Afew months
ago, I
had written an article
in this magazine about the perils of matchback editing under Indian conditions. While the
article briefly mentioned Sling Shot™, a matchback product currently on the market, I
tried to adopt a generic view of matchback when working in
PAL
video,
which is
of course
what we
use in
IndiaMy little
article
seems to have
upset
Barry Silver, a film
editor and co-
founder of
Trakker
Technologies, the
makers of Sling Shot…
but fortunately it
prompted him to visit
our wonderful country
and experience its varied beauty and its warm hospitality.
And Silver’s travelogue – published a couple of issues back in this
magazine – made excellent reading, pity it didn’t quite cover the actual issues
that I raised, nor made clear to the poor reader that he and I were talking at
cross-purposes. It is time then that I set the record straight, for I owe it to you to
explain myself clearly and concisely. And do relax; I have no travel plans, no long-winded
journey through India that I’m going to write about!
To make things clear, Barry Silver’s point in his article was – and
do forgive me if I summarize several of his pages in but one sentence – that he
was able to edit a documentary shot at 24 fps on a Discreet Edit* system in Chitranjali |
Studios, Trivan-drum and use Sling Shot to conform the original
negative and that their sound was in sync with the picture and that their pacing was no
different from what it was when they cut it on theon-linear system. Did you get that? Do
you want to go back and read that line again? Was I being rather over-ambitious,
summarizing Silver’s several pages into just one sentence? Well, maybe I
should have used
several
sentences,
which is
what the
rather
intelligent
Grammar
Checker in
Micro-soft Word
suggested I
do… some of
these computer
programs are getting rather
cheeky! Well you see, my original article claimed
that if you transferred film to video at 25fps for edit-
ing on a non-linear system and then used matchback software to conform the
negative, you would have |
pacing problems in your film and you would have to vary the speed
of your sound by about 4% to make it sync with the picture.
If you are still reading this article, then you’re wondering who’s
right… the truth is that both Silver and I are absolutely right, neither of us is
lying. The fact as I said before, is that we have both been talking at
cross-purposes… I was making a valid and correct scientific argument about the
problems you would face if you transferred film shot at 24 fps to video with the telecine
running at 25 fps and he was talking about transferring film to
video with the
telecine
running at
24 fps,
not
25
fps!
Why didn’t
I talk about
transferring film to
PAL video at 24 fps? Because I didn’t think that there was any software
|
out there that would try to handle this in PAL due to
some issues that I discuss below… and the Trakker
Technologies website does not make this fact veryclear either (seebox). Why
didn’t he tell you that he was talking about something that my article did not
discuss at all…perhaps he was being clever! Forget
the post-mortem, you’re saying… is everythingokay if you transfer
film to video at 24 fps and work the way they
did in Trivandrum? Can I edit
my feature on any video system and use Sling Shot with no problems? The answer
to that question requires a rather detailed and scientific explanation but in summary it
is this: If you transfer film to PAL video at 24 fps for editing a feature on a video
system, you have problems of inaccuracy in your cut
list… but your
sound will be in
sync with your
picture and your
pacing will be
fine, just like
Silver says.But
don’t just take
my word for
it, here’s
the
|
