David Singleton's Diary

Frame by Frame

I assume that the purpose of an online diary is to reveal the inner recesses of your deranged mind, showing what a mad, unhinged person you are. Today’s sorry saga serves as an unexpected sequel to last week’s "Doesn’t mean you should just because you can", which (in keeping with the King Crimson theme) I shall call "Frame by Frame".

But before the madness, a moment of glorious sanity - Davide Rossi came to Broadchalke for a second visit, on his way to a production gig in Bath. We went through the various songs on which he will be playing (most are currently waiting on a singer and final key before he can replace the sample guide tracks). And they are blossoming into things of wonder, pregnantly ready to make their way into the world. So nearly time to move my focus from the studio to the "Be The Singer" search.

But then the insanity...

On Tuesday, I returned to the video of the Warfield that I had painstakingly re-framed last week. And there was an obvious flaw in the opening song, a "displaced glow" to the right of Adrian. I have sent it back to the video experts several times to try and remove it (including a new transfer from a different master) - but it stubbornly remains. I was on the point of approving the master, when I realised that, if this were an audio flaw, we would go to ridiculous lengths to try and ameliorate it. We regularly spend days on small sections of dodgy bootlegs ensuring that they are as perfect as we can get them (which is, we like to think, why people put there trust in us). So what, I wondered, was the video equivalent. Was there nothing that could be done with this nuclear glow? Well if it were a photograph it would easily and quickly be cured in photoshop, I realized…followed, slowly but inevitably, by the obvious, nagging, insane thought that a video is nothing more than a sequence of stills - in this case about seven thousand, one hundred and ninety two stills (23.976 frames a second, for five minutes). And yes, with Alex away on holiday and the deadline already come and gone , I have spent two days correcting every frame by hand. I confess. It is a quantifiable, bona fide illness. I should not be doing it – but, as a producer, I chase perfection. Not a healthy trait when processing bootlegs, which will never remotely be perfect. In fact, this is, in essence, bootleg footage : a low grade, single camera shoot. But, like every other part of these boxed sets, it deserves to be as good as it can…and by tomorrow it will be.

PS. The doctored footage inevitably remains less than perfect, the re-drawing replaces one flaw with another - less obvious, but visible none the less. If you know what has been done, you can, of course, see it. So we now have to flash the “Men in Black” memory reset and forget everything. Or all this work will be pointless.