Did you use any other tools for the creation of this programme?

Nope. See above.

How did you do the rostrum camera work?

With LightWave 7.5 and Aura. The images were scanned at high resolution (around 4-5000 pixels). In LightWave, I mapped this image onto a flat polygon, paying attention to the aspect, and I walked the camera over it. In essence, the LightWave scene looked just like a virtual rostrum.

The polygon with the image mapped onto it was at 0, 0, 0 facing the Y axis; the camera is above facing the plane and I moved the virtual camera exactly as I wanted being careful not to get too close so as to maintain the ratio between the real image and the screen image to as close to 1 to 1. The LightWave animation was imported into Aura, the background is a bit of the image blown up and blurred.

You could do all this in ToasterEdit, but Aura can make nicer drop shadows…

You’ve been editing video for a long time. When did you start?

It’s now more than 20 years that I’ve been working in video. I was an editor/special effects artist for David Niles for a dozen or so years and I worked on the first ADO machines and made computer graphic images on the first computer for non-programmers to do so, the Bosch. I worked for one of the first two private companies to work in HDTV back at the end of the Eighties.

I’ve directed a couple of TV films and video clips and with the arrival of LightWave 3.5 for the Amiga I decided to set up business for myself offering my services and CG images.

Since then, I’ve directed animations and idents for all the French TV chains as well as for institutional clients like Peugeot and SNCF.

The arrival of DV formats and the Video Toaster allowed me to get back into documentary making, only this time in a totally independent fashion.

How many people were on the team to make this documentary?

Four people. The director Alain Dhénault, the writer/interviewer Pierre Lunel and me, assisted by my wife Fabienne, who did the cinematography and the sound, and also editing and helped with the post-production.

How long did the production take?

The shooting started in October 2000 in Egypt, there was a pause until April 2001 and there was some filming in the summer of 2001, but the editing and post-production only started in March 2002 to end in June 2002. The audio mix was done in September 2002. Editing was for two different versions, one for television and a version for DVD that’s longer by about 10 minutes.

When we started the editing, the Video Toaster [2] PAL was still in the beta stage and had quite a few troubles. We had to decide whether we were going to buy an Avid DV or put our trust in NewTek.

My big problem was with using ToasterEdit for editing DV footage. In PAL the fields were reversed and the program had memory problems.

Despite this, I could see the future quality of the program and since I was a loyal NewTek user since the days of DigiView, I knew I would be satisfied at sooner or later (of course, I didn't have much time for them to get it right!). The problems were sorted out within two builds. Since I work on my own most of the time, I'm happy that each time the director helped with the editing (and he's got years of experience with far more expensive systems like Avid online, etc.) he was pleasantly surprised by the Toaster and its speed and ease of use. ToasterEdit was even more powerful than the systems he knew.

So there you go, it's decided. I'm going to buy myself a SuperMicro board with two Xeon processors at 2.8 GHz to make full use of ToasterEdit.

Good luck with your new computer and thanks for talking to us François!

You can contact François Boulène at francoisboulene@aol.com.