Workflow Breakdown of Every Best Picture and Best Editing 2018 Oscars Nominee

We at Frame.io love getting nerdy about workflows, so after we had the chance to talk to some of the groups behind this 12 months’s Oscar nominees, we needed to ask concerning the particulars. As we spoke to completely different groups, nevertheless, we had been struck by a number of completely different factors of comparability between the movies, and that sparked the concept of conducting a broader evaluation.

So we reached out to the editorial groups on all 9 Best Picture nominees and all 5 Best Editing nominees, and received the small print of their technical workflows. There had been 11 movies in all, since three movies had been nominated for each classes. (The Post’s editorial group was sadly unavailable, so we relied on second-hand studies for that movie)

Baby Driver
Call Me By Your Name
Darkest Hour
Dunkirk
Get Out
I, Tonya
Lady Bird
Phantom Thread
The Post
The Shape of Water
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

We might have written an article on every of those movies, however somewhat than diving deep into a selected one, we’re presenting an outline, highlighting a few of the most attention-grabbing parts.

Budget

This isn’t an article concerning the funding of Hollywood movies, however I feel that it’s useful to maintain the relative budgets in thoughts as we have a look at issues just like the size of principal pictures within the measurement of the editorial group.

Here’s a have a look at the budgets for every of those movies, from smallest to largest. It’s fairly extraordinary how numerous the budgets are on this checklist of Oscar nominees, from $3.5 million on Call Me By Your Name all the best way as much as $100 million on Dunkirk.

Production Schedule

There’s a basic pattern up and to the fitting once more, with a number of exceptions. Production is all the time the costliest section of a characteristic movie, and so it’s not stunning that the lower-budget movies usually had tighter capturing schedules. What’s somewhat shockingly spectacular is that the Get Out group shot a four-Oscar-nominated movie in simply three weeks!

The Post’s capturing schedule might need been longer besides that the movie was made in a really quick period of time. Steven Spielberg wished badly to make and release The Post quickly, as quickly as he learn the script, as a result of he felt that it was an vital piece of social commentary for our time. The movie was completed lower than 9 months after Steven first learn the script. That sort of schedule means each section of the movie needs to be rushed.

Editorial Team

Keeping the movies in the identical order once more, let’s examine the sizes of the editorial groups. I excluded put up supervisors and VFX editors, conserving this checklist to editors, assistant editors, affiliate editors, and editorial assistants.

While it’s definitely true that the 2 costliest movies had the biggest groups, the remainder of the nominated movies wanted not more than 4 on the editorial group. A big a part of Dunkirk‘s huge editorial team was needed for the various conform processes (keep reading), but even without that, it had a significantly larger team than any other film on our list.

The Post also had a significant added challenge—they were cutting two films at once! When Steven Spielberg decided to fast-track The Post, he was already in the midst of postproduction on Ready Player One, which couldn’t merely be placed on maintain for a 12 months. Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar, the 2 editors of The Post, thus had to have the ability to swap from one movie to the opposite each day. So, I feel we will most likely lower them a bit of further slack.

I, Tonya’s group had the problem of a small price range however over 200 tricky VFX shots. Although Margot Robbie skilled onerous, knowledgeable skater needed to full essentially the most tough strikes, requiring varied monitoring methods to position Margot again into the movie, along with CG crowds and stadiums. I, Tonya’s small unbiased price range meant that Steve Jacks needed to pull double-duty as first assistant editor and VFX editor (he’s credited for each titles). He can be slicing in VFX photographs within the morning, then within the afternoon he’d swap to doing sound work, after which he’d typically keep late to prep photographs to show over to VFX.

In distinction, Three Billboards’s workflow was so easy that, even with a two-man enhancing group by way of most of manufacturing, the primary assistant editor Nicholas Lipari spent little or no time on the technical particulars. On a given day, he’d spend round two hours ingesting and processing footage, after which he would have the ability to spend the remainder of the day working with the editor Jon Gregory, which is sort of an uncommon state of affairs. It’s an unlucky incontrovertible fact that the duties of the assistant editor are sometimes so completely different from the duties of the editor that an assistant can carry out their job effectively for years with out getting the abilities mandatory to maneuver as much as an enhancing place.

(Do you agree with that? Disagree? Let us know within the feedback or e mail weblog(at)body.io—we’re getting ready an article on that matter.)

