The Haunting of Molly Hartley: HD Editing Workflow Keeps Post Costs Low, Quality High

It’s an age-old problem for indie productions: the pesky post process. The highly technical aspects of post can be difficult to master. And many productions simply run out of time and money near the end of a project, forcing them to skimp on the finishing touches that can make or break the look of a film.

Zene Baker, a veteran editor of indie films (The Foot Fist Way, All the Real Girls), explains, “A low-budget movie doesn’t think about post really. They usually spend about 10 percent on post. A regular-budget, studio film spends 35 percent of its budget on post.”

That’s why Baker was pleasantly surprised by the post workflow on The Haunting of Molly Hartley, a 90-minute horror thriller that he recently completed. The film follows 17-year-old Molly (played by Haley Bennett), who recovers from a stabbing attack by her mother only to face the possibility that she is an instrument of the devil who must be killed. Baker describes the film as a sort of “Rosemary’s Teenager,” with plenty of psychologically intriguing twists and turns. Chase Crawford (Gossip Girl) and Jake Webber (Medium) also star.

The film was made for approximately $3.5 million, and the filmmakers budgeted around $250,000 -  less than 10 percent -  for the post process. Yet first-time film producer Todd Ulman (Everwood, Greek) created a post workflow that rivaled that of many big-budget films.

After years as a producer of big-budget TV series, Ulman embraced the challenge of working on a film project with a tight budget. His goal was to ensure not only a professional editing process but high-quality, theater-based preview screenings as well - often a luxury for independent films. “I kept thinking … how could I make this film for this amount of money and still do previews? That’s how I came up with the workflow,” says Ulman about the film, which was shot on 35mm in the Los Angeles area and edited and screened in HD.

“I kept thinking … how could I make this film for this amount of money and still do previews? That’s how I came up with the [HD] workflow.”
- Todd Ulman, Producer, The Haunting of Molly Hartley

Hollywood-based post house Laser Pacific converted the 35mm film to HD using an economical data scanning process that produced full-range HD-RGB 4:4:4 material while simultaneously laying off timed dailies to HDCAM and/or QBit. Those files were then ingested into an Avid DS Nitris system at Laser Pacific and compressed using the Avid DNxHD 36 codec. The digital files were delivered via hard drive to the cutting room. There was literally no ingest time as dailies were quickly loaded onto Avid Media Composer software systems to begin editing.

The quality of the compressed files, however, was an initial concern. So the filmmaking team checked various HD compression rates to ensure that they would be working with top-quality images on playback monitors and in screening rooms. The filmmakers liked the idea of using the Avid DNxHD 36 codec; it offered the maximum compression rate and most manageable file sizes, comparable to those used in a standard-def workflow. But the Avid DNxHD 36 codec had just been introduced and was an unknown in terms of quality. So Ulman arranged to test the Avid DNxHD 36 encoded material against a more moderate compression format, the then-established Avid DNxHD 115 codec (data rate for 24fps).

Baker was pleasantly surprised by the results of the test. “We all went in to see the first day of dailies that they had done on [Avid] DNxHD 115. But we couldn’t tell the difference between those files and the DNxHD 36 files when the image was projected [in an online suite]. The Avid operator even zoomed in 400 percent. The difference was not discernible, so we decided to go with Avid DNxHD 36 since it would save time and drive space.” For example, with Avid DNxHD 36 compression, 100,000 feet of film (or approximately 18.5 hours of material) takes up about 330 GB of storage.

All of the editing was done in two separate rooms in offices located in Laser Pacific’s building. Each room was equipped with Media Composer v2.7 software, running on Macintosh Pro systems. Each workstation had a disk array to store media, which was uploaded and downloaded daily between stations using a Gigabit Ethernet connection. Flat-screen, 32-inch HD TV monitors were used to play back the Avid DNxHD 36 encoded material during editing.

To keep editing costs low, the production bought the two Avid Media Composer software units and Macintosh systems outright from Avid reseller Key Code Media and then sold the systems back at the end of the project. Ulman highly recommends this approach for productions with limited post dollars.

“If you buy and sell back, you can save a significant amount of money,” says Ulman, who says that Key Code Media offered him a great deal on the units. “This movie edited for three months longer than expected. If we had been renting the equipment, it could have amounted to tens of thousands of dollars in rental fees. In one year we spent only about $14,000 on the editing equipment by buying it and selling it back. It’s a great option for smaller budget films.”

