Things are moving forward steadily on a couple fronts.
We're just about done with the transferring of footage from the RED (and other formats) into ProResHQ for editing in Final Cut. It's taken over 400 hours to do this work, since one minute of footage takes nine minutes to convert. Thanks to Dane for riding herd on all that digital data.
We had another drive fail (one of the ones that was supposedly repaired), so we lost a week due to that, but we're back in the saddle (and backed-up thankfully).
We're also in pre-production on some additional 2nd unit work in our most exotic location: a true virtual reality world. Actors will -- literally -- go in-world to act out the scenes. We'll record their actions and then later replay the action to "shoot" it.
It's a crazy, but very cool and flexible way to work: we separate the performances from the camera work. Basically, because we are recording the every movement of the actors in-world, we can replay it perfectly and then at leisure place the camera for recording and editing. This allows us to place the camera EXACTLY where we want, including shots that we could never afford in real life (helicopter shots anyone?).
It also allows us to shoot from different angles with exactly the same performance, since the performance is literally recorded. Totally wild. No continuity errors are even possible (um, hopefully).
Big thanks to Laura and her team for helping us out on this in-world shoot and making it happen.
This is the largest segment of the film left to shoot, so it will be great to get it in the can. We're planning on having the performance occur in the next ten days with later "recording" of the camera angles sometime later this month.
Eat your heart out James Cameron.