Editorial Update

By Kevin Gasca editor

Hello all! Just giving you all an update on how post-production is going for Palo Alto. At the moment the film is in the hands of our sound and music departments, as well as we are currently doing our HD conform. All this probably sounds a lot like confusing “film speak” but I assure you we are actually working for real!

The sound department, lead by our supervising sound editor Laura Schmadel, is currently cutting and mixing the foley, hard effects and ADR (automated dialogue replacement). This is a painstaking process where they literally have to recreate every sound that we either purposefully left out during production, or that would be too expensive for us to use practically. Once Brad has approved all of the sound edit, it is then mixed to finesse the sound to how it will ultimately play in the final.

The music department, consisting of our composer Geoffrey Pope and music supervisor Eric Robinson, is working simultaneously on the film bringing together the music into one cohesive piece that will bring the films emotion to a much higher level. The power of music is incredible; music for film is no different!

Lastly, during these final stages of the post-production process, the film is converted from the standard resolution (SD DVCAM) to the high resolution (HD D5). This is where the film’s images and beauty get to finally come to fruition. This process is highly technical and involves re-digitizing the footage in the uncompressed (1:1) format and reconnecting this new footage with the original avid output of the film. This process is done per reel (in our case 5 times) and then brought together into one final high definition long-play. This long-play is then laid down onto a D5 tape which then is dubbed (“copied”) and then with this new copy, we go through the final color correction process (also known as the “final tape-to-tape”). At this stage, we also create the final titles for the opening credits and the final end crawl.

Once every department is done with the respective tasks all of the pieces are brought together for the final version of the film, which is called the final play master.

Hope this has been interesting and informative! Best wishes!