Gone Girl was the first feature film fully edited in Premiere Pro CC (Creative Cloud) and After Effects CC

Australia’s Academy award winning film editor Kirk Baxter says his latest film Gone Girl broke tech ground, allowing him to work fast enough ‘to get to home to see my kid’.

The first feature film shot in 6K resolution, edited in 5K and screened in 4K, Gone Girl was fully edited on everyman software — Premiere Pro CC (Creative Cloud) and After Effects CC — the same editing platform that costs the average punter $49.99 a month for access to Adobe’s editing suite online.

While most Hollywood filmmakers like the cache of elite software such as Avid, the man who won an Oscar for The Social Network had been using Apple’s Final Cut Pro before he and his director David Fincher took a risk to make Gillian Flynn’s thriller on Adobe’s one year old cloud service.

The new subscription model for popular tools such as Photoshop has 2.8 million subscribers to date, but many users have vented on the company’s user forum about crashes, registration problems and the 20GB storage limit.

Gone Girl’s production team admit they too had teething problems in Creative Cloud — including slow playback but once the pace picked up, they were able to cut faster and work collaboratively in real time, which Baxter reckons let them make a better picture.

The Sydney-born filmmaker says the cloud integration between Premier and After Effects allowed the team to take actors in different scenes and splice them together, using the luxury of RED’s whopping 6144 x 3160 pixels shot on Dragon to stabilise and position the picture.

Karl Soule, an L.A-based editor who now works in business development for Adobe, says because Fincher demands 30–40 takes from his actors, there was a lot of footage for the editors to whittle down.

“The visual effect they were able to achieve is having one actor’s lines step on another with Kirk cutting by ‘hacksaw’ to get it roughed out and then have it smoothed out in After Effects so that it looks seamless, like one complete scene,” says Soule.

Could Baxter have edited this film as successfully in another program?

“I would like to think that we’d always get to the same result. It would just be harder and we’d have longer hours. The huge radical difference is being capable of doing split screens and stabilising images. In that respect, I’d say the movie is 50 per cent better than before (you could do that),” says Baxter.

Fincher and his post production team relied on Hollywood’s collaborative Pix system — which costs six figures to set up its concierge style servers — to communicate with the entire crew, using virtual sticky notes to give frame-by-frame feedback remotely, rather than confining the director to a video village on set.

“Filmmaking is really enjoyable when it’s bouncing back and forth,” says Baxter.

Post engineer Jeff Brue who founded OpenDrive cloud says cutting 500 hours of footage into 2 hours 25 minutes saw the team use 2.6GB a second peak bandwidth, which reduced scene load times from 10 minutes to one minute, helping to fast track production.

“We are working so rapidly that maybe two weeks after the end of a shoot, we have an assembled film, and then it becomes three to four months of polishing,” says Baxter.

He says ultimately he is the film’s ‘finger painter’; called on to ‘extract time without losing content’, which required a huge element of scene splitting, teasing and pace on Gone Girl, which he likens to pulling back a slingshot until the movie’s dramatic twist at the 40 minute mark.

“The minute that all those storylines converge … the gift you get is to come into a screening and to hear someone gasp, or laugh, or like that man who was cackling his head off, over there, who I just want to hug.”

This writer saw Gone Girl at 20th Century Fox Studios as a guest of Adobe.