Issue: HD - October 2008

'MAX PAYNE' SEES AJA/FCP WORKFLOW

LOS ANGELES – Twentieth Century Fox’s latest feature film release, Max Payne, was edited via an AJA Kona 3/Apple Final Cut Pro workflow. Directed by John Moore and starring Mark Wahlberg as homicide detective Max Payne, the film is based on the popular videogame title.

Kona 3 is AJA’s high-end, uncompressed capture card for SD, HD, and Dual Link 4:4:4 HD for Apple Mac Pro systems. Dan Zimmerman served as editor on the film and says the Kona 3 combination with Final Cut Pro provided both flexibility and great picture quality.
 
Zimmerman and first assistant editor Ian Silverstein got involved in the project just prior to principle photography. Max Payne was shot in Toronto and Deluxe Toronto handled lab processing, telecine and capturing HD dailies into Final Cut Pro using a Kona 3 card to deliver media via SmartJog to the editorial team in LA.

In Los Angeles, the editorial department had four Intel-based Mac systems running Final Cut Pro. One served as the editing system, one was used as an assistant editing station, a third handled VFX editing and the fourth served as a rendering station. The three editing stations had Kona 3 cards with breakout boxes connected to HD monitors and a 7TB Apple Xsan. 
 
The systems were also used to output DVCPRO HD QuickTime files for use on the mix stage at Warner Bros. in Burbank.  
 
“Without having to go out to tape, the quality is virtually lossless, which makes it very easy to mix and sync dialogue — even for background characters that may be out of focus,” Zimmerman explains. “All we do is hit ‘export,’ give Warner Bros a DVCPRO HD file, they load it — and in the FireWire world it only takes about three or four minutes until they’re able to play our HD QuickTimes through their 2K Christie projector using the Kona 3 card.”