The following online article (www.apple.com/pro/film/murch2) has been edited and reprinted with permission from Apple.

In director Sam Mendes’ (American Beauty) Gulf War there are no bombs-eye views or panoramic overhead shots; instead, the cameras are as strictly constrained as the sandblasted grunts.

Shot chiefly in the deserts of central California and New Mexico with handheld Super 35mm cameras, Jarhead attempts to interpret in an amped-up, bleached-out documentary style how the war was experienced by ‘Swoff’ (Jake Gyllenhaal), who signed on to fight but ended up in a tent city in the desert with thousands of other soldiers waiting for the war to happen to him.

For editor Walter Murch (Cold Mountain, Apocalypse Now), the prospect of editing in tightly circumscribed visual angles was inherently interesting.

‘Film is really a kind of theater of thought,’ says Murch. ‘You’re watching people think in movies, which is the fascinating and completely unique experience of film versus other kinds of theater, where the thoughts have to be expressed in words. In film, of course you have words, but mostly you have thought and attitude, and that attitude is mostly expressed in the eyes of the characters.’

But since switching to digital nonlinear editing in the ’90s, a process designed to make footage more easily accessible to editors, Murch had been struggling to see the eyes of the characters as clearly as he needed to.

‘Screen resolution has always been the weakest link in whatever digital system I was using,’ he says. ‘So editing in high definition was something I was very eager to do.’

Murch got his chance on Jarhead. Leveraging Final Cut Pro’s new HD editing capabilities, he was able to edit Jarhead in DVCPRO HD at 720p, something he was unable to do while editing his last feature, Cold Mountain, on an earlier version of Final Cut Pro.

The enhanced resolution had an immediate effect on Murch’s editing decisions.

‘How much detail I see around the eyes of the characters subconsciously determines my choices,’ he says. ‘The lower the resolution, the more I tend to use close-ups. With higher resolution, I feel confident using a wider shot, or a longer shot, because you can clearly see what a character’s eyes are doing, which is to say what the character is thinking.’

Murch says that the image quality at 720p was so good that after a couple of weeks he was completely confident making final edit decisions looking at HD video rather than celluloid.

Besides the esthetic advantages of front-to-back high-resolution viewing, Murch and his crew realized efficiencies throughout production and post-production by deploying a flexible new tapeless HD workflow anchored by several Final Cut Pro editing stations tied by Xsan software to an Xserve RAID.

According to Jarhead associate editor Sean Cullen, who helped design and deploy the workflow, one of its key advantages was its easy enabling of file sharing, not only in the editing room, but among widely dispersed film, edit, sound and effects crews.

When principal photography began in L.A., Cullen would receive tapeless digital dailies from Technicolor Complete Post, which saved the crew the work of capturing the footage.

‘As we were going along, we needed to get feedback from the director,’ says Cullen. ‘So once a scene was cut, we’d export a compressed version – still very high quality, better than SD, but not full 720p – using a system called PIX [Product Information Exchange], an online hosted system for sharing information designed for the film industry. So we could simply upload a QuickTime movie to PIX and it would send an e-mail to Sam saying he had a cut to look at. He could watch it on his PowerBook 20 minutes after we cut, whereas with tape it would have taken a day.’

The seamless efficiency of Final Cut Pro impressed Cullen as the essential mark of a professional application.

‘When you’re dealing with a sound department, VFX department and sound mix stage in a feature environment, you need to consider how you’re going to be exchanging media,’ he says. ‘The thing that makes Final Cut Pro a pro app is its ability to interact with other departments.

‘Tape isn’t dead, but I prefer to work random access with QuickTime and digital files. And with

Final Cut, we were able to bypass that whole tape stage. We did a lot more updating, and we had a lot more current media going into the mix and into visual effects because we were using a tapeless system.’

Murch, who has won Oscars for both film and sound editing, says that the sound mixing for Jarhead was helped considerably by significant audio enhancements to Final Cut Pro.

‘From my point of view, besides working in high def, the main difference on this picture was the ability to be working in sound at 24-bit, 48K resolution, which is the resolution that we were mixing the final film at.’

While editing Jarhead, Murch found himself reworking on his timeline a very familiar scene from a very famous movie. ‘Just before the soldiers are sent to Saudi Arabia they watch the helicopter attack from Apocalypse Now,’ he says. ‘I found myself re-editing my own material 25 years later.’