The Academic Director of VFX School, CB Arun Kumar, helped Ram Gopal Varma complete production of a film in 28 days. Now he’s experimenting with unconventional video editing software solutions. By Heena Jhingan
Bollywood director Ram Gopal Varma was experimenting with Canon cameras as opposed to traditional movie cameras for his Telegu venture Dongala Mutha. The challenge he faced was the deadline that he had set for the completion of this project. He wanted to complete the film within 28-30 days, which seemed an unrealistic expectation to most industry professionals. However, CB Arun Kumar, Academic Director, VFX School, was convinced that it was a doable task. The film was completed in a record 30 days. Kumar later worked on other projects with the Varma, including the recently released Bollywood film, Department.
Kumar explained that video editing is just one part of film making. There are various processes involved in creating digital content There are several blocks of processes to undergo before getting to the final product. In the past, each block was represented by a specific platform.“In the Media & Entertainment space, we have different boxes like a camera, a video editing machine, etc through which the digital content has to pass. Traditionally, these were standalone processes and different pieces of software were used to run them. As a school, we decided to revolutionize this workflow. We believed that there was no need to exit a group of interconnected software to do a task and we chose to use Adobe end-to-end as they have the best connectivity as far as process is concerned,” he reasoned.
Although there are certain critical Adobe production applications like After Effects that are used by all editors, Kumar felt that there was one weak link that was none other than the video editing product, Premium Pro, which was not used by film editors as it was perceived to be a multimedia product and not a high-end broadcast/ film product. “However, one of revolutions that Adobe later brought to the product was the concept of the Mercury Engine that enabled editors to do the tasks that all the other existing professional and competing products like Final Cut Pro could do,” Kumar said.
Varma wanted a solution that was more flexible and faster than a traditional film camera. “The film was supposed to be edited on Avid Media Composer, which was what Ram Gopal Varma was used to as he had never used any other software. However, he had an impossibly short deadline and using Avid composer required that the format of the video recording had to be changed. That alone would require seven or eight days,” he explained. Instead, the team kept sending the footage to the editing table in real time and, on the second day of the shoot, Arun Kumar’s team was ready with some edited sequences that had been shot on the previous day.
“The shots were being color corrected and cleaned up on After Effects CS5 and the film went to 400 screens in India, Australia and Europe within 28 days,” said Kumar. The best part was the fact that there was no loss from the time the movie went from the camera to the editing bay and finally to the screens.
Kumar’s team realized that they could do a round trip of production, right from concept, and observed that the production time came down dramatically. “Normally, a film will require seven to nine months to make. This film was completed in a month. We have now edited about seven films using this solution. In the past, nobody was using Premium Pro as a professional editing product to edit movies. Now others have also begun using this product,” he said.
“If you look at the developed markets like the US, usually schools experiment and the industry follows. It rarely happens that way here. As a school, we lead the industry. In the last year, we saw many others opening up to the idea of using the solution for professional video editing purposes,” he said, adding that competing product lines like Apple’s Final Cut Pro, a dominant video editing software, are nearly ten times as expensive as the Adobe solution.
He explained that there were other low-cost products from Autodesk etc but these were better suited for niche editing of short duration content but not for a full-length feature film.Kumar has been testing Adobe’s recently unveiled After Effects CS6 and is hopeful that the new version will bring higher levels of professional video editing capabilities.
