Post-Production Guide

Congratulations! Your shoot is done, you've got 24 beautiful hours of footage, hundreds or even thousands of photos, and now it's time for the moment you've been waiting for...

Post-Production

Firstly, we send a great big thank you to you from all of the volunteers who have worked on this developing this document and all of the additional volunteers who will be processing this content in the future for your paying close attention to these guidelines. If you would like to suggest changes or edit this document, send an email to dave at globallives dot org.

 So, here's what needs to be done, preferably in this order:

 

1. Shoot debrief (a.k.a. Director/Producer's Statement)

 Write down all of your observations about the day of the shoot and the preparations--what went well, what went wrong, what you would do differently in hindsight. This is intended for the use of future teams as a way for us to build institutional memory. Write this up as soon as you can and then save it so that when you're done with post-production, you can also write a post-production debrief as well, summing everything up.

 

2. SHARE PHOTOS ONLINE & THROUGH DROPBOX

Create an online photo album of stills from the shoot. This is important because everyone gets to see what you've got right away! Also, upload High-Res photos to GLP's DropBox.

FLICKR: We have set up a photo pool on Flickr in order to share our best pictures with the world. To upload your pictures to Flickr, sign up for an account (free) and upload the best 50 to 100 pictures from your shoot with captions. Tag all of your photos "globallives" and send them to our group pool by joining our group and then in the "organize" tab, selecting all the pictures and sending them to our group.

You must also be certain to include a photo of every crew member who participated in this upload, as we will be featuring them on our website and in the exhibition. Please be sure to include their names.

Captioning: It is better to have more detailed captions and only the best pictures than lots of pictures with skimpy captions. Captions should be written in complete sentences and should include as much concrete information as possible, including what exactly is pictured and any relevant (but brief) cultural/historical context. Remember that photos will eventually become part of our GLP searchable photo database, so think about search terms people might use to find your image. Captions must also include the full name of the photographer. In the descriptions of your sets, be sure to mention the date and location of your shoot as well.

DROPBOX: Along with this, you should upload the full resolution versions of these pictures to our FTP drop box.  Go to www.dropbox.com  For easiest and fastest upload process, click "Download Dropbox" and instal this desktop application first.  Then, login either online or by opening this application.

Login:

Email: photos@globallives.org
Password: email david for pw

Navigate to the files and folders. To upload photos, open folder "Photos", and find your corresponding country.  Please also upload a text file with the captions and file names of each photo, and please rename the photos with the name of your subject and a number, i.e., "edith01.jpg," etc. If you shot in RAW, please also upload the original RAW files of these photos and make sure that filenames correspond to the jpgs.

 
3. Contextual Essay + Crew List & Bios

Write a 2 to 4 page, double-spaced essay covering the subject's day, life story and important local, regional and national context issues that shape their life. This will be edited and posted on our website and used in our book and educational materials. Be sure to double-check all facts and have other members of your team read it over to see what they think and if they have additional contributions.

Be sure to include: population of the country and city/town/village, demographic characteristics of the subject (age, income, religion, etc.), description of family, political-economic characteristics of the region, history of the region, etc.

With this essay, you must also submit a final list of the crew members who participated, their short bios (up to 100 words), and their credits for the shoot (camera operator, director, etc.—or whatever other terms you like) as these will be posted on our website as well.

 


4. Transcribing, translating, and subtitling the full 24 hours and the life story recording

This is the most involved part of the process. Luckily, we've probably made all the mistakes you could possibly make already between San Francisco and São Paulo. As such, we've developed this step-by-step guide that will hopefully make the process as painless as possible for you. If possible, try to do this at a well-equipped university computer lab or other location where you will have access to multiple Macintosh computers that you can create a distributed processing setup on. This will greatly increase your efficiency with the compression part of the process. We assume in these steps that you are using Final Cut Pro, although it is possible (though not recommended) that you could do all of this in another video editing suite like Premiere or Vegas.
 

Step 1: Capture your tapes.

You will need about 300 gb of free disk space to do this, as each tape uses ~12gb. Make sure that your Audio/Video Settings are configured for HDV and the type of video that you collected (1080i60, 1080p24, etc.). Also make sure that the "Create new clip on start/stop" in the "Clip Settings" panel of the Log and Capture window is NOT selected, as you want each tape to be its own single file, and if your camera operator happened to stop the camera for any reason (battery change, etc.) during a tape, you'll end up with unwanted breaks. Also be sure to establish your naming conventions before you start for the files, i.e., "edith_tape01" for the first tape, etc.


