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!

Color Correction

By Brad Leong story, director

I’m sitting in the final color correction session as I write this. Everything is looking super great. George (Porgy) dropped by for a surprise visit, which was nice because I haven’t been able to see him much since production. I’ve gotten to know our colorist Steve Peer really well, we’ve spent a few lonely nights together locked in the telecine bay working away till 1 in the morning.



We got the cut D5 online of the film a few weeks ago and have been going through it and working on perfecting the color of every shot. The basic process starts with Rachel, our DP, coming in and scanning through the whole film with Steve color-correcting the wide of every scene under her direction. This sets the tone / color mood of the film as a whole and the specific color feel of the individual scenes. It took about 5 hours to do this.



Using these corrected wide shots as a reference Steve can then go in and correct all the other shots in the scenes around the wides. He makes all the shots conform and cut seamlessly between each other. This took another three nights of work to get through the whole film. While it’s fairly frustrating that it takes so long and you are literally moving though shot by shot our post house gives free meals to clients sitting in on color sessions so I’ve been loving it.

After Steven finishes working through the whole film there is a final session where the entire film is “laid down” meaning it’s actually printed to tape in real time. We are all sitting right now watching the final tape to tape “lay down” making sure everything looks excellentness. If there is a problem Steve can stop recording and we can go back and make changes and then pick up where we left off.



After tonight there are only a few more pictures processes. We still have to overlay opening credits as well as the ending roll. And we also need to do some computer magic to get rid of a few logos that we weren’t able to clear. But after those two things we are pretty much completely done with picture. Love it!