Cocaine Cowboys - Exposing
Miami"s drug wars in HD
In the 1980s, ruthless drug lords invaded the city of Miami, transforming it from a peaceful retirement mecca to one of the most dangerous places on earth. The pulse-pounding, heart-racing documentary Cocaine Cowboys chronicles the city's meteoric rise to the drug and murder capital of the U.S. The film, produced by Miami-based production company rakontur, earned rave reviews after premiering at sold-out screenings during New York's Tribeca Film Festival in May 2006. It recently landed a 15-city distribution deal with Magnolia Films.
Dubbed 'the definitive documentary' about Miami's darkest period by the New York Post, Cocaine Cowboys tells a multi-faceted tale. There are first-hand reports from the ruthless drug dealers and hit men who cashed in on Miami's coke wars, as well as sobering interviews with the detectives and prosecutors who fought on the front lines. The end result is a high-energy exposé that combines rapid-fire cuts of present-day interviews, archival still images, and vintage television footage.
"It was an ambitious project, even by documentary filmmaking standards," says producer Alfred Spellman. "The final film has more than 3,000 cuts, compared to 1,200 for your average two-hour feature film. Plus we worked with just about every video format you can think of, incorporated several film formats as well, and animated hundreds of archival photographs."
In shooting Cocaine Cowboys, rakontur's crew captured 160 hours of interviews on digital SD video using a Panasonic DVX100 camera in 24p mode. Additional footage was shot in Super 8, 16, and 35mm film and telecined to 29.97 fps. The crew gathered an additional 50 hours of archival video footage in 29.97 fps, along with 700 historic photos from the heyday of Miami's drug trade.
But the volume of footage and number of formats weren't the only challenges involved in making Cocaine Cowboys. "The archival footage included some of the earliest video clips ever used by Miami news stations," says director Billy Corben, who edited the documentary with co-producer David Cypkin. "Much of it was stored on old ¾-inch and Beta SP masters. So you can imagine the image quality and coloration issues that lay ahead."
"[Avid DS] Nitris allowed us to bring all our various media and formats together, manipulate footage at different frame rates, and work in real time to achieve our creative vision."
- Alfred Spellman, Producer, Cocaine Cowboys
Trouble in the Editing Room
Once all of the media was captured, the editors began cutting the interview and archival footage using Apple's Final Cut Pro. However, the editors noted problems early on due to the system's inability to handle the project's multiple media sources and large file sizes.
"We'd be executing a complex sequence of quick cuts in Final Cut Pro and suddenly lose it all," explains Spellman. "The system would just crash. It didn't have the media management capabilities we needed. We were spending more time worrying about backing up the project than executing our creative vision. As documentary filmmakers, if we don't have robust media management we can really get in trouble."
Those unwanted outcomes can include missed deadlines, added expenses, and less than optimal quality - all of which can be devastating for indie productions with high aspirations and limited budgets. These were the realities that the filmmakers faced in early 2005 when the Miami International Film Festival invited rakontur to screen Cocaine Cowboys as a work in progress. The editors had been cutting for a few months and thought it would be a great opportunity to test some of the sequences.
"We made an assembly of the film, but Final Cut Pro could not output it without crashing. Essentially, our movie was trapped inside the computer," explains Corben. "It was an incredibly helpless feeling. None of us slept for days. We were on the phone with tech support, trying every Houdini-like contortion we could think of to get the movie out of that box. We ended up missing all but our final screening. In hindsight, we didn't just stretch the limits of Final Cut Pro; we shattered them."
Corben and Cypkin eventually completed a bare-bones offline version of the documentary using Final Cut Pro. "It was a hassle, but we did the best we could," says Cypkin. "We simply assembled the interviews and then tossed in the archival footage and some basic versions of the photos as placeholders so we'd have a map to follow during the finishing process."
"The interoperability between Avid Xpress Pro and Avid DS Nitris - the ability to seamlessly transition from start to finish - is what really sold me on [Avid] Xpress Pro."
