Some of the projects finished by Rockhopper Post in the past year are finally emerging into the public light. One of these is Vapor Trail (Clark), a documentary by the filmmaker John Gianvito. Gianvito, whose “The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein” was picked by Time Out New York as the 20th best film of the 2000s and whose “profit motive and the whispering wind” won Best Experimental Film from the National Society of Film Critics, tackles the disastrous environmental fallout caused by the US base presence in the Philippines.

Vapor Trail (Clark) has already been accepted to the Rotterdam Film Festival, and other festival presentations are forthcoming. Says the Rotterdam page:

John Gianvito’s epic Vapor Trail investigates what the US does to that land. Take Clark Air Base, once the biggest US military facilities on foreign territory. When the Philippine Senate voted out the presence of US military bases on its land in 1991, the former self-appointed ally forgot to properly clean up the mess it had made, turning huge parts of the island of Luzon into an eco-disaster of monstrous proportions. Vapor Trail (Clark) is a humble act of solidarity, a defiant work of remembrance, a rallying cry to rise and resist: a cinematic prose poem.

Vapor Trail is an SD production, encompassing 4.5 hours of finished material that had to be broken up into three reels for output to digibeta. John’s documentary filmmaking is very naturalistic and verité-style, so the color grading had to maintain that natural quality and not veer into the realm of establishing a “look.” These goals are very different from the typical television style of doing everything possible to make a shot look “good,” saturated, and “contrasty.”

The opening shots of the documentary, depicting sunrise in the Philippines, were very carefully styled to depict the sunrise accurately but also cover up some of the encoding artifacts of the DV source material. While we experimented with some image processing methods of noise reduction, we determined that careful manipulation of basic color curves was the best choice.

Another shot, much later in the film, is beautiful to watch. It’s a single 20-minute interview take that stretches from late evening to sunset. The shot actually consists of two color corrections, fading from one to the other as night sets in.

Filmmaker John Gianvito says of Rockhopper:

“My experience with Rockhopper Post Production has been nothing but positive. Doing post-production on a 4 and a half hour documentary can be a wearying proposition, financially and creatively. Rockhopper accomplished stellar results with efficiency and utmost professionalism. In the critical last stages of completion I knew that they would be not only close listeners and responders to my subtlest or most complicated directions but that they would bring welcome suggestions to the table. I’ve done my last two films with them¹ and I hope to do many more under their care.”

1. to be precise, Owen Williams worked with John on his last film at another company [↩]

Rockhopper Post Production had the privilege of working with Boston-based Spy Pond Productions on their co-produced, multiformat documentary “Japan’s Secret Weapon”.

From National Geographic Channel’s description:

One of the best-kept secrets of the Second World War was a huge aircraft-carrying submarine designed to deliver Japanese bombers to within a few hundred kilometres of American cities.

Engineers and historians conduct experiments and demonstrations to reveal the secrets behind a technological marvel that could have changed the course of the war.

Plus, archive footage shows what made the I-400 subs so deadly: the three state-of-the-art attack bombers it could carry anywhere in the world. But why was the technology never used in an attack on the US?

The doc, a co-production for Nat Geo and WNET, had a complex and challenging workflow, requiring two distinct cuts of the material at different framerates, one for NTSC systems and one for PAL. Rockhopper Post was charged with maintaining a consistent, high-quality look across the various HD camera footage, PAL / NTSC stock footage, animation, and still-image media.

Executive Producer Eric Stange: “We worked with Rockhopper on a film that was full of challenges, but Owen helped us meet them all. His calm professionalism, organizational skills, and great technical savvy were reassuring, and he was always very responsive to our needs. We would definitely return to Rockhopper for our post work!”

The show will air in the US with the title “Japan’s Secret Super Sub” as an episode of the PBS show Secrets of the Dead.

There are four new images in the gallery from a new short film called The Unknown, premiering April 17th at the Boston International Film Festival. From the description:

We follow the life of Boston actor, LOU MONTE, as he
struggles to make it through the crazy, amusing world of the
entertainment industry. LOU MONTE, played by Christopher
Tranchina, a 30 something year old, Boston actor drives to
NYC on a weekly basis trying to ‘make it.’ We follow his
humorous journey into the gritty, true to life, reality of the
continuing fight to believe in yourself against all odds.

Rockhopper Post provided color correction and online editing services for The Unknown. Good luck, guys!

Normally when adding a track in Avid, you get a new track on top of all your other tracks. Sometimes, though, you want to insert a track in the middle. There is actually a super-secret hidden way to do this:

Hold Option (mac) or Alt (PC) and right click on the timeline. You’ll see the standard context menu:

Select New Video Track.

At this point, if you didn’t hold Option, Avid would just add a new track to the top layer. Instead, you’ll see this small dialog:

This can be a little confusing. If you want your new track to appear underneath the current V3, select V3. In other words, whatever track number you select, that’s the layer where the new blank track will appear.

Avid will ask you to confirm your selection. Luckily, there’s no way to mess this up and somehow “replace” an existing track with a blank track. Click “Insert” and you’ll see your new track.