Post-production Schedule

You would possibly suppose that giant productions like Dunkirk and The Post would have the luxurious of spending as a lot time within the edit as they want, however the actuality is that period of time allotted to postproduction doesn’t correlate very effectively with price range. I’ve stored the movies so as of price range from left to proper, and there isn’t a discernible pattern in any respect. Note that I’m together with solely the time spent in postproduction after the tip of principal pictures, though after all these groups had been all onerous at work producing meeting edits whereas the movies had been being shot.

On studio movies, the discharge date is often set earlier than they even start capturing, and the method of jockeying for prime launch dates implies that a studio movie can find yourself with loads of time for put up, or little or no.

The smaller unbiased movies, like Three Billboards and Lady Bird, had much more freedom to take as a lot time as wanted within the edit. Even small unbiased movies do typically must hit deadlines after all, which is commonly a selected movie pageant that they’re focusing on. It’s attention-grabbing to notice, although, that although the unbiased movies usually reported having way more flexibility of their postproduction schedule, they didn’t essentially take the longest.

In the case of this 12 months’s nominees, a variety of various factors dictated the period of time in put up: technical complexity of the edit (Baby Driver and Dunkirk), urgent launch dates (The Post), advanced VFX (The Shape of Water), with a number of taking no matter time they felt they wanted (Three Billboards, Lady Bird, Call Me By Your Name).

Hardware

Given the large vary of budgets for these movies, it’s a testomony to the wonderful democratization of the instruments of postproduction that these movies had been lower on comparable {hardware}. In truth, many of those movies had been lower on laptops from moveable onerous drives, in addition to in full edit suites.

It will come as no shock that Apple’s {hardware} dominated the checklist, with most movies enhancing off of Mac Pro “trash cans” in the primary edit suites (the brand new iMac Pros weren’t out there when these movies had been being edited). Call Me By Your Name’s group opted for top-of-the-line iMacs, and a few might be stunned that Darkest Hour and The Shape of Water each used outdated Mac Pro towers, although The Shape of Water really moved to Mac Pro trash cans in the midst of the shoot. Old habits die onerous.

The Edit: Still Standard HD

Given Avid’s dominance of the characteristic movie market, it’s a given that every of those movies was edited utilizing Avid’s DNx household of codecs, most utilizing the DNx 115 taste, although 4 movies (Baby Driver, Lady Bird, Call Me By Your Name, and The Shape of Water) used the DNx 36 taste. If you’re extra used to the ProRes household, DNx 36 is similar to ProRes Proxy, whereas DNx 115 is similar to ProRes 422 (you’ll be able to see a comparison table here).

Although it’s turning into simpler and simpler to edit in 4K (and these productions definitely had the budgets for high-end computer systems), all 11 groups selected to edit in normal 1920 x 1080 decision. For readers who’re used to engaged on smaller productions the place your complete postproduction course of occurs on the similar facility, this could be stunning. These movies had been all captured or scanned at 4K or increased, and the budgets had been loads massive sufficient to pay for top-of-the-line {hardware}, so why not edit 4K? If persons are editing feature films in raw 6K, certainly it may be finished in 4K with out an excessive amount of hassle.

Why Not 4K?

If you take into account the workflows of a lot of these movies, although, a 4K edit nonetheless doesn’t make a lot sense. Before we ask why these movies wouldn’t edit in 4K, we first we’ve got to ask ourselves, “what are the benefits of editing in 4K?”

The major profit for most individuals who edit in 4K is just the truth that they will skip the offline editing process and do all of their work instantly on the camera-original recordsdata. Although it’s very simple to design a easy offline workflow, and all the main enhancing packages help it, there’s some good simplicity in avoiding the necessity to transcode for an offline workflow. If you’re doing all of your shade correction and ending within your editor (which is more and more attainable), you may have the added important benefit of having the ability to transfer fluidly between phases of your postproduction course of. You can spend extra time on momentary color-correction as you’re enhancing, realizing that you may proceed that work later somewhat than having to start out over once more. You also can make edits to the movie in the course of the ending section, with out the complications of a reverse conform course of.

But these characteristic movies, even the low price range ones, all used a conventional offline workflow that concerned a handoff from the editors to a separate ending group at one other facility. So there was no risk of the sort of all-in-one workflows that are actually turning into possible.

As wonderful because the iMac Pros and Z840s are for renderless 4K enhancing, there are nonetheless loads of hiccups and slow-downs concerned with enhancing a big movie in 4K. Temp VFX and color-correction can rapidly choke playback on a system that’s not completely tuned, and render occasions stretch out.

