I have always wanted to go back and make a definitive version of Seven Minutes Fast. I've always liked the final cut of it, but there were a number of restrictions in regard to quality at the time it was made. For the dvd I wanted to not only remaster the short itself, but to also include other footage in the form of bonus material.

Seven Minutes Fast was shot on Betacam and transferred to one inch tape. A new set of Betacam dubs were made from the one inch tape and encoded with time code. These Betacam work tapes are the ones that were loaded into the Media 100 fo editing. I was allotted 2GB for my project. For reference, a three minute clip of uncompressed video can easily exceed 1GB, and the final cut of Seven Minutes Fast is 25 minutes. The rough cut, of course, was even more compressed. All of the VHS dubs that I made and gave to the participants (except Tod) were extremely compressed fourth generation copies.

When the project was completed, I made an online master from the one inch tape and transferred it to a Betacam master. I had to make a new set of titles using the character generator on the one inch machine, which is why the VHS versions have different credits and why the credits on the final Betacam dub look so archaic.

For the dvd, I made a new uncompressed master directly from the source tapes it was shot on. I loaded the Betacam master uncompressed as a reference. I then loaded all of my available Betacam source tapes, also uncompressed. When everything was said and done I was missing one tape, but missing one tape out of a dozen isn't too bad. I then went through and color corrected every single shot.

Revisiting the footage in this way also allowed me to go through and select all of the outtakes. I had made a compilation of outtakes at the time, but these were heavily compressed and culled only from what I had loaded into the Media 100. The dvd will feature a complete compilation which, at about 12 minutes, will be almost three times the length of the original.

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