Ambitious film editing question

vitalforce2 wrote on 6/26/2003, 1:30 PM

Soliciting advice from those who have done some long-form editing on V4. Although I am a writer, and director of the current project, I am not experienced in editing feature-length material (but I will be when I'm done!). I am in mid-film project, and already can see the complexity building as I try, for example, to insert bits of the medium and close shots into the wide shot covering a particular scene. I also am dealing with two soundtracks--the camera's recorded sound which I use as a scratch track for synching, and a separate audio track recorded via boom mike. I quickly saw the value of bins with the V4 upgrade, but editing my way through what is, so far, 6 hours of raw footage on a timeline--any suggestions for making the work flow a little less schizophrenic is appreciated. In particular I am having a real problem trying to create regions and then not being able to call anything up in the "region" view.

Comments

filmy wrote on 6/26/2003, 3:41 PM
A lot of people love to just take everything they shoot and digitize it. I disagree with that. My best bit of advice for starters is to have a good script supervisor on the set who lines the script as you shoot. Good for director? Circle the take. Second is have a good AC who will log the shots - good for camera? Circle the take. And having a good audio person helps as well - good for sound? Circle the take. Now when you get to the editing stage you can do an edit log - view the tape and see if you want to print the takes that were 'circled' on the set. You remember loving Scen 25, Take 2 but you see the sound person made a note that one of the grips was sleeping and you hear snoring and the AC made a noted that their focus was soft at the end of the shot. So maybe Take 1 was better even if the acting wasn't as good..either way you log it mark only the takes you like for capture. This was you are only capturing 'circled' takes and not the entire tape you shot that day.

Next I would say make you bins so they reflect a shot or scene. Mark it any way you want - Scene 1, Scene 2 and so on or just label by description - film intro, tom and dick kill harry and alice, or whatever. Audio wise you really need to sync up your footage first - editing the picture is NOT the same as doing the audio and that should be kept in mind. Yes you can, and will, do the dialog and location/production sound editing from that audio but you need to worry about picture first. Again - with your printing of circled takes first is a start because now when you capture your audio you first will only need to capture the circled takes for audio as well. I am hoping you slated the head of all shots? With the good ole "Speed" "Scene 46. Take 1. Marker" Because you will need this to make syncing easier. Problem is now - the sync will have to done possibly in a 2 step process. First is taking the picture, each take, and sync it to the audio. Second is rendering out that take with just the sync sound as the only audio. Currently I do not think there is a way to sync up your sound and picture and than dump it back into bins and keep that sync.

the last bit of little advice here is based on how you edit, picture wise. You say you have 6 hours of material on the timeline - I pray this isn't just one scene you are working on? Going back to how I suggested marking your bins, and what would be in each bin, you should try to edit each scene and once that is done move on. How you want to do this is up to you - you can do it in order and place slugs where a scene goes that isn't shot yet. You can just start editing what you know is complete - scene by scene. Timeline wise this will really clean it up because you are only dealing with scene by scene - not just dumping the entire film on there and trying to cut it. Sort of a 'rule of thumb' is to dump your master shot onto the timeline and than just cut your other shots onto that. But this is just a suggetion and not very creative overall. For dialog it is pretty straight forward but for action scene it can get tossed out the window.

Audio wise it is an entirely new ballgame. IMO you really should not try to start cutting the final audio until you have the picture locked. As it sounds like you are doing everything yourself I would suggest starting by cutting dialog. Once that is locked go to effects and that alone will have many layers. You should have at least 2 tracks set aside for ambiance, one for foley, one for production and one for hard effects for example. You should plan ahead depending on what kind of film it is - lots of gunshots? Have them all on one track, or as many as you need, but the idea is to keep the guns on those tracks - no other effects. Same for cars and a subsection - types of cars if it is something like "Fast and Furious". And so on. Once that is done put the music into play.

On top of that audio - if you plan on going 'foreign' than you will need an M&E of everything and that is where it could get really tricky. You think that driving shot is really nice but if you don't put the basic effects under that shot when you pull out the dialog you might find you have...nothing. Same goes for the fight scene - if you pull out the production audio you might find no more "ughs" and "omphs!" and all the other noises stunt fighters like to make. For me I feel anything that is a 'word' or can be heard as a word should be pulled out. Any sort of other bodily noise should be left in: grunts, groans, moans, heavy breathing and so on - and if it isn't there you need to put it in.

