Myriad advances in technology are not only accommodating a freer, rapid-fire flow of information between client, agency, production and post-production teams, but have also put into the hands of a growing number of editors the tools to enter what used to be the mysterious domain of the effects shop. More and more, editors are being charged with the responsibilities of compositing, working with mattes and color-correcting in the offline stage to give as polished a representation as possible of what the online result will look like. In other words, the rough cut isn't so rough anymore.

Advances like portable editing suites and recent toolkit features like Avid's AniMatte for the Media Composer system have emerged seemingly in step with other tech developments such as higher bandwidth for file exchange and delivery. Thus, clients are much more in the mix than ever before, and luckily, the technology exists to appease them into approving concepts and cuts with a minimum of guess work on their part.

"Some clients may have that fear factor - 'What's this going to look like?'," says FilmCore LA editor Michael Hackett of the increased demand to see more polished effects elements at the offline stage. "We're not working with tapes anymore - we've got screening rooms online, FTPs, and approvals are happening a lot quicker. Technology has allowed us to present to clients in a way we never had to. So these requests go hand in hand with that."

Dave Webb, editor at the London office of Final Cut says the capability on the part of editors to provide that reassurance has made it part of the expectation."You can't say, 'We'll fix it in post' - you have to show them," he says.

Webb says having to provide offline edits with composites and matte work is a recent development for him, and not one that's necessarily purely client-driven. His work on GHD "Restaurant" involved working with one sweeping motion-control shot in which each of the three characters had to be repeated many times. By the time he'd completed the offline, he'd composited 24 layers and crashed two Avid suites.

"The director was sitting here at one point when I had composited all the main action and we were going through the layers," he recalls. "And he said, 'Wasn't there supposed to be a waiter that we were going to comp into the background?' I told him that I was going to get the online guys to do it as there was only one take of this thing. And he said that he thought the client would want to be able to see it, so the director was pushing to get it as polished as possible."

"Once the process is started, it gets a lot harder to change things, whether it's a timeframe issue or a cost issue," says David Gioiella, a partner and editor at New York-based Northern Lights Post who gained his initial experience with VFX as an intern at Industrial Light & Magic. A recent four-spot Office Depot campaign required rotoscoping, keying, morphing and 3D tracking, all on the part of the editing team. "I like to be able to tell people when we're working that any idea that comes out of the process can be done and at least illustrated roughly on screen before all this effort and money is allocated on doing it."

Pre-Viz Prep
Increasingly with effects-oriented spots, where time and money are especially of the essence, tech-savvy editors are brought into the mix at the boards stage, offering input on what can or can't be done and cutting animatics for the agency, production company and client alike. And in situations where, as Hackett puts it, "the agency has the foresight to do so", editors are involved in the pre-viz, helping to block out the spot for directors, animators and effects teams, and bringing to light any potential pitfalls that could arise with certain shots.

Lost Planet editor Paul Martinez credits being involved at the pre-viz stage on BBDO, New York's Pepsi "Pinball" spot, helmed by Traktor, with making the process one of the most organized and easiest effects-driven shoots he's been involved with. "Traktor was in San Francisco before the shoot and we'd have discussions about certain shots, and then the animator would put those shots together for the pre-viz and send them to me," he explains. "I'd start cutting pieces together and we could have an interaction where I could tell the animator the sort of shots that would help me with the edit, and he could animate it - even before any casting was done.

"I was cutting together rough animations that would still hold true when the spot was shot, so we basically had an edited spot just from the animation," he continues. "We put together the pre-viz and I added sound and music to it, so even though it was animated, the client got the feeling of what was going to happen. The creative directors signed off on it, the clients signed off on it. By the time you get to shooting, you know you'll have what the client wants to see and what will work creatively."

Once that edit was completed, clean background plates were shot, which were then sent to Martinez for another edit, as well as a CG pinball and central character supplied by VFX company Method Studios and comped into the edit by Martinez. "That gave me a rough timing," he says. "It also gave everyone from the director to the agency a chance to see the pace from the beginning."

Martinez says being able to edit on-set, working with footage fed to him by the video assist practically as it's shot, is also a major boon when it comes to attaining all-important client approval or troubleshooting. "With portable editing, you can put things together on set and help people get their heads around what they need to shoot," he says. "It's definitely changed the point in which we get involved with a job."

Gioiella concurs: "As everything becomes more portable, it allows me to go on set and do these pre-comps faster and therefore have more say on how these things are put together from the day of the shoot rather than complaining two weeks later."

A Matter Of Trust and Teamwork
Of course, there are also editors who are wary of getting too deeply involved in manipulating footage to replicate online effects. Stephane Pereira, an editor with Fluid Editorial in New York, has worked on a multitude of effects-oriented spots, most regularly with Antoine Bardou-Jacquet. And while he's not averse to doing the odd bit of keying in the offline stage (as he did for Euro RSCG's recent ice-skating carbot spot for Citroën), he doesn't deal in pre-comps.

"My role is to serve as a collaborator to the director," he offers. "With Antoine, I work prior to the shoots with him on storyboards and collaborate at that stage. I also intervene at the very end, once everything has been done with the effects. I don't do any compositing.

"With the tools we've been using for the past eight years and all of the new tools of the last few years, perhaps there's more of an expectation to see something before you've even started," he reasons. "Maybe the evaluation process in the US, where the clients need to validate things before they are finished, can be a factor. [But] when you work with very high-profile directors, there is more trust that the end product will be great."

Indeed, even some editors who freely indulge in messing with mattes and comps say that while such effects knowledge should be second nature to an editor today, it can potentially detract from the main task at hand: using his or her toolkit to tell the story. "There's going to be a need to develop new skills in compositing because editors are being increasingly asked to do that," says Hackett. "But once the editor steps outside of the edit and starts dealing with something like AfterEffects, that creative story-telling process really slows down. I don't think it's as fluid. In an effort to make everything look as polished as possible, you're hindered by the intricacies of the program and the minutiae."

"For the longest time the school of thought was to keep everything in one box - you can offline in there, color-correct, do online," says Gioiella. "But I don't embrace the tools for those purposes. I use them to illustrate concepts and effects but it's the collaboration with other artists that really makes a spot work and makes it cohesive."

Martinez offers that it's about being part of the team."Yes, you have to learn the programs and the plug-ins, and it may change slightly every time a new piece of software comes out, but you just have to force yourself to do it because it will make everything so much easier." He maintains that while he may be performing a lot of the tasks that a Flame or Inferno op may've done in years past, it all just makes him a more valuable part of the process, lending the editor's innate sense of storytelling to a genre that needs it.

"The spot has to have some kind of soul, some kind of story, more than just being one big effect. As an editor, you always have to keep your mind on that - you don't want the spot to be just one giant explosion.

"So if you can watch a pre-viz and you're feeling something from that, then you know the spot's probably going to work."

And as Hackett says,"We're all going to need to keep evolving and learning new tools, but as a creative editor you need to remember that that's what you do - you edit."

FilmCore Editorial http://www.filmcore.com
Final Cut http://www.finalcut-edit.com
Fluid Post http://www.fluidny.com
Lost Planet http://www.lostplanet.com

Northern Lights Post> www.nlpedit.com