King Kong: Mammoth Post Power

Yields Epic Results

King Kong is one beauty of a beast. With more than 3,200 final shots culled from 3 million feet of live-action footage and thousands of visual effects shots, taming this film in post was a gargantuan task, especially considering that it was shot and edited in just 18 months. "For a project of this scale, no other systems could have done it," says Avid editor Jabez Olssen about the multiple Avid editing and shared-storage systems used to cut director Peter Jackson's three-hour remake of the 1933 classic.

Working with Academy Award winning editor Jamie Selkirk (Lord of the Rings: Return of the King) on the film, Olssen and a team of more than 10 assistants relied on a massive deployment of Avid gear. Nine Avid Media Composer Adrenaline systems, two Avid Unity MediaNetwork shared-storage solutions with 9.6 TB each, and an Avid Xpress Pro system were used by production company Big Primate Pictures for picture editing, while Weta Digital, the film's visual effects house, used two Media Composer Adrenaline systems linked through the Avid Unity LANshare shared-storage solution with 4 TB for visual effects editing. As many as 20 Digidesign Pro Tools|HD workstations also helped facilitate a tightly integrated collaborative post workflow with the sound team.

"We chose Avid on this because none of us really believed we could do it on anything else."
- Dave Birrell, First Assistant Editor, King Kong

Massive Media Management

Everything on King Kong was done on a grand scale, and media management was no exception. "Peter never likes to delete media," explains Olssen. "He likes to have everything in [Avid Unity] in case he wants to go back to it. He might say, "I want to go back to that scene we had a week ago," and we have to be able to call it right up."

As a result, the postproduction teams stored, managed, and shared media assets for nearly 100,000 shots - without ever deleting any files during the process. To organize the media, the editing team used five separate shared projects with the Avid Unity solution, one each for input (film dailies, sound, motion capture, and visual effects), edited sequences, completed visual effects, output to other departments, and archives.

First assistant editor Dave Birrell managed the never-ending stream of media flowing in and out of the editing department. This included handling pre-vis sequences cut before shooting began, logging live-action dailies, editing selects for 2k scanning, importing CG animations and effects shots in various stages of development, and outputting sequences to multiple departments as the film progressed. "It was constant turnaround," says Birrell. "We were the gateway of all of the picture and sound media for the film."

Two Avid Unity MediaNetwork shared-storage setups supported this simultaneous sharing of media and files. One setup was located in the picture editorial department at Big Primate's offices in Wellington, New Zealand, and another portable setup traveled with Jackson, who prefers to see cuts in progress wherever he happens to be: on the set, or potentially on the mixing stage or at his home. "Without the shared projects and being able to load and move media from one [Avid] Unity to another, we could never have gotten through this project - especially when we were working so quickly toward the end.

We'd have somewhere up to 200 [visual effects] shots a day coming in, in up to five batches during the day.

Those shots were usually needed in the cutting room immediately, and the minute they were in the cut, we had to get them back into the assistant's area and back over to the sound stage, because they would be mixing that reel that day," says Birrell.

Because of the film's effects-heavy content, which allowed the filmmakers to produce some complete CG scenes even before shooting began, the editing team found itself juggling conventional production and postproduction workflows simultaneously using the integrated digital editing and shared-storage workflow. "By overlapping all stages of production and postproduction, we were able to be much more efficient," he adds. "If we had waited until all the footage was shot before we started handing over scenes, it could have taken another six months or even longer."

"As far as we are concerned, [Avid] DNxHD is uncompressed [in terms of quality]. It's all we are ever going to want."
- Jabez Olssen, Avid Editor, King Kong

 

 

A Packed Timeline

The Media Composer Adrenaline system's ability to easily handle various source formats and mixed resolutions on the same timeline was indispensable for supporting this complex workflow, as the editors could simply import any sort of media - standard-definition dailies as Avid media (backed up to Betacam SP) or high-definition dailies on HDCAM SR from the telecine house, QuickTime files from the visual effects team, or 24-bit Broadcast WAV files from the sound department - and immediately begin working on the creative aspects of the cut. The editing team also made full use of the system's 24 tracks of video and audio for organizing and managing the project. They particularly relied on the Clip Colors feature to quickly identify different types of shots; for example, dailies were gray, temporary effects shots were yellow, and final effects shots were cyan.

The Media Composer Adrenaline system's Locator feature was also vital for tracking the huge volume of effects shots. "We would take the daily that was to become the visual effects shot, put a locator on it, give it a visual effects number, and then be able to carry that on throughout the project as an identifier for that shot," says Birrell. "One of the latest features on the Locator window that we absolutely loved was the ability to transfer [via a tab-delimited text file] all of the locators from the dailies onto the current track of visual effects before it was sent out. When those shots went out as an EDL or an AAF, they had a locator identifying the scene and shot.

Previously, this would have been done manually. This automated process was wonderful because those shots were constantly being replaced. By eliminating that manual step, we were really able to speed things up."

Underlying the entire editing process was the Media Composer Adrenaline system's unerring ability to work with frame-accurate 24p media easily and efficiently. "I think the Avid is absolutely bulletproof in the way that it handles film information. It's always been completely reliable," says Birrell.

