Dialogue Editing

16 NO ONE WORKS IN A VACUUM
A Brief Pause to Discuss Negative Cutting
in the Modern World
Avid’s Film Composer and Final Cut Pro’s Cinema Tools came into being
to allow editors cutting on workstations to create accurate negative cut lists.
It’s vital that the negative cutters know that a certain video frame refers
exactly to a corresponding frame of negative. This is not a good place for
approximations.
Negative cutting was more straightforward in the days of sprockets. You
simply put the 35 mm workprint into a sync block, read the key numbers from
the print (numbers that were printed directly from the original negative onto
the workprint), and found the corresponding piece of negative. Simple. Now
we edit on workstations, which offer countless creative advantages over fi lm
but make negative matching more complicated. Remember, you can’t directly
load fi lm negative into a workstation; you must fi rst transfer the image to
videotape or at least create some sort of a videolike stream and load that. This
process is called the telecine transfer and it’s done at the lab or at a boutique
“dailies facility” working in conjunction with the lab. Since neither PAL nor
NTSC video runs at fi lm speed, maintaining a relationship between fi lm
frames and video frames is a bit of a black art.
In the NTSC world, the transfer from fi lm (24 fps) to tape (29.97 fps) is accomplished
by scanning one frame of negative onto two successive fi elds of video,
then scanning the next frame onto three fi elds of video, and so on. This cycle,
called the 2 : 3 : 2 pulldown, 10 continues for frames A, B, C, and D; on the fi fth
frame the cycle starts over. 11 As long as the transfer engineer takes care to
start this “A-frame” cycle at the right place and then carefully logs all of the
appropriate information into a FLEx fi le, the Avid can keep track of the
redundant fi elds and deliver a reliable negative cut list. During telecine, and
for the rest the postproduction process until the picture is again on fi lm, all
picture and sound elements are slowed by 0.1 percent, to the NTSC crystal
rate of 59.94 Hz. While the project stays in the video/computer world, sound
and picture run at 29.97 fps.
Back on the other side of the ocean, PAL folks don’t even try to transfer the
24 fps negative to videotape at its natural speed. Instead, they accelerate it to
10 The 2 : 3 : 2 pulldown has many names: 3 : 2 pulldown, 2 : 3 pulldown, 2 : 3 : 2 pulldown,
and so on. It’s all the same thing.
11 A concise explanation of the NTSC 3 : 2 pulldown can be found in The Film Editing
Room Handbook, Third Edition, by Norman Hollyn (Los Angeles: Lone Eagle Press, 1999, pp.
105–14).