Eric Heikkinen

Put Him in the Ground is a film written and directed by Daniel Vang, a fellow student at the Savannah College of Art and Design. The film is about a young African American male rap artist who is about to make it big, but struggles with conforming to the more popular violent lyrics in order to succeed. The film finished primary post production in November 2007 and is currently retouching the music score. It should appear in a few film festivals in 2008.

I worked on this film through all three stages of production as an editor. During preproduction I was used for camera tests with the Panasonic HVX-200 and Redrock Micro lens adapter. The HVX shoots on P2 cards, which was something new I picked up on. I actually own my own HVX camera, but I have in the past always tethered it to a laptop with a firewire cord to record straight into Final Cut Pro. This option works fine if you have a speedy hard drive with plenty of free space, but if you don’t have that you will end up getting the occasional drop frame. Another downside to the tether mode is when you have a dolly shot where you need to keep the laptop close and hold it steady so the hard drive doesn’t lock up. The P2 cards offered typically 20 minutes of storage on a 16GB card recording 720p at 24 frames. While I’m speaking about these two recording modes I would like to mention a third method that I tried out at NAB 2007, the Firestore by Focus Enhancements. I had such a horrible experience using this product with a Canon camera at NAB, even with representatives from both Avid and Focus Enhancements there to help me out.

The project was in the production phase for two weeks in late spring. Each day I would assist on set and log the footage to my Macbook. I used Final Cut Pro to test the P2 footage for immediate playback for the director. At that point Apple’s Final Cut Pro software offered a significantly better tool for importing P2 footage into the workflow or preview. Since then Avid has made a few improvements, but I haven’t been able to test it out since I haven’t shot another P2 project.

The biggest problem that I came across initially was dealing with upside-down footage. The Redrock lens adapter flipped the image 180 degrees, causing everything to be recorded upside down. Having to deal with this problem was a huge headache when I was testing on Final Cut Pro because I would need to apply a 180 degree rotate effect and then render the timeline whenever I made an edit. Avid handled it pretty well since their “flip-flop” effect can be applied to a video track and every track below that will be rotated 180 degrees. Avid also doesn’t require rendering nearly as often as Final Cut Pro when trying to play things back. I think that the best solution would be if Apple or Avid were to add an option to apply an effect such as the 180 degree rotation during footage import. Since a lot of independent and student filmmakers use the Redrock Micro adapter I’m sure there are a lot of independent and student editors who have shared my grief at some point.