A couple of weeks ago, I posted about Walter Murch, legendary editor of films such as The Godfather, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now and, more recently, Cold Mountain which was edited on Final Cut Pro. Well, in one more of Apple's Pro stories, he talks about editing Jarhead which is directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty ).

Talking about using HD now versus the old day of SD–"How much detail you see around the eyes of the characters subconsciously determines my choices, the lower the resolution, the more I tend to use close-ups. With higher resolution, I feel confident using a wider shot, or a longer shot, because you can clearly see what a character’s eyes are doing, which is to say what the character is thinking."

Associat Editor, Sean Cullen, elaborates about the director reviewing the footage–"So once a scene was cut we’d export a compressed version — still very high quality, better than SD but not full 720p — using a system called PIX [Product Information Exchange], an online hosted system for sharing information designed for the film industry. So we could simply upload a QuickTime movie to PIX and it would send an email to Sam saying he had a cut to look at. He could watch it on his PowerBook 20 minutes after we cut, whereas with tape it would have taken a day."

Sequences were sent to the sound department’s Pro Tools system via Gallery’s XML Pro. The reels were exported from Final Cut Pro 5 as QuickTime movies with eight or more audio tracks. Compressor was used to create 29.97fps MPEG-2 QuickTime movies for the sound department.

Anyways, interesting read for anyone who is interested in the full power of Final Cut Pro.