Antony: Who’s responsible for the cataloguing of the footage, and for physically putting those tapes into the computer so Kevin and Scott can edit?
Phil Benson: I’m the guy who loads the BetaCam SP tapes the footage comes on into the AVID. The person who establishes the relationship between each frame of film and the video that gets loaded is the guy who actually transfers the film to video. There’s a machine that not only converts the film into video, but actually reads the number on the edge, and transfers those numbers to a data file that we receive. Every day, I receive BetaCam tapes of the previous day’s shoot, and I also receive a floppy diskette that tells the AVID exactly which scenes and takes are on that tape.
Antony: What has been your best moment?
Phil Benson: I was just talking with Scott [Mosier] about this. On JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK, the first time we had to do an audience preview, we got crushed with our time and we had to quickly mix everything together for an audience preview. Then we had some technical problems, and our mix was going late, and we had to be on a plane to San Diego for our first test screening. We ended up mixing all through the night with no sleep, and then Scott and Monica and I went straight from the mixing stage to the airport, went straight to San Diego, got off the plane, and did a run-through. The test screening went fantastically. We hadn’t slept for days. I remember thinking at the time that the kind of euphoria that comes from working non-stop for days, and then finally having a great test screening with all the Miramax people there, and Kevin being totally ecstatic, made it all worth it. It was probably one of the best moments of my career.