Appendix 1

Introduction
Overview
There was a time, not long ago when, if someone asked how motion pictures were edited, you could
hand them a book. It was a fairly short and straightforward book explaining the process of work
printing, syncing, editing, and conforming. All fi lms were shot and edited in, more or less, the same
way. The editors all knew what was expected of them, the lab knew what their role was, and the
costs were simply the costs.
Those days are gone with the dinosaurs and the ten-cent cup of coffee. That well-worn path through
the woods is now overgrown with brush, and fi lmmakers can be seen stumbling blindly through the
trees and undergrowth in search of the fastest and cheapest route between here and there. Now and
then, someone shouts that they have found a shortcut, a new and clever way through, only to have
someone else shout them down saying that their way is faster still and cheaper to boot.
The path through postproduction is now called workfl ow, the ordering of the steps that takes the fi lm
from shooting to distribution. The problem is not that there are no good workfl ows, but that there
are so many. And each has options, variations in when to zig and when to zag. An examination of
one-hundred fi lms will likely reveal one-hundred workfl ows.
The starting and ending points are shifting as well. Shooting on digital formats, digital intermediates,
and digital projection all complicate the problem. What worked this year may not work next year
because the technology moved on, or the new and revolutionary thingamajig that you just bought
for half a million dollars may have turned out to be a digital Edsel.
This book is intended to direct motion picture editors through the complicated maze of postproduction
workfl ow using Final Cut Pro Studio with Cinema Tools, Adobe graphics applications, and Pro
Tools. While there are many other paths through this maze, this book focuses on workfl ows using
only these software packages. This is not because this is the most common or simplest way of editing
motion pictures, but precisely because it is not the most common. The advantages of these workfl ows
are cost savings, fl exibility, and freedom. Freedom to edit on a laptop in a cabin at Lake Tahoe or
the red sandstone cliffs of Utah, fl exibility to edit 35 mm fi lm, high-defi nition digital, or digital video
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