Dialogue Editing

34 A QUICK LOOK AT PICTURE EDITING
to the projector’s shutter. A powerful cathode ray tube is the source of light,
and the image is scanned rather than merely videotaped. The telecine operator
has enormous control over brightness, contrast, and color, but with dailies
the transfer is usually one light, a term from fi lm printing meaning that no
great care was taken to color-correct each shot, but rather a decent, average
setup was used. Depending on the needs of the picture editing department,
the videotape format may be Betacam SP, Digital Betacam, DVCAM, U-Matic,
or S-VHS.
Increasingly, high-budget productions are forgoing transfer to tape and
instead creating high-defi nition fi les directly from the telecine. It’s only a
matter of time before this process is democratized and all transfers go straight
to disk. Tape or fi le, the process and the bottleneck issues are the same.
In certain circumstances, the audio from the shoot—whether originating on
DAT, Nagra-D, DA-88, or hard-disk recorder—is transferred to the videotape
during the telecine transfer (not recommended). Otherwise, the sound is
transferred and synchronized in the picture-cutting room.
Transferring negative to tape without developing a relationship between fi lm
frames and video frames is a waste of time. Remember, sooner or later, a
negative cutter will have the job of precisely recreating the picture editor’s
decisions. Unlike the picture editor working in a virtual world with many
levels of undo, the negative cutter works with a pair of scissors, with one
chance to get it right. This is no place for approximations. For the telecine
videotape to be useful, you must know the relationship between any given
videotape frame and the corresponding fi lm frame and original audio timecode.
If you don’t, you’ll fi nd yourself in darkness once the picture editing is
fi nished.
Establishing a relationship between the telecine videotape and the original
sound recording is no great feat, given that each carries timecode to identify
every frame. But what about the original fi lm negative, which holds no timecode?
Thankfully, original camera negative fi lm is manufactured with a
chunk of data printed twice per foot, outside the sprockets. Machine-readable
Keykode 1 barcodes contain address information as well as codes for manufacturer,
fi lm stock, and lot number. This information replicates the humanreadable
key number. During telecine transfer, the colorist creates a record
of pertinent information from the fi lm negative, the sound recording (if used),
and the transfer videotape.
1 Keykode is a trademark of the Eastman Kodak Company.