I recently had the opportunity to demonstrate what I feel is the overwhelming power of Virtual Katy on a project very similar to the first show that I used VK on.
That first show was “Vantage Point” and when it first landed with us it was a linear telling of the story of a presidential assassination. It was a short 5 reel movie and far removed from the final released version. it had however had a lot of sound editorial work done on it already and parts of that was hoped to be saved. The next version we received was a non-linear telling of the story with each reel being from a different characters perspective culminating in a linear ending post-reveal.
Change notes on this type of conform would have been a nightmare and so we decided to give this new program, Virtual Katy a go. After a couple of failed attempts and some marvellous help from Craig Tomlinson with EDL evaluation and guidance we were able to reconform the linear version of the film into a non-linear version.
Flash-forward to 5 weeks ago when I was approached by the mixer/sound editor on an independent feature to do this exact same process. We took the linear final mix sessions and we were able to reconform the full movie (tracklay, automation etc) into the non-linear directors cut in 40-60 minutes. The look on the directors face as he watched the linear guide QT’s being cut into the new non linear version and matching frame for frame was priceless to see.
Obviously that wasn’t the end of the story and the sound editor then spent a few days going through and filling in the new scenes and smoothing some automation jumps but it widely accepted that this process would have taken a couple of weeks to have fixed without VK and it’s shot tracking, full project view.
Picture Editorial: Final Cut Pro, 24p project format
Sound Editorial : Avid Pro Tools 8
Conform materials: FCP Video EDLs
Virtual Katy: 3.0.2, 23.976 fps project