2009

If you’re worried you won’t have the time or budget to get access to the deck in the
future, you can capture at online quality right from the start. This method is increasingly
popular for highly compressed acquisition formats like DVCPRO HD. These formats have
low bandwidth requirements, allowing for capture at the highest native quality of the
source media, with little overhead, and giving you the freedom to work at this quality all
the way through to mastering.
If you’re ingesting at online quality from the very beginning, but the resulting media is
too bandwidth-intensive to conveniently edit on your particular system, you can use the
Media Manager to create duplicate offline media with cloned timecode and reel names
for offline editing.
Ingesting Film Transferred to Video
If you’re working on a project that was shot on film, you need to transfer the camera
negative to a video format suitable for your workflow. If you want to work using a
conventional video format, the transfer is typically done using a telecine. Telecines are
machines capable of converting the negative image to a video signal in real time, in the
process cropping and resizing the image to the appropriate resolution and converting
the frame rate as necessary to record to the video format you require.
The way you choose to have the film transferred depends largely on your budget, your
intended workflow, and the level of quality that’s necessary at each stage of your
post-production workflow. In terms of translating the film frame into a video image, there
are three general methods of managing the color and contrast of the final result.
• One-light transfer: This is the most inexpensive way of transferring the negative. The
footage you choose is transferred quickly, using the least possible number of
adjustments (hence the name—one lighting adjustment for an entire roll of film) to
achieve reasonably good-looking video. This method is good for obtaining offline-quality
media for editing, but you usually need to retransfer from the original negative to
obtain maximum quality. The advantage is that after editing, there’s usually much less
footage to transfer, which saves time and money. Using this method, you request a
telecine log that you can import into Final Cut Pro (or Cinema Tools) to track the
correspondence between your offline media and the original film negative. (The ATN,
FLEx, FTL, and ALE telecine log formats are compatible with both Final Cut Pro and
Cinema Tools.)
35Chapter 2 Ingesting and Organizing Your Media