The only thing I can think of involves life insurance, murder and a pact of silence. Or Pluraleyes: http://www.redgiant.com/products/all/pluraleyes/ My God, I've had some bad beats but this sounds like someone crafted a nightmare specifically for you. I'm guessing when they ask you what you think, they don't want your artistic input, they just want you to hold them. Reshoots are out, financially, right? Keep it technical and financial and within your department. Unless the audio is fixed, something that can be done with minimal (if tedious) effort, then the sound issues will make it unreleasable, guaranteeing no return on investment. If the sound sources are fixed, you can do your job and they can release it. You just upped their return from zero. You're a hero. If you have to throw good money after bad, better make it the least amount for the most return. If everyone including Choppy is made aware of his role in the clusterfuck, shame and fear should make him more pliable. Getting Choppy to sit long hours syncing, because of his failures, is a low investment. He also gets punished for his incompetence. If Choppy's too slow/incompetent to get the job done, suggest they take some of his fee to pay an intern to do it. His shit-eating grin of agreement will be informed by the terror that, due to his incompetence, they may never release the film. Sync the clips, post the audio, get the fee, watch them take the loss again, shake your head. Then send them to me. I have an amazing script that's perfect for April, shooting in the Spring. I just have to write it this weekend.
Pluraleyes is one of those things that's awesome in theory, sucky in practice. Not that Final Cut or Avid are particularly quick, but inject Pluraleyes into the mix and you can literally set a computer chunking for days while it rebuilds a short film. I once watched it chew through 8 minutes of footage for three days on a 12-core Mac Pro without ever actually syncing anything up correctly. Two other things to keep in mind: 1) The movie is terrible. Even were all the audio to be pristine, it would still involve placing my name on an abysmally-bad project. Is the money good enough to warrant work without credit? Perhaps to someone else. 2) Part of the reason for dealing with Harry and June is that, theoretically, filmmakers get better and move on to brighter and better things. Poky Stick 2 demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt, however, that they have learned nothing and that the arc of filmmaking is long, but theirs bends towards craptastic oblivion. That said. many of your points were made by me in my eventual settlement in the matter.
I agree with your sentiment that Pluraleyes is crappy. I've used it to sync unsynced/unslated/unlabeled clips but thank goodness that was a corporate shoot with only about 50 separate clips, all shot on one day. I originally tried to sync the entire sequence, which failed miserable. I ended up going back and syncing all the independent raw clips from camera with boom and lav, while treating myself to a very nice bottle of scotch on the producers dime. Then I had all the raw video clips with 6 audio tracks - 2 camera, 2 lav, 2 boom and reconnected the media using the new stuff. Once that was was in place I went through and made sure the audio from boom/lav matched the video and then chose the best of the two. Thank goodness it was all voiceover and some sound like doors opening and closing. There were a couple that didn't sync properly so I had to go and find that section by hand which was miserable. But not as miserable as it could've been. I think it would take a massive amount of adderall and an intern or 5 to wade through all the clips and sync them like I managed to do on the hot mess shoot. As for placing your name on the film, blah. That's always the worst. We've burned a couple DPs on hot mess shoots because the final output was so terrible that they didn't want to be associated with it in any way. Even though they were paid a fairly reasonable sum, for a 1 day, 1 location, corporate video. The execs at my company fail to realize how important reputation is in the industry, or how to properly manage a shoot, or how important a DP is. In fact I got called in a couple months ago to be asked if I wanted to be on set for an upcoming shoot and only 30 minutes later realized they wanted me to DP. Yeah. I don't DP. But because I can take photographs and videos with a 5 year old DSLR in a lightbox on occasion, apparently they assume I can DP. Hahahhaha. Good luck, KB. Not to stroke your ego too much, but you're fucking brilliant and seem to be a phenomenal problem solver and people person so I have no doubt that you can get through and come out on top with whatever shitstorm flies your way.
Thhbhbhbbhbhht. This particular issue was sorted by me six months ago. I'd just started writing it up and forgot about it until I found it, bored, last night. So I finished it up and posted it. This one has a solution/semi-happy ending.Good luck, KB. Not to stroke your ego too much, but you're fucking brilliant and seem to be a phenomenal problem solver and people person so I have no doubt that you can get through and come out on top with whatever shitstorm flies your way.
I thought you were crowdsourcing complex problems to a small community you respect, hoping we could find something you had missed. kleinbl00 is asking for advice? not leaving it for others? But what you really did was set up a chess match mid-game, and let us have a go. Have you already written the ending? I can't wait to check the back the book for the answer.