Step 2: Compress the tapes into uploadable files.

You will do this using the program called Compressor, which comes with FCP. You will need to create a new compression preset based on the "Web Streaming (Quicktime 7 compatible): H.264 800Kbps Streaming" format that allows for the 16x9 video to be compressed and output as 16x9 files.

To do this, open the Presets window (command-2), select the aforementioned preset and then click the Duplicate Selected Setting button at the top of the window (a little file with a plus icon). This will give you a new setting under the Custom folder, which you can then edit. All you need to do is change the frame size under the geometry settings tab. Select "Custom" and then change the dimensions from 320x240 to 320x180. Rename your preset with a name you'll remember and then you're ready to go!

To start running the compressions, drag each tape file into the batch window, select your newly created compression preset from the pull-down menu, and set it to run. Unfortunately, if you're doing this on a laptop or even a semi-recent desktop, each tape can take upwards of 24 hours to compress. If at all possible, the best thing to do to make this go faster is to get your hands on at least one or two other computers (in Brazil, we borrowed friends' laptops over a few weekends) and go to step 2.5.


Step 2.5 (optional, but highly recommended): Set up a distributed processing cluster.

Even adding just one additional computer to the mix will speed up this process considerably. First, find your FCP installer DVDs and in the "Extras" folder, find the file called "AppleQmasterNode.mpkg". This is an installer for Qmaster, the distributed processing software that you'll be using.

You will then have a new preferences panel on all of your computers called Qmaster, where you will activate Qmaster. Designate one computer to be in charge of all the distribution, and in that computer's control panel, create a Quick Cluster. On the others, select, "Share this computer as: Services only." These computers will receive tasks from the Quick Cluster controller computer.

Now is the tricky part. You may need to restart all the involved computers, and also restart the cluster services a few times before you can actually get the darned thing to work. If you can find someone who has a lot of experience with this stuff, ask them to help you if you can, as for me, there is still an element of voodoo involved in getting the darned thing to work reliably. The good thing is that when it does work, it really saves you a ton of time, so even if you have to invest a few hours and a few phone calls to make it work, you could, depending on how many computers you get involved, save yourself a few weeks of processing time.

If you are able to make it work reliably, please share your technique here!

Note (July 1, 2007 - David Harris): I've totally and inexplicably lost my ability to make Qmaster work with my group of laptops here in São Paulo. I've decided to just copy each tape that I want to compress onto each computer's hard drive (or external HD) and have each computer compress individually. Each tape takes ~24 hours to compress. It was easier with Qmaster, but I just wasted so much time trying and failing to get it to work that I've given up. If you are a Qmaster guru or know someone who is and wants to post a tutorial or link us to one on this subject (I've read quite a few articles in the Apple help and none of them has worked), let me know!


Step 3: Upload compressed tapes to DotSub.com and to our own web server

To understand what DotSub is all about, watch their nice demo video.

First create an account on DotSub.com with a nice, recognizable name, like "globallives.japan," and start uploading your files. Each file should be about 400mb in size.

Secondly, we ask that you upload the same files that you have uploaded to dotsub to our SFTP dropbox (see directions above for photos) in the folder "/dropbox/compressed_video_files/countryname". This will allow for editors in other locations to work with your video content and to download the dotsub titles and create derivative works.


Step 4: Transcription & Translation

DotSub is the key to the whole transcription & translation process. The first step is to get as many highly literate volunteers involved in this process as possible. It is very time-consuming, and as such, the more you can split it up, the better.

The way that DotSub works is that first you create your base transcript of the video in the original language. This language is where all of the timing for all of the subtitles is determined once and for all, so be sure you get it right before you click on "finalize transcript." After that's done, then it's time for the translating, which, in the hands of a reasonably skilled translator, is now much faster than the transcribing, and then when you're done, poof!, the subtitles are there and ready.

We are not doing closed captioning, except in the case that there is a sound coming from off camera that influences the behavior of the subject that the average listener can't make out, such as, (call to prayer) or (school bell ringing). We are using the music note symbols offered by DotSub to denote singing.

The transcription process is also a great place to begin to get text information about what happens during each tape. As transcribers and translators watch their tapes, please instruct them to make a note, with rough time codes, of what happens during each hour of the day. This can be included on the DotSub descriptions of each video.