The different important drawback to a 4K edit for these movies is the scale of the storage required, even should you edit off of proxy recordsdata as a substitute of the unique digicam recordsdata. At completely different factors within the course of, the groups behind Baby Driver, Three Billboards, and The Shape of Water had an entire copy of the movie operating off of a single onerous drive linked to a conveyable laptop computer, which might not have been attainable had they edited in 4K.

A 2-hour characteristic movie would possibly simply have a 50:1 capturing ratio (capturing 50x as a lot footage as leads to the ultimate movie), which suggests 6,000 minutes of recorded footage. Using our bitrate formulas, we will rapidly calculate the area required.

ProRes 422 at UHD is 503mbps, so we plug our numbers into the highest components:

503mbps * 6,000 minutes * .0075 = 22,635GB, or 22.5TB.

22TB is affordable to retailer in a powered RAID, however you’re going to have hassle throwing that in your backpack.

So, should you can’t reap the benefits of the first advantages of a 4K workflow, and it’ll gradual you down and hamper you, it simply doesn’t make any sense to make use of cutting-edge 4K workflows purely for their very own sake. Even should you’re slicing Dunkirk.

The one profit that these productions would have obtained from a 4K edit is just the better decision and element in the course of the enhancing course of. That may be a bonus, however simply not a sufficiently big benefit to tempt these groups …but.

Note that I’m particularly speaking about enhancing in 4K vs 1080p, which is a separate query from whether or not to seize and grasp at 4K or 1080p. All of those movies used a conventional offline workflow, which allowed them to edit in 1080p however produce a remaining output at the next decision.

Film vs Digital Acquisition

The choice to shoot on movie vs. digital is all the time a fraught one. It is usually a query of price range, a query of non-public style, or a query of material. All of the movies on this checklist had sufficient of a price range to think about movie, however it’s attention-grabbing to notice that, of the six motion pictures shot on movie (Baby Driver, I, Tonya, Call Me By Your Name, The Post, Phantom Thread, and Dunkirk), 5 of them had been interval items of some kind. Films set previously are inclined to shoot on movie extra typically than movies set within the current as a result of we are inclined to affiliate the look of older movie shares with the previous.

Of course, it’s all the time attainable to emulate the look of an older movie inventory with a digital picture, however I’m making an attempt to not take sides an excessive amount of right here.

The solely non-period-piece to make use of movie was Baby Driver, which is much more stunning given the truth that the movie’s synchronization to its soundtrack required real-time, on-set enhancing (extra on that later). Shooting digitally might have simplified this workflow, however Edgar Wright is a movie purist, and it’s fairly onerous to argue with a director like Edgar Wright.

Baby Driver: 35mm, Alexa Mini at 2.8K ARRIRAW.
Call Me By Your Name: 35mm.
Darkest Hour: Alexa SXT, Alexa Mini at 3.4K ARRIRAW.
Dunkirk: IMAX 65mm and Standard 65mm movie.
Get Out: Alexa Mini at 3.2K ProRes 4444.
I, Tonya: 35mm, Alexa 65 at 6.5K ARRIRAW, Phantom.
Lady Bird: Alexa Mini at 2K ProRes 4444.
Phantom Thread: 35mm movie.
The Post: 35mm movie.
The Shape of Water: Alexa Mini at 3.2K ARRIRAW.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: Alexa XT Plus at 2K ARRIRAW, Ursa Mini.

Of these 11 movies, Dunkirk was the one movie to do an optical print with no digital intermediate. This was once more a private aesthetic selection by Christopher Nolan to keep away from the digital shade instruments and limit the colour therapy to the restricted instruments of the normal photochemical color-timing course of.

The 5 different movies that shot on bodily movie all scanned the pictures and did their shade correction and on-line results on digital recordsdata. They then exported DCPs (digital recordsdata) in order that the movies could possibly be projected digitally, or else printed these digital recordsdata again onto movie for a movie projection (Phantom Thread). Dunkirk, as a substitute, was projected on movie utilizing prints created from the unique digicam negatives the place attainable.

There are a number of caveats, nevertheless. Dunkirk nonetheless did a digital scan of the digicam negatives, for a number of completely different causes. In spite of his love of the bodily movie, not even Christopher Nolan can deny the apparent benefits of digital enhancing, and so the movie needed to be scanned and transcoded to a 1080p digital intermediate codec for the enhancing. Second, though Christopher Nolan tried to do as many results in-camera as attainable, it was nonetheless essential to do some digital VFX on sure scenes. Those scenes had been scanned at 8K and delivered to the visible results home, which labored at 6K. Those 6K recordsdata had been then printed again to movie detrimental and spliced in with the prints that had come from digicam negatives.

