Academy Award-winning director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Erin Brockovich and Ocean’s 11) is returning to his independent film roots with his next film, Full Frontal, a (sort of) digital sequel to his indie hit sex, lies & videotape.” And Soderbergh is using Mac technology to make his new flick, according to an Apple Hot News article .
Soderbergh and producer Scott Kramer built a postproduction workflow around Final Cut Pro 3, which Kramer calls “the perfect solution for their take-no-prisoners approach to filmmaking.” The Full Frontal team worked with Apple and Outpost Digital, a postproduction facility in New York, to design a workflow that would satisfy the unique requirements that included a combination of DV and film acquisition (80 percent DV, 20 percent 35mm), and a SAN-based editing suite that would be available for editing during shooting in LA and then moved to New York for final cut and finishing, according to Apple.
The editors began capturing and editing during production in an edit suite set up in the Los Angeles offices of Universal Pictures, installed by DigitalFilm Tree, a Final Cut Pro post shop in LA.
“The real beauty of doing it on Final Cut Pro this way was the fact that their systems in essence were DV systems,” Evan Schechtman, principal of Outpost Digital, told Apple. “Everything was transferred to DVCAM and loaded that way. And they definitely used Rorke Galaxy 60 SAN to its fullest extent, not just for centralized storage, but to share volumes to enhance their workflow. In the past people were saying one of the problems with Final Cut Pro is that you can’t have shared storage. Obviously, you can.”
Final Cut Pro and CinéWave RT was used to color correct DV footage to Soderbergh’s specifications and to produce several tests of effects before the footage was printed to film.
Full Frontal was filmed chiefly in digital video (MiniDV), using Canon XL1s PAL cameras. All audio and video were synched in Final Cut Pro. In the final edit, various different pieces of music were given a test run by importing CD audio. After locking the picture, Outpost the editors exported sound reels to the sound editors as OMF files in QuickTime, along with QuickTime video.
Several dual processor G4s and 22-inch Apple Cinema Displays were used during the filmmaking process. Check out the Apple Hot News article for complete details.