If any of you at the Melbourne premiere thought that the film played a little late, let me tell you about my 3 day battle to get the film ready for the Melbourne premiere. However first I just want to say how bummed I am at myself for not having a High Definition copy of the film to play at the Melbourne premiere. That was always a big goal for me. I blew it.

Anyway it all stared on Wednesday when I flew to NSW for the Sydney premiere. Woody and I noticed a few errors with the film. You see we filmed the whole movie in high definition, so when I built the DVD to play at the premiere’s I had to down-sample everything into a PAL timeline. Now we missed 2 of our flights from Melbourne to Sydney because the rendering of the film takes anywhere between 2 and 4 hours, and you can’t get an accurate estimation from the rendering program Compressor.

So we missed our flights and then had to frantically search for someone to drive the DVD up to The Entrance premiere whilst Woody and I took the other DVD to The Roxy. Thanks to Thomo for doing that for us. The next day Woody flew home to Melbourne whilst I stayed in Sydney for the opening night of Dan’s exhibit. Woody made some corrections (namely a shot had gone wrong in the HD to PAL conversion in Charles Beckinsale’s part) and added in a new color corrected intro. So when I returned to Melbourne on Friday morning all I had to do was work out a good m/bits number to play the film in HD at the Melbourne premiere. That was the plan, we’d hired a HD projector so that we could take advantage of our HD cameras (as the DVD will be in regular definition PAL).

So I set about running some test on a small bit of footage to determine the right HD bit-rate so that the film would play from a laptop without any skipping or shuddering. I worked out that 7m/bits was the right compromise and set the film to render. This was around lunchtime, 12pm. Once it had completed at 4pm I watched it back and noticed that some clips hadn’t scaled up correctly during the PAL to HD timeline swap. No problem I thought, I still had 5 or so hours until the premiere, I’ll just make the changes and render it out again.

Well of course Murphy had something to say about that. I started the HD render at 4:27pm and it failed at 6:30pm. The rendering program, Compressor, had shat itself. I was in trouble. The people were starting to show up and I didn’t have a rendered version of the film. Well not in HD anyway. I did have the regular PAL versions of the film but that had mistakes and the intro wasn’t color corrected. I didn’t know what to do! I didn’t have a choice, Drew was calling me counting down the amount of beer kegs we had left. The film had to show at 8pm or we were going to have one sobering up angry mob. So I frantically rendered out the color corrected intro, fixed a mistake in the Two Weeks In Logo that had gone unnoticed (another PAL to HD timeline swap error) and decided not to run the credits (we didn’t have a rendered version of those in PAL).

It was going to have to do. I raced downstairs and jumped in a car that my Dad was waiting in outside and rushed to the venue. Drew met me at the door and together we both pushed our way through the crowd, dropped in the disc and took a breath. No matter how long I give myself for a project, it always comes down to the wire. It’s stressful but when that Two Weeks In logo came up after the intro and people cheered, I was thinking about what we should make next. That moment, when people actually cheer for something you’ve poured your blood and sweat into for the past 6 month is something that gets you through all the critics, haters and self made mistakes. It’s totally worth it.

Note: The above screen shot shows the render log from Compressor on the night of the Melbourne premiere. The times shown in the log are the times that the job was submitted for render, not when they finished. Also note names of the jobs. This give you an idea of the pressure I was putting on myself. The premiere actually started at 7pm. The beer ran out at about 7:45pm. I got to the venue with the hacked together DVD at about 8:05pm.