Editor Jay Cassidy reviews the Avid ScriptSync.

See the Fall issue where Filmmaker reports on the different post production options four directors chose to finish their films.

In the craft of film editing, discipline does not assure success. There are those editors that can rip into the material right out of the gate and brilliance occurs. I‘m not one of them. Throughout my career, I‘ve found that a certain amount of organization and study is necessary to allow me to do what I do. “Memorize the footage” is the school that I came from and, over the years, I‘ve adopted and discarded all manner of different organizational methods, first with film and now with Avid.

All of those organizational methods had something to do with a script. By that I mean “script” in the larger sense; it could be written beforehand as in a dramatic film, a lyric sheet for a music video, a transcription in a documentary or a pile of index cards of sequences for projects with very unstructured shooting. The goal has always been easy access to particular moments in the morass of material.

In March of 1998 when Avid version 7.0 was released, Avid representative, Michael Phillips claimed at a seminar at the Sony studio that “the script software finally works.” Script-based editing had appeared with Avid version 6.5, however, the word was not good. The frankness of his admission was enough for me to give it a try.

As I understand it, Avid had bought the core code from an older system called Ediflex, a system I‘d never used. It was software design circa 1985 — clunky and unforgiving but allowing a dynamic connection from a line in the script to a clip in the source monitor. Click on the line in the script and it plays in the monitor.

This organization came with a price. The user had to import an electronic version of the script — fortunately the script program Final Draft supported an export format that preserved the page formatting — and then “line the script” and add marks from the clip in the source bin to make this dynamic link possible. Avid provided a variety of helpful tools but, when the day was done, it was still “find the line, place a mark, find the next line....” A daunting task with the pressure always to get cutting.

For me, the price was worth it. When marked up completely, the script acts as the only open-source bin when cutting. The coverage is instantly clear. It‘s possible to have frame representations of each setup. We evolved all manner of custom scripts to deal with generic material. And, as re-cuts occur weeks and months after a scene was originally cut, the script stays invaluable in recalling previously studied material.

Apparently I was in the minority in adopting script-based editing. Directors who knew Avid would look at it and say, “I‘ve never seen that before,” and then become very dependent on it. Clicking through every reading of a particular line at a moment‘s notice was amazing at first and now is so ingrained in my process that I‘d be hobbled without it.

Script-based editing did not change much from 1998 until this spring when Avid released a new version of the software called ScriptSync, in which a speech-recognition engine takes over the chore of marking the individual lines. Script preparation has crossed a threshold from “too daunting” to “why not?”

For those of us who have labored for nine years with the manual marking, this was divine intervention. But I have to keep telling myself that they didn‘t create this tool just for me, they created it to allow others whose first impression was to dismiss script-based editing as too labor-intensive to consider trying it.

I was tied up finishing a film until July so I did not touch the new tool until I started a short project in early August — a play-on-film of Dalton Trumbo”s Johnny Got His Gun. In one sense, this would be an easy test of the speech-recognition abilities of ScriptSync because it was one character shot on a controlled set. But the play is 60 or 70 pages of very dense dialogue.

This is the moment in the article for a description of how to make it work. I‘m going to skip that and refer you to the Avid Web site which has nice Quicktime demos (avid.com/products/media-composer/scriptsync.asp) and also to the Editors Guild Magazine for the summer quarter which has a detailed description in the “Tech Tips” section (editorsguild.com/v2/magazine/archives/0707/techtips_article02.htm).

Does it work? Yes, surprisingly well considering the variations that occur in real life. Put the line on the script that covers the dialogue for the particular clip in the source, trigger it and watch the marks appear much faster than real time. In fact, more marks than anyone would do manually. But who cares if there are more marks? The computer speed has overcome the large file slowdowns of the past. Housekeeping is still necessary as actors read lines incorrectly, transpose phrases, ad lib and so on.

What about resets and pickups within the same clip? There‘s no reason why a clip can‘t be lined several times for each internal take. This was a solution before ScriptSync and is still viable.

Anyone in the software industry knows that the product is never done, it‘s just the next release. The conventional wisdom is that the software company listens to its customers and adds features accordingly. ScriptSync is different. Here was an underutilized feature — Avid script-based editing — and no one was clamoring for speech recognition. By all rights, it shouldn‘t have been developed but there it is.