But the biggest cost benefit may have come from the HD editing workflow itself, which enabled the filmmakers to offline three separate versions for theater screenings, quickly conforming them on the Avid DS Nitris system at Laser Pacific. Ulman estimated that the production saved $100,000 on these screenings by avoiding the high costs associated with conventional onlining and color timing processes.

“I would gladly use this workflow on any future project. You get more time to actually edit and spend less time, energy, and money [on piecing together a workflow].”
- Zene Baker, Editor, The Haunting of Molly Hartley

There were some glitches along the way in preparing the previews. For the first screening, the editors output same as source HD QuickTime files from their Media Composer system and handed them off to Laser Pacific to online the screening tapes. “It took two days to import the QuickTime files [into the Avid DS Nitris system], since the Avid doesn’t read those directly,” explains Ulman. “That was a mistake.”

For the next preview, the editors delivered the entire Avid project (original media files) on disk as a consolidated cut to Laser Pacific. “It plugged right into the Nitris. Ten minutes later, we could print to tape. Everything was true, the effects were there, everything was perfect. It took a half-hour of setup and then 90 minutes to online the movie real time. It cost just $900. There was no tape to tape, no digitizing. You just link the project and have the operator hit the play/record button and you’re off to your preview with an HDcam or any format you want. It was awesome.”

The preview preparation did not require color timing because the offline HD material originated from the timed HDcam tapes (as opposed to the full-range scan on the 4:4:4 HD-SR tapes that would be used to actually complete the film after lock). The preview version was output to HDcam tape and then downconverted to anamorphic Digi Beta. It was previewed at a Culver City screening room using digital projection and two channels of audio (LT/RT).

Ulman is quick to credit the technical expertise of the staff at Laser Pacific for helping him design the streamlined HD workflow. “These guys are really eager to help independent filmmakers. They want you to do it there. We didn’t make them any money. They just wanted to help us. If something doesn’t work, they invent it there.”

There was another pleasant surprise that was a by-product of the well-designed post workflow: Baker had more time to focus on the creative aspects of cutting the film. He explains, “This is the first project I ever worked on that I didn’t have to act in some way as a co-post supervisor. I’ve worked on a lot of smaller budget films. They really want the editor to wear multiple hats  to install the editing systems or to make sure the dailies are set up correctly at the lab. But on this project, all I had to think about all day long was how to make the movie work [creatively].”

Baker says he felt like “a spoiled child” on The Haunting of Molly Hartley. “I would gladly use this workflow on any future project,” he says. “You get more time to actually edit and spend less time, energy, and money [on piecing together and maintaining a workflow].”

With two affordable editing systems, assistant editor Emily Koonse also enjoyed the benefits of working side-by-side with Baker. This work arrangement enabled her to learn through a traditional mentoring relationship, which often gets lost when a production can only afford one system and the main editor works during the day on shaping the story, while the assistant is forced to come in at night to load dailies or handle other more mundane tasks.

With virtually no time devoted to ingesting material, it was easier for Koonse to find new ways to enhance the editing process as well. “The new thing for me was that, as an assistant, I had the time to go deeper into the software and figure things out. I went in and tried out the new ScriptSync feature.”

“Once we started using ScriptSync, it became invaluable,” adds Baker about the script-based editing feature, which uses phonetic indexing of text and dialogue to sync source clips automatically with the script itself. “What was new was the phonetic recognition [of lines from a script]. Before we had to do it all by hand, clip by clip. Creatively, ScriptSync really came in handy. We did a fair amount of multi-camera coverage on a lot of scenes and multiple takes of that. The ScriptSync feature became very helpful in seeing all of the different coverage we had at specific points for specific pieces of dialogue. And we were able to see all of that very quickly … to isolate a specific area in the script and play back all of the clips. The director definitely liked having access to all the different line readings.”

Ultimately, the greatest pleasure of working on the film may have been the lack of drama behind the scenes. “When you are on a short schedule and on a lower budget film if anything goes awry, you lose a lot of time and you have limited resources,” says Baker about the typical editing pitfalls. “What was exciting was that this was a new workflow, and that it worked so well. We were in command of this process and confident. I wasn’t held up in any way.”

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Indie Slate magazine.