Please take a close look at our translation style guide before you start subtitling and make sure that your translation volunteers look at it as well. Also, in recruiting translators, please post a new wiki page and ask a site admin to post a link on our translation volunteer page describing how you want volunteers to contact you or get involved in your translation process. You may also find our Facebook Global Lives Translation Brigade to be a good place to look for volunteers.

 

Step 5: Email the SUBTITLES

Email David the final .SRT files that DotSUB exports. Check to make sure that the timecode on all your subtitles is accurate.  

On each clip in DotSub, you can download the SRT file. Simply download them (in the Translate and Transcribe box on each clip), organize them and mail them to David with instructions.

Please make sure that you have had a native English speaker proofread every single clip. 

 


5. The 5-8-Minute SHORT

This short video will be put on our website and DVD and be sold with books at our exhibits, it might even end up on TV too. For the San Francisco shoot, we first did a 30-minute cut, and then a 15-minute cut. After repeated screenings in the US and Brazil, we came to the conclusion that, in order to hold people's attention, we needed to produce something shorter, which led us to do a 5-minute cut of the Brazil shoot. Take a look at the discussion of that editing process to get an idea of what we considered in putting it together. We had originally planned to use footage from the life story interview in this cut, but in the end, the editing group, led by Helio Ishii, made the decision to use only footage from the 24 hours.

The life story video in its entirety will still be made available online and will serve as important background information for our planned project book and for the bio of Rael, the Brazilian subject, to be featured on the GLP website. It was also agreed that the life story interview was an important part of preparing the subject for the day of the shoot and building their relationship with the crew.

Future teams are invited to take creative license in the production of their 5-minute shorts, choosing whether or not to incorporate the life story footage. The five-minute restriction, however, is important to stick to, as it will be a part of an hour-long DVD and possibly a TV broadcast in the future. If your team would like to cut a longer version as well, that is great, and both can be included on the web. Please be sure to submit the FCP projects that reference the raw footage on your hard disk in a way that edits can easily be made in case and post-post-production adjustments need to be made.

 


6. Audio finishing and color correcting

For the full 24-hour shoot, this need only be done for situations where there are significant problems with the exposure or audio levels. These should be noted during the transcription process.

 

 

7. Send a FULL QUALITY VERSION of VIDEO for use in Exhibit - Due DEC 15

Choose Method A or B below.  Make sure to have a full backup of all footage stored locally.  Ship David 

the Hard Drives and Tapes. . If you do not have storage space for a backup copy, send just the hard drive and keep the tapes until you receive a confirmation that David has received the HD. Then you will ship the tapes separately. Ship to:

 

Coco Harris

  1200 California St., Apt 4C

  San Francisco CA 94109

 

A) You are sending us full resolution HDV files that are exactly

  the same length (frame for frame!!) as the compressed files that

  you uploaded to DotSUB for translators. You get these by using

  the FCP Export>Quicktime Movie... command and leaving settings

  the same. A 15-minute file should be ~3GB.

 

  OR

 

 B) You are sending us two 12-hour timelines in a clearly labeled

  FCP project file and all of the referenced media with MARKERS

  placed at exactly the same frames where your in/out points were

  for exporting your compressed DotSUB videos.

 

 

8. Post-production Debrief & Director/Producer's Statement part II

Go back to the debrief that you wrote in Step 1 and now add to it all of the lessons that you've learned in the post-production process. Tell us exactly how long the process took, what tasks you used volunteers for, which ones people were paid for, how you managed the tasks, where the bottlenecks were, and how this could be done more efficiently. Then edit this document and make these directions better. Thank you!!!!


For questions or suggested changes, email david at globallives dot org

 


Note on naming your subject files:

For ease of collaboration, all files (video, photos, text) should include the first name only of your subject (if we get multiples, we can start using last names too or initials). Also, in file names, please try to give as much information as possible, such as the date of the version (in ISO-8601 format), the file format if it's video, the length of the video, language (using two-letter ISO 639-1 codes).

Examples:

rael_short_5m47s_hdv_2007-06-02_en = Short video of Rael Feliciano, 5 minutes, 47 seconds, HDV (high definition video codec), June 2, 2008, english.

If you're on Mac, Name Mangler is a great freeware program to help organize filenames.

 

 Final Cut Pro Resources (from Jason Price):

http://www.2-popforums.com/forums/

http://forums.creativecow.net/forum/applefinalcutpro

http://www.lafcpug.org/forum.html

http://www.kenstone.net/discussions/list.php?3

http://www.digitalzoo.com.au/lunchtime/