Spending the next 8-9 hours transferring footage from camera to my hard drives. A laborious process but am getting a good workflow going. Heres how it goes in Premiere Pro :

1 play tape through until you find the first usable take
2 rewind to this takes start point
3 select scene detect
4 enter name as scene no and description
5 capture
6 pause at end of scene, deleting section of next scene captured by scene detect
7 go to 1

This seems to me the best capture method. In effect you are saving time in the capture/edit process as you are shot selecting in the capture itself. Saves both time and disk space – and with HDV this is a good thing.

I’m flying now, taking off on the editing suite. Started yesterday to edit circular tracking shots around six actors. This was my Reservoir Dogs diner moment. Man its tricky to edit but when it comes together, as it is now, its awesome. Just love the pace and urgency of the scene as the group decide who will stay and who will leave. I’m loving this, just loving it! Chew? Toby Chew? Charlie fucking Chan.

Post by Kris Tearse: Myself and Rhys have been chained to our desks trying to get through as much of the editing as possible. The majority of the footage captured has been edited and things are moving along nicely. Hopefully once shooting is finished Sunday we should have the majority of the first 4 podcasts edited. Obviously this isn’t including any further post such as sound but we’re getting there!

For the opening scene we went for a ‘Man on Fire’ approach using time ramping to give it a quite crazy effect. Cameraman extraordinaire, Neill Phillips, recently added a few more effects and cuts to the scene and we can confirm that it’s looking pretty damn sweet. Further editing updates appearing shortly!!

Kris, Matthew Gyngell and myself worked on transferring the Panasonic footage to Final Cut Pro last night. All the steadcam shots were taken with the Panosonic HVX 200. We’ve been having problems as although v. 5.01 has the menu choice to import P2 footage when you click on the link nothing happened. A quick web search later and we found that FCP 5.14 was needed. In stepped Matthew with this version and imported the files no problems. After flipping the images – due to the Brevis rotating the image 180 degrees – we are ready to edit. The titles are complete and ready to put into the opening sequence.

info@zombieundead.com

Kris has been working on the edit for the footage shot so far and the rough first edit looks awesome. We’re shooting pretty much chronologically so he’s working on the first scenes – the bomber leaving the train station and planting the dirty bomb. Some great use of speed ramping and time reversal in there. These effects were not just for visual flare but to represent the convoluted state of the bombers mind and work a treat.

The back story for the plot is set in these first few minutes which are cut into the film titles. How we are distributing the film necessitates a quick start to the feature so we keep viewers attention. We’re using the titles from Zombie Undead – The Short Film as they have a great cinematic feel to them and their dirty, grainy feel fits in with the start of the feature nicely.

info@zombieundead.com