- Alfred Spellman, Producer, Cocaine Cowboys
Avid DS Nitris Saves the Day
Realizing they couldn't complete the documentary on Final Cut Pro, Spellman and his team searched for another solution. They found it at Cineworks Digital Studios, a Miami-based post-production company that uses an Avid DS Nitris system for conforming and finishing offline projects. For the next 10 weeks, Corben and Cypkin worked alongside the online editors at Cineworks, supervising the completion of the documentary on the Avid DS Nitris system. Much of this time was spent on a cumbersome conform process, which could have been avoided if the filmmakers had offlined the project on an Avid Xpress Pro or Media Composer system, both of which offer dependable media management features, support for a wide variety of formats, and smooth integration with higher-end Avid systems for finishing.
Instead, Corben and Cypkin had to devise multiple workarounds to conform the offline edit created on Final Cut Pro. They began by importing just the interview clips into the Avid DS Nitris system via a mini-DV master that was outputted from Final Cut Pro. This DV track indicated where all 1,200 archival shots belonged by leaving holes in the footage. Then the editors imported the archival source tapes into the Avid DS Nitris system to conform and digitize the historical footage - going cut by cut to match each archival shot with its proper 'hole.' To simplify this process, Cypkin created a spreadsheet that identified the in and out times of each archival shot, as well as where it occurred in the film. The editing team imported these spreadsheet numbers into the Avid DS Nitris system and used them as timecode markers.
Once the film's cut was fully transferred to the Avid DS Nitris system, the editors had all the tools required to quickly and easily prepare the film for Tribeca. "[Avid DS] Nitris allowed us to bring all our various media and formats together, manipulate footage at different frame rates, and work in real time to achieve our creative vision," says Spellman. "We could take a shot and reframe it, flip it, slow it down, or speed it up. Doing this in Final Cut Pro would take forever. With [Avid DS] Nitris, it took no time at all - and we never lost a single cut. Media management was never an issue."
Foolproof media management, with built-in metadata tracking, is a hallmark of all Avid systems - from Avid Xpress Pro software to Media Composer Adrenaline systems. With the project loaded on an Avid system, the editors could rest assured that their project files and media were secure, giving them the freedom to spend more time focused on the creative aspects of their work.
Cypkin used Photoshop to manipulate the documentary's 700 archival photos, cutting the subjects out of the background and creating the layers necessary to animate each image. The editing team then imported the Photoshop files into the Avid DS Nitris system and animated them in full resolution - 600 dpi or higher in some cases - to ensure that a zoom effect would not degrade image quality.
"[Avid DS] Nitris gave us a lot of creative leeway in animating the still images," says Cypkin. "When you're doing 3D effects with 2D images, you create a lot of visual anomalies. So we'd have to redo shots three or four times to get the background blurs, foreground moves, and zooms just right. With [Avid DS] Nitris, we could execute each creative decision instantly. In a matter of seconds, the post editor would show us what the edited image looked like in real time, fully rendered."
Given that nearly 40 percent of the film consists of archival footage shot on various media under varying conditions, color inconsistencies were inevitable. Using the Avid DS Nitris system's comprehensive, real-time color-correction capabilities, each clip was analyzed and normalized to eliminate color discrepancies and create a more fluid transition from one shot to the next.
With the finishing complete, the editing team used the Avid DS Nitris system to upconvert the entire SD project to HDCAM using a Teranex box. The HD master video was used for Tribeca screenings and formed the basis for the final 35mm film print.
"The strength and robustness of Avid DS Nitris is what won the day for us," says Spellman about the system's complete range of editing, finishing, and mastering capabilities in both SD and HD.
Based on its experiences working with Avid systems, rakontur plans to offline its next documentary using the new version of Avid Xpress Pro software on an Apple Power Mac G5. The filmmakers believe that using Avid Xpress Pro software, which is comparably priced to Final Cut Pro, could offer added cost savings over time. With its reliable editing and media management features and flawless integration with higher-end Avid finishing systems, the industry-standard tool could shave weeks off an editing schedule and dollars from a modest indie budget.
"The interoperability between Avid Xpress Pro and Avid DS Nitris - the ability to seamlessly transition from start to finish - is what really sold me on [Avid] Xpress Pro," says Spellman. "Avid is dedicated to this [film editing] technology, and, for us, it's really paid off."
CREDITS: Copyright Rakontur Flm Venture One, LLC