The cooperation project did not run smoothly in general, but it is very valuable for learning.

I will summarize here some of the problems encountered in the cooperation process.

Video Specs

Through communication with another team, I found that our team did not emphasize the use of the same and lossless video codec in the cooperation for the final editing. Another group use Apple ProRes 422 for output during process and H.264 for the final movie.

At the same time, some team members used the wrong frame rate and size format when editing the project file, resulting in the lack of detail quality.

The most important thing is that we did not use high-quality original footage for compositing, which caused a serious decline in video quality and increased the difficulty of rotoscoping, tracking and compositing.

Live shooting

Another serious mistake was that the green screen was not used for shooting, which made rotoscoping difficult in post-production. When shooting, we did not consider the lighting of the scene thoroughly, which caused some avoidable problems and had to be fixed in post-production.

For example, the hard light that needs to be removed in the scene, we did not block it, resulting in unwanted light effects, and greatly affected the faces of the characters.

Coherence in design

Although we prepared storyboards, script and mood boards for the pre-production, and conducted on-site inspections of various shooting scenes, in actual shooting, we did not go exactly as planned. Looking back at the preliminary preparations, we seem to have done a lot but in fact did not make a thorough arrangement. At the same time, we did not develop a coherent style during post-production. The styles of the footage produced by each compositor are independent of each other.

Lack of quality management, unclear roles and responsibilities

At the beginning, we designated everyone’s work but did not clearly divide the work, and did not conduct inspections at each stage of the work, resulting in the handover not going smoothly. For example, a member of our group did the wrong cleaning plate but her progress was not checked, which caused the compositor to do it all over again; another example, the work done by roto artists and 3D tracker did not reach the standards, leading to a delay in progress. It is incovenient to fix the roto data given by others because we can not see the roto key frames in our own nuke, in this case I need to check each frame to ensure if the key frame causes the problem. It may take less time to roto all over again. So I think the roto artists should check the quality of the work done and fix the issues before uploading it, however, the coordinator thought it was part of composer’s job.

From my understanding, good collaboration means smooth workflow, but everyone in our group just texted messages in the chat, but no one checked the quality at each stage. This leads us to waste a lot of time doing repetitive work, especially when the project is reaching a deadline, it took time to deal with work that should have been completed at the beginning. At the same time, it also leads to conflicts and disputes in cooperation.

But finally we reached agreement and finished the work. Disagreements are inevitable in teamwork, because everyone is making efforts to achieve better results in their own ways. It is truly valuable to learn how to be more effective and professional through this collab project also in the future.