Appendix 1

The Filmmaker’s Guide to Final Cut Pro Workfl ow
Let the splice stand for thirty seconds or so, longer if the splicer is cool. Carefully open all the clamps
on the splicer and check the splice. There should be no glue extending onto the picture and the splice
should be strong. The black leader should totally hide the splice, as shown in Figure A8.3. This is
true in bookend splices as well, where fi lm is spliced at both ends of a negative, as seen in
Figure A8.4. After a few minutes, you should be able to twist the fi lm slightly without the corners
coming up.
Figure A8.3 The fi nished splice
Figure A8.4 Bookend splices
The outgoing splice is a mirror of the incoming splice. The fi lm can be placed in the splicer forming
a large S shape coming off the reels, or you can make all the head splices in one pass rolling head
to tail and all the tail splices in one pass rolling tail to head. But the picture is always in the splicer
on the left and black on the right. Never scrape the black leader.
The standard practice is to conform the entire negative by taping the rolls together with paper tape
stuck only to the area that will be lost in splicing. Then making all of the head splices rolling in from
head to tail then reversing the rolls and winding back tail to head doing all of the tail splices.
The shots are pulled from the camera or lab rolls by winding into the shots and cutting out the shots
with scissors. Because the splicer requires an extra frame at each end for scraping, standard practice
on 16 mm is to cut through the center of the frame outside of the frame to be scraped. This means
that one-and-a-half frames are lost. This is why the “cut handles” in Final Cut Pro are set to three
frames in 16 mm, one and a half at the head and tail of every shot. On 35 mm, standard practice is
to cut through the middle of the frame to be scraped. As noted earlier, 35 mm splicers only require
one half of a frame for scraping. Here, too, this makes the cut handles in 35 mm only one frame.
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