Ontario Nurses Association: Nurses Know.
The Ride Home and A Long Day
Client: Ontario Nurses Association
Producer: Compass360
Director: John Cook
Director of Photography: Gregory Bennett
Editor: Adam Schoales
February 2016
It was great to be brought back onto the team for another round of Ontario Nurses Association spots. These spots were going to take on a slightly different format from the last ones and meant I got to flex my “narrative” editing muscles, even if only slightly.
As with the previous spots, I got to be on set so I could take detailed notes which I could later feed into Shot Notes X. The first day was a studio shoot where we brought in a full size vehicle and used projection to simulate an outdoor night shoot, while the second day was a location shoot in a beautiful old Toronto home.
Behind the scenes of our first shoot featuring a full size car, front projection, and plenty of strategically placed lights
The spots were shot on an Arri Amira, which I absolutely love not just because it looks so great, but because of it’s ability to shoot ProRes 4444. This means that I can actually edit in the native full-resolution, online ready codec, which makes the colour/online stage so much easier (no wrangling of R3D files)! It’s especially nice that Final Cut Pro X features automatic built in LUTs for Amira so that while I’m cutting I am looking at a corrected image rather than the flat LOG image the camera actually shoots. This feature is especially helpful during client screenings, and the fact that it is automatic saves me from having to apply a LUT to each clip while I’m working.
Once again I employed the incredible power of Shot Notes X and Sync-N-Link X to make the ingest and organize process an absolute breeze. In a little under 5 minutes I went from a completely un-organized library to one that was fully marked up, had our circle takes selected, and all of our audio from the day synced to our clips. Being able to basically automate this process and get cutting as quickly as possible is for me the greatest benefit Final Cut Pro X has to offer. So much so in fact that I created a real-time demonstration of the process to help better explain the process, and encourage other editors to try it themselves (and to help them persuade their producers as well).
Demonstrating the power of Final Cut Pro X, Shot Notes X, and Sync-N-Link X in real time
I was once again amazed at how well my 15” Retina MacBook Pro was able to handle the 4K source material. No proxies were ever generated, and I never experienced any serious slow-downs or hiccups throughout the editing process. The 4K files were used in a 1080p timeline, with FCP X automatically resizing the clips to fit the new frame size. When it was necessary, we could easily reframe a shot because of the extra size afforded by the 4K files.
Because there were plenty of takes that we liked, I made use of "auditions" to be able to quickly and easily jump between the various options to help decide with the director which take was the absolute best. Along the way I also got to employ some clever trickery, combining multiple takes into one to create the perfect performance.
"Pulling a Fincher": editing together multiple takes for the perfect performance
When it came time to hand off files to the audio and colour team, the process was incredibly painless. I once again employed the incredible power that is X2Pro. I had been sure to set my roles early in the process so that when it came time to prep that AAF for the audio team they received a perfectly organized and clean project.
Mixing the audio with the talented team at Mach Sound Studios
The colourists we were using this time around weren’t colouring in DaVinci Resolve so the hand-off was slightly different than I had been used to in the past. However thanks to the excellent tool EDL-X I was able to prep the needed EDLs and send the material off to the colourists who had no problem getting the spots relinked and ready for colour.
I couldn’t be happier with the end results. The team at Compass360 did an incredible job of crafting these spots in a way that feels both honest and moving, while at the same time looking absolutely stunning. I am so proud to have played a small part in their creation.
TECHNICAL SPECS
Lat 2013 15" Retina MacBook Pro
2.6 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB Graphics Card
9 TB RAID (4x4TB drives RAID-5)
Final Cut Pro vr. 10.2.2