny bit, yeah.

Johnson: Yeah, so we were always trying to exploit those little movements. We used the mouse moving in and out of frame a lot.

PVC: That’s your person wiping the frame?

Merrick: Yeah. Sometimes the mouse just jumps to another place, but you don’t know notice because we’re cutting at the same time.

Johnson: I think you pace it like you would a conversation. You’re not necessarily just stuck in shot reverse, shot reverse. You’re going to have your two shot, you’re going to have your master. Your two shot would be like this wide framing.

Merrick: We tried to keep the frames somewhat narrow and then we would usually start on that and then whenever there was a particularly important line, you could cut in for the closeup. We didn’t do too much cutting back and forth but like you could have one up here, and then like slide over to where they type and see the response be typing.

PVC: Ah, so that would be more like a traditional pan over to a reaction?

Merrick: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Johnson: That was something that we had to learn ourselves I think. I totally get the impulse to want to just follow the mouse everywhere and not cut. It took us a while to understand that we can do these things, and by the end it was just like editing a normal movie.

PVC: Ok, so the 16:9 aspect ratio doesn’t exactly fit a computer screen, right?

Merrick: It does actually. We may have cheated it very slightly, but when we go out to the full 16×9 wide, it looks like a MacBook.

PVC: Did you find that wide framing to be an impediment when you’re cutting around stuff? A text message thread is not really that wide, it’s kind of square, right?

Merrick: We don’t go out wide often. Normally it’s for effect.

Johnson: That was one thing that Sev, our producer, really said early on. As soon he saw the animatic, he said we should be reserving our wides for really important beats.

Merrick: Like you never use a wide as your default. You never default to the wide.

Johnson: The nice thing is that everyone’s familiar with the layout of a computer screen, so we can kind of use that to our advantage. It’s not like you need to, like in a normal scene, live action movie, you have to establish the space at some point early on maybe so that people aren’t confused. We could start a scene on a text notification, for instance, and not worry that people are going to be like, “Whoa, where are we?”

Merrick: It’s funny to even play with that sometimes. There are times where we start in closeup, and you don’t know where you are yet, and you slowly find out through context. Our best compliments were after a lot of our test screenings people said, “I totally forgot everything was on a computer screen.”

PVC: So I imagine that you used the full Adobe tool set on this project.

Merrick: Most of it, yeah. Mostly Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator.

Johnson: Yeah, we didn’t really use InDesign. We used Lightroom a little bit, for some photos we shot.

Merrick: We even used SpeedGrade. It was our DPX viewer.

PVC: This was before … I guess SpeedGrade has since gone away?

Merrick: Yeah, we found a way to get it back.

Johnson: SpeedGrade weirdly was the best DPX viewer we could find. But we did color, we did do almost all of the primary color in After Effects with Color Finesse.

Merrick: We found a colorist, Zach Medow, who could do it.

Johnson: Zach was one of the only people who could listen to our workflow and not laugh us out of the room. He understood what was going on in our sequences. He had to color every live action element separate from the screen without ruining the screen. He was amazing.

Merrick: He had no playback. It was terrible. Just the worst conditions you could have for a colorist. But he did an incredible job. Like he nailed it. We had a pretty short amount of time, and he nailed it.

PVC: Sound design probably plays an important part in this sort of film? Who did sound design and how did that process work?

Johnson: A company called This is Sound Design did it, and this was actually probably the most traditional part of the process. I don’t necessarily want to speak for them, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that they had to also wrap their heads around the rules of this kind of film.

Merrick: Something that was weird…Foley for clicks in a keyboard suddenly becomes very critical, like you have no leeway.

Johnson: There’s a lot of character.

Merrick: You could show emotion through the clicks and through the keyboard, like how hard somebody’s typing. They did a great job with that. Every time we’d go to … I don’t want to explain how we go between computers, but when we do, it’s a different mouse, different keyboard.

Johnson: Each computer has its own unique keyboard sound and click sound.

Merrick: Then they would pan just a slight ambiance around the room, so that you kind of felt like you were in a space and had something to hear. It’s very hard because a lot of computers, there’s not, you kind of have to justify sounds because you don’t want to just sit and it’s quiet. It’s very music heavy too.

PVC: Was there like hum from fans? Did they go that far as well?

Johnson: Yeah, yeah. I think they would have birds, they would have a lawnmower in the distance for like afternoon. Like room tone hum. Honestly, it’s pretty traditional treatment, it was just, I think, tough to wrap your head around the rules, especially with typing and clicking. And I think David’s voice is actually panned a little bit. So you have this feeling that David is right with you, and the people on the computer are just in the center track.

Merrick: They did a lot of great futz work too, because if you’re talking to somebody on the phone, it has to be just distorted enough but not distracting.

PVC: Thanks so much for your time, and good luck with the premiere!

Sony Pictures Worldwide bought the global rights to “Search” the night of the film premiere at Sundance, and a theatrical release is expected.