David Fincher's latest film, "Gone Girl," opened at number one this weekend and earned $38 million. It was Fincher's biggest opening weekend ever. It was also a veritable coming out party for the editing software his team used for the project, Adobe's Premiere Pro CC. Film editors play a crucial supporting role in the filmmaking process. Fincher's two-time Oscar-winning cutter, Kirk Baxter, is Oscar-worthy again.
Less visible, but crucially important, was the technology setup that enabled Fincher's dedicated team to achieve the director's vision. For "Gone Girl," Fincher's production team worked with Adobe product managers and engineers to develop a system that could maximize creative freedom and minimize frustration. We don't often think of it this way, but movies are exemplary big data problems. Making all of that data flow quickly is key to the tools enabling creative work rather than thwart it.
Each day of shooting produces terabytes of data that have to be organized and assessed before any creative work can be done with the footage. Once the data is in the pipeline, the editor has to be able to compare takes from each scene and roughly cut them together into sequences. These sequences are then passed to colorists and special effects people to make rough composites that the director will see as dailies. The director annotates the dailies and sends them back for refinement. And this process iterates over and over. Assistant editor and long-time collaborator, Tyler Nelson, has a quote from Fincher as his screen saver: "Make it perfect and we’ll go from there."
I saw a screening of the film yesterday at Adobe's MAX Conference in Los Angeles, and it is, in many ways, a perfect film. Ben Affleck may be too easy to like and Rosamund Pike too easy to hate, perhaps, but as a piece of film craft it is superb. It does not, in any way, seem like a "special effects" movie, and yet every frame has been elaborately touched by digital effects."Gone Girl" is in fact the first feature film to have ever been entirely produced using Adobe Premiere and its quality and success will pose a serious challenge to rival editing products, most notably Avid and
Without getting into the technical nitty gritty (which you can find on Adobe's blog and hardware partner Nvidia's case study) there are two innovations that supported the creative team. First, "Gone Girl" was shot in 6K resolution, but framed in 5K. This means that if the best take cut off the top of one of the actor's heads, it's no problem because there are 20% extra pixels on all sides to move the frame into. This fact creates enormous flexibility in the editing process. Instead of just having to make due with the camera work, the editor can make a suite of additional refinements in post-production. Because this is a Fincher production, the original camerawork is near perfect, so what we are seeing in "Gone Girl" is refinement on top of refinement.
The target of that 5K frame is actually a 4K master for cinematic release. So again, the extra resolution creates additional options in the final product. The big data problems come from the fact that keeping this beast moving involves, what post-production engineer Jeff Brue of Open Drives estimates as 2.6 GB per second peak bandwidth. So the challenge for Adobe and Nvidia (which provided the hardware for this workflow) was to enable all of this data to flow with as little latency as possible. Baxter gave an example of what this meant in practice at a talk after the screening yesterday. Imagine, he said, that he and Fincher were working on a scene in one of the eight "reels" of the feature and they wanted to pull up a scene from a previous reel. At the beginning of the production process this could take an excruciating eight minutes or more. By the end of the production, the team had reduced this 10x.
The effect for creative teams of all of this hardware and software is to make the technology disappear. I asked Baxter if he could estimate how much better the film was for this increased flexibility and ability to iterate. His first reaction was a humanist one. He feels that, technology aside, they would have made the same decisions—it just would have taken longer. But when pressed about the benefits of quick comparison and reframing overall, he said that it was perhaps "50% better" for being able to do all of these things—and they got to go home earlier!
Baxter is not, perhaps, the best person to speak to the benefits of these improvements. The real beneficiaries are all of the people who work with the effects and are able to exercise even more design decisions on a micro level. It is the accumulation of of "perfect" details that has always characterized great films and Fincher and his team have taken this to new heights with "Gone Girl."