Apple Color makes extensive use of your system’s onboard graphics card, which can cause odd problems. For instance, if you have a custom color calibration applied to your monitor, the video preview may vanish, leaving a black empty space instead of an image.

To work around this bug, do the following:

1. Exit Apple Color
2. Using System Preferences / Displays, turn off custom color calibration by selecting the top, default calibration
3. Re-launch Apple Color
4. Re-select your custom calibration

As long as Color has already been started, it’s safe to turn the calibration back on.

By default, Avid chooses the first frame of a clip for the Frame View in the bin. Often this is good enough but sometimes the first frame is black, or a slate of some sort, or otherwise just not helpful. Luckily, there’s a secret way to change which frame is used as the thumbnail — this method is also a way to preview footage without even loading it in the source monitor.

Here’s a bin with a clip, and since this clip was captured from a tape, the thumbnail is a worthless countdown slate. We’d prefer to see some of the footage in the thumbnail instead.

All you have to do is select the clip and push the L key like you’re playing the footage. And, that’s exactly what happens — the footage starts playing, sound included, and if you have an external monitor you’ll even see the footage on the screen. Just hit K to pause the playback, and that frame will be the new thumbnail.

With this method it’s not possible to instantly jump far ahead in the clip, so if you had a very long clip it might take a long time to find just the frame you want. Thankfully, you can multi-tap the J and L keys to rewind and fast forward at higher speed, just like in the timeline.

Replace Edit is a tricky feature to grasp at first, but is extremely powerful. I find it most useful in online editing, where I’m often replacing temporary footage with final, high resolution footage. The images are the same, but I can’t just recapture the footage with Batch Capture or Batch Import.

For instance, if I’m replacing stock footage, I often have to perform an “eye-match.” That’s where I choose a frame on the timeline as a reference, then find the corresponding frame in the high quality version. I want to replace the low quality version in the timeline with the final version. Without Replace Edit, this would be slow:

1. Copy any transitions on the timeline, because they will probably be lost when you overwrite and trim
2. Find matching frames with the playheads (so the source monitor looks like the record monitor)
3. In the sequence, mark from the matched frame to the end of the sequence
4. Overwrite that part of the clip with the new source
5. Put the playhead back on the cut where the matched frame is
6. Use Trim Mode to stretch the new source from the matched frame back to the beginning of the clip

Replace Edit is much easier:

1. Find matching frames in source and timeline with the playheads
2. Clear the in and out points on the timeline
3. Perform a Replace Edit

The footage in the timeline will be replaced with the source, starting at the matched frame and extending out to each nearest cut. Transitions will be maintained, but effects will be lost. If you want to keep your effects, step into them and perform the replacement there.

If you want, you can set in and out points on the timeline and Replace Edit will overwrite everything between the points. In and out points have no effect on the source side.

Trim Mode is one of the great Avid innovations, but there are cases when you don’t even need to launch trim mode to make a change. For instance, in this example, we have audio and video that have fallen out of sync by 7 frames:

To fix this issue, we’d like to slip the video back seven frames to put it back in sync. You can do this with Trim Mode, or you can do it right in the timeline. First, make sure only the layer you want to work with is highlighted:

Position the playhead over the clip you’d like to change, and just tap the Trim Left key (usually ‘,’) a few times. You’ll see the out-of-sync indicator decrease until it reaches zero:

It can be somewhat confusing at first to predict which direction the slip is going when you tap the keys. The best way to think of it is, “I am pushing the footage to the left,” and tap Trim Left. If you’d like to push the footage to the right, Trim Right. This is a great trick for eliminating flash frames (one tap and it’s gone) or fixing lip sync issues.

If you’re looking for more great tips for Avid and Final Cut, Scott Simmons over on PVC is posting a tip every day this month.

Getting information about a clip in the timeline, such as what drive it’s on, what its format is, or figuring out where quicktimes were imported from is a complicated process. This is the usual method:

1. Place the playhead over the clip in the timeline
2. Use Match Frame to load the clip in the source monitor
3. Try using Find Bin to locate the clip in the project
1. Oh wait, Avid says it can’t find the bin, so go to the bin with the sequence you’re working on
2. Go to the hamburger menu and select Set Bin Display
3. Enable Show Reference Clips
4. Try Finding Bin again
4. Play with the Headings in the bin, or use Clip Info to try to figure out what you want to know

Luckily, there’s an easier way to get clip information, although you would never ever discover it on your own. First, load the clip in the source window like you did before. Then, and I am totally serious, click and hold on the invisible space between the timeline of the source window and the video image itself, on the far left end of the window:

If you do it right, you’ll see an info box magically appear, with data about the clip’s format.

If the clip was an imported video file, it will even tell you where it was imported from originally!

This can be a lifesaver if there’s a clip on the timeline and noone can figure out where the original file is.

Update:
After a little clicking, it looks like you don’t have to be on the left side of the source window, you can click anywhere on that thin bar. And, if you click on the Record side, you’ll get some info about your sequence too.