I let a few days go by without talking to the negative cutter's people, and suddenly they tell me that the negative should be finished by Monday, and maybe even this afternoon.... Time to spring into action again. I've chosen a lab (Lab-Link) to make the prints; my immediate mission is to give them a list of the shots in the film that have to be "timed" so that they look darker in the print than they do in the dailies. (All the nighttime bed scenes in my film currently look as if they take place in broad daylight.) I also have to find a way to give them some kind of numbers that will help them find the shots that need help.
After the first print (called the answer print), which will be silent, comes the sound mix. The issue of how to do the mix while keeping the film in sync, which I discussed previously, is still unresolved. The fellow at Lab-Link is pushing hard for me to mix to the film print, which will be vastly more expensive than mixing to a video copy of the print--I need to find out the probability of a sync error if I go the video route, and the penalty that I will pay if one happens.
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