AV News 177 - August 2009
Re-Making "The Final Cut"
Ia n B a te m a n FRPS
Those with long memories might remember
"The Final Cut", a documentary about Pink
Floyd, as a slide-tape sequence from the mid
1990's. It was the first sequence I entered into
the National and International AV Festivals
and was quite successful at the time. With the
switch to digital, most of my old slide/tape
sequences have been 'archived', which is a
polite term for 'left to gather dust on a shelf'! I
occasionally resurrect one of these and
convert it to digital format and last year it was
the turn of "The Final Cut".
First job was to scan in the original slides,
which was without a doubt the most time
consuming and boring part of the exercise. Competition sequences had to be
glass-mounted and hence you are faced with the choice of scanning the
slides through the glass or re-mounting them in glassless mounts. I'd already
scanned another sequence through glass mounts and I've never been happy
with the image quality so resolved never to do it again. For this sequence I
compromised and opened up the mount to expose one surface of the slide
and scanned them with this side facing the scanner. This gave a much better
result and saved the time and hassle of re-mounting two magazines of slides.
The original sequence was made with photographs taken at the band's live
performance in Earl's Court in October 1994, with some additional reference
material taken from album sleeves and early band photographs. The concert
images were all taken on a Pentax compact camera loaded with one roll of
400 ISO slide film, so I had a very small number of pictures to work with. If
digital cameras had been available back then I'd have probably ended up with
hundreds of images! The story has obviously moved on since the original
script was written and I was able to include more recent photographs taken at
subsequent concerts in Hyde Park and more recent news items to bring the
documentary up to date.
The most challenging part was the soundtrack. When I listened to the
stereo cassette tape that accompanied the original sequence, it sounded very
muffled with a strong background hiss. The soundtrack had been mixed on a
multi-tracker and included extracts from 12 different songs, some radio
interviews and sound effects, as well as the spoken commentary. The source
material for most of this no longer exists, so the only option I had was to record
the cassette into Audition and attempt to improve the quality by filtering and
boosting the result. As I was going to update the story, I also had to record a
new 'ending' and try to mix this into the new version. The original was
recorded on to cassette tape fifteen years ago, so it was a challenge trying to
make the new part of the voiceover sound remotely similar to the original!
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