I guess there's a lesson here... notice the relaxed tone of my last update? Way ahead of schedule, feeling good about the way things are going - that's the time to panic, because it's a sure sign that things are about to go wrong!
It started with the color correction... mixed lighting on location resulted in some weird skin tones that I just couldn't seem to get right, and which soon had me doubting my monitor calibration. I'm switching between my laptop LCD and external display, trying to figure out what's going on and completely losing confidence in either one. Time's running out though so I finally just commit to one display and finish everything... but I can tell things aren't quite right. After rendering it I exported a segment and watched it on half a dozen different screens - it looks fine, but I think it came out brighter overall than I would have liked and there wasn't much time to change it.
I'm also pretty sure at this point my laptop LCD is dying and will have to be replaced soon, so that's great, but something to deal with later.
So by the time the color correction is done, titles & graphics are in, everything's close enough to call it - I export the timeline to a master file and 80% through I get the helpful "General Error" message from FCP. A couple more tries and it's the same thing - this almost always comes down to a single corrupted file, so I start by trashing the render files, switching scratch disks, rebooting everything, still no luck. So then I start exporting the timeline in segments, splitting the difference each time to try and isolate the bad file, eventually identifying six clips of b-roll from the same source that won't export. I try converting the original clip in another program and re-linking it, only to realize that the bad files are rendered from color and no longer connected to the source. So I take the six clips out into a new sequence, successfully render them out to new files, swap them on the original timeline and final get the whole thing exported...
By now it's 11:20pm. The 5 gig file is going to take 22 minutes to copy to the thumb drive. The airport post office is open until midnight, and is 19 minutes away - the math is not working out in our favor. So I copy the file to a portable fw800 drive (which only takes 3 minutes) and swap to another team member's laptop so they can copy the file to the thumb drive on the way to the airport. Halfway there I hit a pothole and the drive falls off the laptop - fortunately my teammate caught it before it yanked the fw cable out and interrupted the transfer or we would have run out of time. But we got to the airport at 11:45 and shipped it out just in time.
So we made it, but barely, and now we just have to wait and see what the judges think. It's not the closest we've cut a deadline (our record is actually 7 seconds from the cutoff time for a 48 hour film project) but it was a lot closer than I expected or it should have been. Good to have it done though - this is our sixth entry in the doc challenge, and our 25th project in timed filmmaking competitions. You'd think by now we'd have the whole process down to a science, but clearly it's just when you start thinking you've got it under control that the real trouble starts....
EDIT: I actually just watched the finished film - we ran out of time to watch it last night before submitting it, so we were just hoping there were no technical problems! Fortunately it looks like it came out ok... we can't post it publicly (if we're a finalist the festival it screens at requires world premier status) but if you'd like to check it out pm me and I'll send a password-protected vimeo link.
