Mobikes, Mutual Funds, Magic

Smoldering looks, envious glares and people burning up at the sight of the hottest bike in town. Does that conjure a familiar image? Begin dissecting the elements of the ‘Jiya Jale Jaan Jale’ Kinetic GF commercial and they won’t come to much–fire, gray-tone look, bikes, good looking men and women and music. But together, they create the magic that captivates you every time the commercial’s on air. So what makes the magic? A lot of things, computers included.

Like feature films, ad films are shot on 35 mm reel, because of the superior quality this gives in the final product. The shoot is also captured on VHS for video assist. VHS is the assistant of choice because of its low cost. The director uses it to ascertain what he needs to shoot or reshoot, and the editor to, for example, hear the dialogs and figure out where to cut a shot (35 mm film doesn’t store audio).

The footage is now captured on beta and digibeta tapes in a process called teleciné. The former is used for offline editing and the latter for final, online editing. You can do a lot of color correction during teleciné itself–like the gray, grainy tone of the Kinetic GF ad.

The beta then comes to the studio for offline editing, where it is captured in digital format on the computer. 

Each shot on the beta has a time-code, which states what time the shot started and ended. The code identifies each shot and gets copied on the computer when the shots are copied.

Propability, the studio we visited, uses Media 100 on a PowerMac for editing. This is where the story gets its final shape, and effects are put in, like a person swirling into a room in slow motion or people appearing on screen like they’ve jumped out of the woodwork. If the ad is to be for 30 seconds, every millisecond of that time is accounted for here.

The ad is then recorded on a beta tape and sent to the online studio. Along with this is sent the EDL–Edit Decision List–on a floppy. The EDL, generated automatically by the software, contains a list of shots identified by the time code, which appear in the final edit on the beta. 

The online studio has a digibeta tape, also called the master tape, of the raw footage from the 35 mm film. It now uses this EDL to copy the shots used in the ad from the digibeta onto its computer. The editor refers to the beta to verify that the copy is the same as the offline edit copy. 

The ad now gets its finishing touches. This could include color correction to homogenize the color between shots taken at different times of the day; inserting pack shots of the product being advertised and adding effects to that; or special effects like the fire in the Kinetic GF ad. Machines used here are top-end workstations from SGI or others (costing around Rs 1 crore), running high-end special effects software like Discreet’s Smoke or Fire.

Simultaneously, a music composer composes an ad jingle. These are recorded on DAT and sent to the studio, where it’s taken onto the computer and mixed with the video. Any dialogs in the ad are also dubbed and put in.

Compared to an offline edit studio that could cost you Rs 750-1,000 an hour, an online one costs you around Rs 5,000 an hour. So, the director tries to minimize the time spent in the latter. In some cases, the online edit may

not happen at all, if the ad doesn’t need too much additional effects.

After this, the output is taken on a beta or digibeta tape and sent to the agency, which then makes copies and sends to various TV channels. The final output is preferred to be on digibeta, because you can make copies of this and further copies from those without much loss in quality.

The ad is now ready to be beamed at us.

Pragya Madan