There was additionally but a 3rd full scan with the intention to present digital supply as effectively, since many theaters have moved to digital projection solely. That scan was finished after the movie had been color-timed photochemically, although, so there was no have to do any digital shade manipulation aside from what was essential to match the look of the digital recordsdata as intently as attainable to the look of the all-analog model.

(I’ve barely scratched the floor of the terribly sophisticated workflow on Dunkirk. I like to recommend this article from the ASC and this interview with Steve Hullfish should you’d wish to dive deeper.)

Dailies

I discussed above that each movie used Avid’s DNx offline codecs for editorial, though a few these movies added a number of further twists to the method.

Most of those movies adopted a reasonably normal dailies course of. For these movies that shot on 35mm, the negatives had been instantly scanned to digital recordsdata, after which proven to the manufacturing group digitally, both by sending a bodily onerous drive or through a remote dailies viewing system. For the movies that shot digitally, the recordsdata had been transcoded after which delivered to the manufacturing group through onerous drive or through the cloud. Processing dailies is rarely “simple”—shade must be correctly managed, sound synced, and metadata fastidiously managed—however the course of is pretty standardized.

Two of those movies had notably sophisticated dailies workflows, although for utterly completely different causes.

For Baby Driver, the problem got here from the truth that the movie was timed extraordinarily exactly to the soundtrack. The essential character is continually listening to music on his earbuds all through the movie, and each scene is exactly choreographed to suit the music. Every shot needed to be timed with the intention to match this soundtrack, which was piped to the actors through hidden earpieces.

That clearly introduced as an enormous synchronization problem, which they addressed by referring to detailed animatics, matching the dwell motion footage, shot by shot, to the pre-edited animatics. In order to make sure that they had been hitting their beats exactly accurately, it was essential to edit the movie in real-time, dropping every take into the animatic timeline to make it possible for all the things lined up as deliberate.

Since the movie was shot on 35mm movie, they weren’t in a position to make use of the “real” dailies to do that on-set verify. Instead, the movie’s editor Paul Machliss obtained a sign from video village, which was captured in actual time utilizing Qtake’s video help software program. Qtake recorded ProRes recordsdata, which could possibly be imported into Avid on Paul’s Macbook Pro, however Paul would then transcode these recordsdata within the background to DNxHD 36, saved on an exterior onerous drive.

So Paul was constructing his meeting edits with these momentary dailies, however he was additionally receiving the dailies which were scanned from the captured 35mm negatives. Since his momentary dailies had been decrease high quality, he swapped out the 35mm scans as quickly as they arrived. Of course, it takes a number of days for negatives to be mailed from Atlanta to Los Angeles, scanned, processed, after which despatched again to Atlanta, Paul’s on-set assistant needed to swap out momentary dailies for “real” 35mm-scanned dailies, each day. (that was quite a lot of dailies)

Since these momentary dailies had been coming from a video faucet which recorded independently from the movie digicam, the clips coming in from the 35mm scans didn’t match the momentary dailies exactly. So the brand new dailies must be fastidiously linked again into the Avid timelines, changing the momentary dailies with out shedding sync. Fortunately, dependable time-of-day timecode saved the day, permitting a lot of the relinking to occur easily.

(edit: we earlier reported that the momentary dailies got here in at 25fps. That was incorrect: Paul needed to work with proxies from a 25fps video faucet on The World’s End, however not on Baby Driver. We remorse the error.)

Dunkirk’s dailies workflow was much more sophisticated than Baby Driver’s workflow, although with out the real-time part. All of the issues in Dunkirk‘s workflow were due to the fact that the production was shooting simultaneously in two different non-standard types of physical film, and Christopher Nolan wanted to view his dailies projected by a real film projector using a third non-standard type of film.

In the days before digital capture and digital intermediate, everyone had to view their dailies on film—that element was just a throwback to the old days, nothing particularly new. The tricky part was that Christopher Nolan wanted to shoot part of the film on IMAX 65mm, part of the film on standard 65mm, and to view his dailies at IMAX sizes.

In spite of the similar-sounding names, IMAX 65mm and standard 65mm have different sizes and different aspect ratios. The names are misleading because IMAX 65mm is 65mm tall, while standard 65mm is 65mm wide, resulting in two completely different types of film being known by the same number.

Incidentally, this is exactly the same reason why 35mm cinema film and 35mm still camera film are not the same size or shape. 35mm cinema film is measured by the horizontal side, whereas 35mm still camera film is measured by the vertical side.

