Speaker 1: Post-production, where indie films go to die. What's up, friends? It's the nerdy filmmaker here. And today we are on the final part, part four of our four part series. The series is about the different phases of filmmaking. And today we're talking about post-production. And I joke about being the place where films go to die, because how many times have you heard of a film being stuck in post? And it's like years and someone and the director's lost interest in it. And and no one ever gets to see all the work they put into it. Don't let that happen to you. I'm going to talk about all the different steps in post-production. And let's make sure to get those films finished. If you haven't seen the development, pre-production and production videos, I'm going to leave them in the description. Let's get cracking, friends. So I've been editing for a really long time. Post-production is, in a way, my jam. I've edited for quite a while now, about 20 years. And award winning. Should I put it this way? I don't know. So first, I want to talk about a role that most films don't have someone specifically labeled as. But there is someone on every project who is this. And that's the post-production supervisor. You know, whether you know it or not, if you are the person in charge of this film and you're taking care of all the management of post, like you're the post-production supervisor, you may not be great at it, but you are it. So the post-production supervisor is the person who's kind of designing the workflow of post-production, making sure that everyone's on the same page about file formats and what it was shot in. They have all the specs and they're passing it to and from all the different people who are involved in post-production, making sure that schedules are met and that everything is working flawlessly. Now, on indie films, it's usually the editor who is the post-production supervisor, because the editor is the person that starts and finishes the film. Usually something that happens at the very beginning. This can happen either in the camera or it can happen on set while they're transferred or after the footage has been transferred as someone is taking care of this specifically on set. Or it can happen at the end of the project when it's filmed and it's given to the editor. And that's proxy creation. So proxies, I have an old video on proxies. I think this is back from when I lived in my old apartment. I might have even been shooting on a different camera, my old 5D Mark II. But proxies are wonderful things. If you don't know what a proxy is, it's a small version of every single video clip. So if you're shooting in 4K, 6K, computers can't handle that. That's nonsense. It's going to slow the whole thing down. That can't fit into an internal hard drive. So what you do is you create lower quality versions of every single video clip. And this is something, again, that either happens automatically in your camera or you can just set your computer to do it and it runs overnight or whatever. And those are much easier files to edit with. You can give those to your editor. They're going to work with it. Or maybe they're the ones creating. This is called offline editing. Online editing is when the original footage is reattached and you're working with those chonky files. A lot of the basic cutting can happen. All the basic cutting can happen with those proxy files. So great to have. And then in the end, the computer, the software will just flip them back. Different softwares, different cameras might have different things associated with them. So I suggest you look up the workflow, make sure it works perfectly with whatever camera and software is being used. So that being said, the first step is editing and I call it cutting, right? Because I find that editing has like a very global term to it. But I like to say cutting when I'm talking about that first phase. So the editor is first going to be syncing up all the sound with the video, organizing the footage in a way that they like within their editing software. And once they're ready to go, they can start going scene by scene, creating the edits, cutting the film together. If you're a filmmaker who's working with an editor, you can be requesting each scene individually. You want to see edits of each scene or you want to see edits of the whole film. If it's a short film, like you don't want to wait. You don't want to see every single individual scene every single time. You're probably also sitting with the editor a lot of the time working with them. It depends on what the workflow you determine is. I as an editor, if someone's hiring me more often than not, I'm just using the script, maybe some shot notes and someone gave notes or wrote notes on set of what were their favorite takes in the moment. And I can use that to compile a first edit to present to the director. However you want to work, establish that with your editor ahead of time. But you're going through multiple iterations of this edit, right? So you're going to have one or two or three tweaking things. The sound is rough. The actual sound just you have all six microphones on at the same time. You know, so there's lots of reverb and background noise and interference or whatever. And you're going at it. You're making stuff. And then eventually, when you're happy with what you have, you're eventually going to be picture locked. Picture locked means that your edit, your cut is done. Do not move to the next steps until you know that the edit that you have is the movie that you want. There are certain placeholders you can have. You can have placeholders for animation or title sequence or credits or whatever. But essentially, the timing of your film in any way should not change from now on. That includes trimming two frames off of the end of a shot. You are picture locked. It's done. After that, you are then going to be sending your files out to all the different post departments. That's going to include sound, music and color. So music, you can send it off to music pretty immediately. In fact, some composers like being involved as early as possible, even in the filming phase, right? They want to see what is happening and they want to start coming up with motifs right off the bat. That way they can be designing some some some sounds, some some types of music, tent music, even to give you while you're editing, working with your composer early on or when you're done your picture lock, they're going to be starting to create music and you're going to be working back and forth with them again on different iterations of the songs. Send them inspirations, projects that you're inspired by, songs that you're inspired by. If you want to help figure out what the tone of each thing is now. At the same time, your sound can be edited. You can send your project in to the sound department. And I've kind of broken their thing down into the three sections, which is sound edit. And that's usually that's that's fixing up the sound that was recorded. So that might be selecting microphones. Obviously, that's a very important one. Fading them in and out, removing any kind of just like, you know, interference or reverb, messing with the reverb, EQing, all