"Without the shared projects and being able to load and move media from one [Avid] Unity to another, we could never have gotten through this project."
- Dave Birrell, First Assistant Editor, King Kong

Digital Outreach

Two Media Composer Adrenaline systems were connected to an Avid Unity LANshare shared-storage setup at Weta Digital, approximately one mile away from the editing suites, to support the development of visual effects sequences, an iterative and demanding process for a film of this size. "I suppose most shots had 20 or 30 versions. Some had as many as 150," says visual effects editor Matt Holmes.

And the scope of each shot could be extensive. One sweeping shot started at the waters edge of Skull Island and moved up and over the island to reveal the gigantic protective wall, the natives, and the jungle, and then turned back to show Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) hanging from the sacrificial landing. "The shot was created as separate miniature passes; there were nine miniature sets in all," says visual effects editor Lucas Putnam.

"The real-time performance was incredible," he adds. "The Adrenaline was so much faster than the older Avid systems we had been using - and you cannot emphasize the importance of speed on this project enough."

Media from various departments - first unit, second unit, miniatures - was delivered to the effects editors daily via hard drives, while all Avid media files and effects shots in progress were exchanged with the picture editors over the Internet. While the effects editors initially began work with 2.5 TB, it quickly became apparent that they needed more storage. "We had to get another 2.5 TB for the LANshare, and we nearly filled that," says Holmes. Reallocating storage was easy, he adds, "The LANshare itself was 60 feet and a couple of floors away, but using the Administration tool, I could do all management right from my desktop."

Finding the Voice of Kong

As many as 20 Pro Tools|HD digital audio workstations were used at various times to handle the sound editing, sound design, ADR, Foley, music editing, and mixing. "Kong was an incredibly complex project involving lots of locations, creatures, and effects, and a huge amount of it - close to all of it - was originally recorded for the movie. One of our aims was to have a track with completely fresh sounds," says supervising sound editor Mike Hopkins.

This included re-creating the authentic sounds of 1933 New York with period cars and airplane engines, as well as creating all of the creature and environmental sounds on Skull Island. A sound team spent eight days recording in five national parks in Borneo, where crew members traveled deep into the jungle to capture sounds free of boats and generators. These island sounds were recorded at 96k to give the sound team the ability to pitch them down and darken them to match the ominous mood of the film.

Considerable time was also spent creating Kong's voice, which supervising sound editor and sound designer Ethan Van der Ryn describes as "the heart and soul of the character."

Human and animal elements were seamlessly combined by sound designer Brent Burge to give Kong his signature roars and cries. "The emotional spine of Kong's voice was in Andy Serkis's performance," says Van der Ryn about the actor who played all of Kong's scenes during production. "We brought him into the ADR studio and had him do complete vocals on every scene. We recorded that straight into Pro Tools at 192k, so we had the ability to pitch it down significantly. Brent then added all of these different types of recorded animal sounds - lions and tigers; a little elephant and bear; and gorilla sounds acquired through the Diane Fossey Foundation. Brent did an amazing job of incorporating all of these sounds seamlessly into a single voice."

The Pro Tools system even offered a way for Serkis to refine and shape his performance by pitching down his recorded vocals for immediate playback on the motion capture stage or on set. Hopkins explains, "On the stage, Brent found a way to loop through a mic to Pro Tools, go through the standard Digidesign Pitch Shift plug-in, and then go back into Andy's headphones, so he could hear what it sounded like and modify his performance accordingly. This was all real time, with only a very slight time delay. Peter [Jackson] found out about this method and said, "That's a fantastic idea!," and asked if we could use it as a playback device on set as a reference to the cast. So we put it together with Pro Tools on set using a production recorder and a speaker with the pitched-down vocals coming out of the speaker. We came to call it the "Kongalizer.""

Nostrils Flaring in HD

Jackson screens his films in progress in a theater numerous times during post, and for King Kong the filmmakers expected to view new cuts and updated visual effects every few days. To tighten the turnaround required for creating a new workprint for each version, Jackson decided to use HD screenings. The editing team upgraded one of its Media Composer Adrenaline systems with an HD card and dedicated it to conforming HD previews to shave days off the conventional workprint preparation process.

Still, quality was a concern. So before holding the first preview, the filmmakers ran a test to be sure that the HD preview created using the Avid DNxHD encoding technology on the Media Composer Adrenaline HD system would measure up to that of a film print. "We recreated the trailer in the Avid, which exactly matched the one that had been done as a 2k and filmed out. We went into a demonstration screening in Peter's theater to see whether the quality of the Avid preview was going to be acceptable. Instead, we were trying to figure out which was the uncompressed 2k and which one wasn't. We were very pleased with the quality for this type of preview work; it's well beyond our expectations," says Birrell.

"As far as we are concerned, [Avid] DNxHD is uncompressed [in terms of quality]. It's all we are ever going to want," adds Olssen about the space-efficient encoding format.

A Gargantuan Success

King Kong was a true test for the Media Composer Adrenaline system - and the most ambitious feature film project that these systems have supported to date. "We chose Avid on this because none of us really believed we could do it on anything else," says Birrell. "There are definitely other editing systems that can be used to cut films. There's no doubt about that.

Where my concerns lie is whether any other editing systems have the ability to manage the projects and manage this amount of media for this many machines simultaneously - and also do it in HD. At the time we made the decision to go with Avid, we believed there was no other system that could do it, and we seriously doubt whether there's anything else right now that can do it either."

Credit: © King Kong images courtesy of Big Primate and Universal Pictures.