Also, you may have heard that the film was projected at IMAX 70mm, not IMAX 65mm. This is another issue of confusing terminology. The image is exactly the same size in both cases—the extra 5mm is used by the soundtrack during projection. So you always capture IMAX at 65mm and display it at 70mm, but the image is not scaled or cropped in the process. Same thing with standard 65mm film—it’s projected at normal 70mm (not IMAX 70mm).

Yeah, complicated.

Ok, again to Dunkirk. Christopher Nolan wished to view his dailies on bodily movie, and since he was capturing two completely different codecs, he obtained dailies in two completely different codecs. All of the usual 65mm photographs had been printed to straightforward 70mm, requiring the manufacturing group to hold round a 70mm projector with them. Given the quantity of fabric shot, it was just too costly to create IMAX prints of all the IMAX footage. Only chosen photographs had been reviewed at IMAX 70mm—most had been diminished down to suit onto a regular 35mm print.

Because of the time required to course of the 35mm reductions, they needed to skip syncing sound on the all the IMAX dailies. Fortunately, all the dialogue scenes had been shot on normal 65mm, and they also had been in a position to view dailies with sound on the dialogue scenes.

The dailies on The Shape of Water had been a lot easier technically, however they needed to maintain a really tight ship as a result of the editorial group labored on the studio the place the movie was principally shot. Director and co-writer Guillermo Del Toro would drop in incessantly, often in the course of the lunch break, which meant that the assistants needed to work in a short time with the intention to ingest the day before today’s footage, permitting the editor Sidney Wolinsky time to work with the footage and have one thing to point out Guillermo by lunchtime.

Distributed Workflows

There aren’t many movie labs able to dealing with all the complexities of Dunkirk’s workflows (and I’ve ignored a number of different tough bits), in order that they needed to ship all the movie from Europe, the place they shot a lot of the movie, to LA the place IMAX and FotoKem processed dailies, mailing copies again to Europe for the manufacturing group. With all of that turnaround time, dailies took round per week to return to manufacturing. (Can you continue to name them dailies in the event that they take per week? Not certain.)

Call Me By Your Name’s group was additionally distributed world wide, however the place Dunkirk’s workflow was advanced, theirs was easy, and the place Dunkirk’s workflow was easy, theirs was advanced.

Dailies had been a lot easier for Call Me By Your Name since they had been working with normal 35mm movie. They did must ship dailies from Crema in northern Italy to Rome for growth and scanning, however the workflow remained fully digital from that time on, tremendously facilitating their distributed postproduction workflow.

The editorial group remained in Crema, however the remainder of the postproduction was scattered the world over. The shade grading was finished remotely in Thailand, the sound mixing was finished in France, the VFX and Sound Design in Rome, and the ADR in LA. The director Luca Guadagnino was even in a position to direct ADR classes in LA from a collection in Italy, syncing their Pro Tools classes in order that the director and editor had been in a position to pay attention in dwell because the actors delivered their performances in LA, viewing the video accurately synced, and provides path as if they had been in the identical room.

Get Out’s group was a lot much less unfold out than Call Me By Your Name’s group, however they nonetheless made use of remote collaboration tools, as did most of the movies on our checklist. Matthew Poliquin at Ingenuity Studios, which produced Get Out’s (principally invisible) VFX used Frame.io’s cloud-based evaluation and suggestions instruments even for inside communication, inside the similar constructing.

While it’s onerous to argue towards the advantages of getting the director and editor in the identical room for the editorial course of on a characteristic movie, cloud platforms like Frame.io make it simpler to speak and supply suggestions asynchronously. That’s very true for somebody like Matthew engaged on VFX, who must coordinate suggestions for a lot of artists working individually, utilizing Frame.io as a single, central platform to trace suggestions on varied drafts of every shot.

What Really Matters

As fulfilling and thrilling as it might be to study concerning the workflows behind these wonderful Oscar-nominated movies, on the finish of the day, it’s not concerning the awards. Christopher Nolan doesn’t watch IMAX-sized dailies and Edgar Wright doesn’t meticulously choreograph automobile chases to music to win an award. I’m certain everybody we talked to on this checklist (and their collaborators and counterparts on the movies not nominated) would all say the identical factor—they do what they do for the love of the craft and the pursuit of excellence. That pursuit is what drives each passionate artist. It’s what drives us to create wonderful software program (or coordinate dozens of interviews with hard-to-reach professionals to convey you the absolute best weblog.) And it’s our honest need that this data will encourage you to do the identical. And should you occur to win an Oscar alongside the best way, that’s simply icing on the cake.