that kind of stuff that happens in the sound edit. After that, they have Foley and effects. Effects is if you're taking it from like a database of effects, of existing sound cues, you can take those and put them in. But then Foley is stuff that is specifically recorded in the studio to complement sounds or, you know, replace sounds that are either not caught properly with the microphone or just to accentuate things. So, you know, sometimes you see people turning a paper or you're putting down a cup and it sounds really rich. It's probably because that was recorded in post as Foley or it was an effect. So that happens after the sound edit. And then finally, the sound mix happens. And the sound mix really can only happen when you also have the music, because the mix of their voice also depends on the music that you choose. There's certain moments that things need to be adjusted, right? I'm sure they can do a basic sound mix before the music comes in, but you really can't finalize that mix until the music's in. So there's a lot to do in the sound department. They're going to have a way they like to be delivered the files. You know, there's different AF and OMF and all these different versions. But usually that's something that's determined by a post-production supervisor, like a discussion they have with them. Or they a lot of times some people have their own sheets that they send you. And it's just like it lays out how they want their files delivered. So it's usually the sound files and a reference video, not all the video files. They don't give the video files to your sound engineer, just a reference. So it's going to be like a 720p, low bitrate video with timecode burnt in. So that way they can watch the video as they're mixing. They don't have all those chonky, heavy raw files that they have to read. And then finally, the color. So really, at the same time as all of this is happening, you can be sending this off to your color grading person or studio color grading. And actually all of post-production is pretty expensive. There's a lot of setup and equipment and stuff that's been built up over time in order for them to help you with your film and their expertise. And it's not like the most fun job. You're out on set with a whole bunch of people. You're like locked in a dark room, you know, just by yourself, color grading or whatever. I love to color grade. I love to be there at the color grade from the start. And it's usually me and at the very least, my cinematographer who had a very strong vision for the aesthetic as well. And you two talked about that. And a lot of the times it's just, you know, you agree and sometimes you disagree. And it kind of spurs this conversation and you decide where you want it to go. Ultimately, as the filmmaker, as a director, it's your decision. But cinematographer might have shot things a certain way because they had an intention for it to be color graded a certain way. And it's important to talk with them and take everything they say into consideration. So it's usually you as a filmmaker. The cinematographer, the color grader and, you know, whoever else wants to be there for the color grader. They're going to need the original raw files to work off of. So when you give them a timeline, an XML or whatever from your editing software, you know, which is basically just going to recreate the timeline on their software. You need to also bring them all the raw footage on a hard drive for them to take and put onto their computer. But there you go. So that's happening. Color is happening. Sound is happening. Music's happening. In the end, all of that gets sent back to the editor. The editor is going to be getting a stereo or five point one wave file from the sound mixer, and the color grader is going to be sending you either individual clips or a single clip. But either way, they are very heavy files. They have a lot of information on them. And the reason for that is that then you take that. That's your master video file. You can then export again off of that. So it's a very high quality image. And the editor takes that, takes the audio, puts it together in their timeline, and will start to put in any text. So at this point, you're putting in, you know, you're putting in all the assets. Maybe you've got a title from the graphic designer that you want to put in, and maybe you got something from an animator, and maybe you want to now put in the rolling credits at the end. All these things are done in that final timeline with those assets. Great. So there you go. You've got the assembly. You've got the titles in. Maybe you've even done some closed captioning, right? Because maybe some film festivals require closed captioning. So you have that ready for you for them. So you subtitle or closed caption, and then there you go. Then you export a final file depending on, you know, if you're sending it to YouTube, you just export an MP4. But maybe you need the captions burned in. Maybe you need them turned off. Maybe it needs to be French captions because you're at a French festival. Or maybe you need to also create a DCP. This is really the last step for festivals. Some festivals, depending on on the cinema that they're in, they need a MP4 or an MOV. And some, if it's a fancy festival, they need a DCP, a digital cinema package that I do not know how to create. So I'm not going to pretend that I do. You can create it on your own using Resolve or I think Premiere can do it. From what I've heard, the hard part is testing it. You have no way to test it because you need a cinema to test it. So a lot of the times your color grading studio that you're using has the ability to create and test DCPs. They're not cheap. It can be five, six hundred dollars. But, you know, it sucked to make us put all this effort into a movie and then it doesn't screen properly at a festival because you made your own DCP and it sucks. So weigh that, you know, weigh that option of having someone else create a DCP. Don't do it until you actually need it. So you might get into a festival and they're like, no, we don't use DCPs. We just use MOV files. So there you have it. My friends, you're done the film. It's exported. It's sent. You watch it on the big screen. I congratulate you in the future when you do this. Think of me. You're watching the movie. Just think of me. Don't don't watch the movie. Think of me. And I'm giving you a thumbs up like this. You know, good job. You did it. I would love to talk about festivals and distribution and all that kind of stuff, but I am not the person qualified to do that just yet. Maybe one day in the future. But I can share my experiences with festivals, but it's not necessarily a very strategic experience. I hope you enjoyed this series. Again, if you did not watch the other three videos, I'm going to leave them in the description. If this did help you and you think you can help someone else, please share it. Please get it out there. I put a lot of effort into these four videos and I hope they were helpful. And if they were, tell a friend and it would mean a lot to me. It'd mean a lot to the channel. All of us at the channel. Happy filmmaking. I'll see you in the next one. All right. Mwah. Goodbye. Camera off.