The gear has been returned, film is at the lab, thank you notes are in the mail, and we are caught up on rest.

With that said, post-production on Cowboy Smoke begins tomorrow. Our assistant editor Tim Edwards will begin logging and capturing the footage as well as syncing up the sound. No small task and I will explain why. When shooting on film sound is recorded separately, meaning the audio and visual are recorded in two seperate formats. If you’ve ever wondered why a man or woman (assistant cameraman) stands in front of the camera before each shot and calls out the scene number, setup, and take and then claps the slate shut… it’s so the sound can be synced up in post-production. An assistant editor has to sort through hours of footage and before each shot, looks at the slate where the scene number, setup, and take are marked. Next the assistant editor (or whoever is syncing the dailies) will listen to the audio for a matching scene number, setup, and take… then will locate a spike in the audio on the audio’s timeline. A spike in the audio is nothing more than a point in the audio’s timeline where the sound peeks to a sharp point, hence the term spiking. When the slate or clapper is shut, it causes the audio to spike or peek. This is how the editor knows where the audio and visual sync up. Sounds pretty easy right? It is.

Except, when attempting to sort through 10+ hours of footage and 17+ hours of audio it becomes rather monotonous and boring. I am thankful to have Tim handling this for me because aside from requiring a lot of visine and no-doz it zaps you creatively. On Wesley Cash I synced up all the dailies and afterwards I was none too excited about beginning the editing process. I leave tomorrow for a (much needed) vacation and when I return, Tim will have most of the dailies synced up. This will allow me to jump right into editing… and to top it off, I will be fresh and ready to go.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.