the past. past.
long past.
It all started from a time when workstations were almost recklessly expensive, and the workflow started from filming on film.
The film led to an inevitable work process, which required a clear separation between the first part of the creation of an audiovisual, the offline, and a second part, the online. Once the shooting was completed and the images were transferred to electronic media (digital or analogue as they were), the acquisition time of the material was in the vast majority of cases 1: 1. That is, for an hour of filming it took at least an hour of material loading on the workstations, both offline and online. This is relative to the evolutionary peak of the workflow starting from the film, around the beginning of this century.
In any case, after uploading the material for offline editing it was necessary to separate and name the scenes, which arrived separated only visually from a clapperboard. When a direct socket was present, audio synchronization was necessary, as the audio-video coupling was not carried out directly on the film.
This took a long time.
Choices were not necessarily made on low-quality materials, with a rough definition of the messages that wanted to be made from the video, as the basic material had to be loaded on systems that allowed to keep a large amount of footage in a small amount of storage space.
The most common method of exploiting the limited space available was extreme compression of the images, which obviously did not allow the use of the same material for finalizing the film in high quality.
This was the process called offline.
This storage space, and the time needed to load the material, were often doubled, if not tripled, as what had been loaded and defined for the offline was never usable for the online, both for the intrinsic quality of the file than for the changes. Each scene to be worked after the final decision of which scenes to use had to be loaded again, in high quality, into the workstations from time to time necessary to finalize the work: from the telecinema to the compositing machines.
The high quality recomposition of the decisions taken offline was called conforming, which added to the definitive realization of compositing and super to be put on stage was called online.
Each of these steps was practically unavoidable, and almost always involved stopping the machine for the time needed to load and unload the footage and the finished videos, as well as the times of the concrete creative and execution works, and finally the renderings.
Il costo delle lavorazioni era quindi necessariamente suddiviso in valori orari. Il motivo è conosciuto a chi questo lavoro lo fa da almeno 10 anni: l’esigenza di ammortizzare gli enormi costi delle strutture (dalle workstations ai cablaggi fino ad arrivare alle apparecchiature di controllo e di registrazione) portava ad una organizzazione adatta a suddividere al massimo i costi.
Inevitabilmente, se una sala aveva un costo orario di €1000, si rendeva necessaria una quantificazione del lavoro molto precisa, per evitare l’esposizione di costi eccedenti la reale quantità di lavoro eseguito.
Questo portava ad un circolo virtuoso anche nella preparazione del lavoro da parte di cliente, agenzia e CDP: il costo elevato dei processi realizzativi era spesso uno sprone ad una migliore definizione delle esigenze da parte del cliente, una migliore creatività e precisione nella esposizione delle idee, ed una migliore realizzazione delle riprese.
Da parte delle post, di conseguenza, si aveva una maggiore professionalità dei tecnici e degli artisti, che erano i diretti responsabili della migliore e più rapida esecuzione possibile dei lavori: un errore di due ore nella realizzazione di un lavoro poteva avere un costo oggi comparabile a diversi giorni di lavorazione.
Quindi ogni preventivo era realizzato analizzando lavori molto meglio definiti, con idee spesso molto più chiare sulle necessità, con riprese eseguite con più criterio (organizzazione dei bollettini di edizione e ciak in camera, stop tra una scena e l’altra), ed organizzando in modo molto più capillare le lavorazioni, esponendo poi il numero di ore strettamente necessarie a realizzare il lavoro.