It is a long process to DIY but it can be done, you just need to do it in sections. Not all at once or on the same timeline. Keep one project for Picture edit and one project for audio at the least. At the most - one for picture, one for ADR, one for foley, one for hard effects, one for dialog and one for music. Than you do premixes and bring it all together for the final mix. And also - this is my film background speaking - it would probably be easier for you if you looked at this as 10 minute pieces and not one long piece - as far as working audio anyway. I have done it both ways and it is really insane trying to sit down and mix a 90 minute film in "real time", let alone trying to work on one that way.

Keep one important, important thing in your mind - you need to find a way to work that you are comfortable with. Your main question was workflow and the timeline being not so 'schizophrenic'. What I said will help to clean up that timeline a lot and keep your mind on what is in front of you instead of trying to do everything at once, on the same timeline. I hope it helps somewhat, and really you learn best by actually doing it - like I said, finding what works best for you.
BrianStanding wrote on 6/26/2003, 4:14 PM
Filmy covered most of what I was going to say. I would just re-emphasize:

1. Organize your bins in the way that makes most sense to you, given the project you're working on. Scene by scene is certainly one option, but you may want to have a bin of "cutaways," "brooding close-ups," etc. Remember, you can put the same clip into multiple bins without running out of disk space. And take advantage of the comments section in the Media Pool to jot down thoughts about clips as you review them. Your goal is to find exactly the clip you want with a minimum of hunting around.

2. For setting regions in clips, the method I use is this:
a. set Options to "automatically save markers and regions with media files"
b. load event into the Trimmer (I have Options set to "double-click loads media file into Trimmer"
c. use the "I" and "O" keys to set in and out points to mark the region I'm interested in
d. press "R" to set the region and name it
e. hit the "save" key to save the markers and regions to file (should be unnecessary, but you can't be too careful).
f. When you view the clip in the Explorer window, you should get a list of regions, by name (explorer window set to "regions" view). You can grab these by name with the mouse and plunk them on the timeline.

3. If you're working with a script, start marking it up with editing ideas on paper before you start working with the computer. If working without a script (documentary?), I try to put together a paper "spine" of themes, topics and ideas that lead naturally from one to the other. I then try to build scenes around each topic. If you have a target length, you can also start coming up with estimates of desired length of each scene. This then becomes your blueprint, and you can refer to it when you get lost to remind yourself of where you are and where you want to go.

4. Carve the beast up into chunks! Work on a scene at a time, then try to fit the scenes together into a larger sequence. The nice thing about non-linear editing is that, well, it's non-linear. If you find yourself staring at a particular scene unable to decide what to do next, maybe it's time to move to a different scene. Sometimes if you have the beginning scene and the end scene cut, the middle suddenly becomes clear.

vitalforce2 wrote on 6/26/2003, 5:36 PM
Thanks, fellows. As usual the SoFo forum proves its worth as a virtual university. I appreciate how much work you each put into commenting on this subject.

The advice is tremendously helpful. It was also good to see that my first instincts were along the right track. To answer some of your prompts: The project is divided into 29 distinct scenes, and I did use the scene numbers, which corresponds to the production script (I pencil-marked a script breakdown when we shot--professional crew working for peanuts in the dead of winter). Following what I had read on the subject, I decided, as a first-timer trying to minimize his error rate, to capture everything first, except the obvious unusable stuff. I named the video and audio files similarly, so they would match by scene number after capturing. And absolutely my first step after putting it all on a timeline was to sync ALL the audio and group it together. After that, since I don't want to delete the camera's scratch audio track till the very end, I couldn't really use the Trimmer, but it did seem that the Region functions were an excellent way to identify the takes I intended to use.

This project started out as a short film, a WWII love story shot on a brand-new Panasonic DVX100 (incredible footage with a very weak Tiffen filter, in 24p--a lot of subdued browns and green German uniforms, etc.). Originally it was a short play. My wife's an actress and I'm a closet writer (don't make a living at it-yet), and in the 90s we developed a series of plays in small NYC theatres, which we are now rewriting, one by one, as films. When I put together a 3-minute trailer for our wrap party, the cast & crew flipped and urged us to go on and finish the whole story. We recently decided to do just that. So truthfully, now that it's no longer a short film but a feature project, I will probably bow out and recruit a pro editor a little later in the process, but in the meantime Vegas enables me to shorten my learning curve and convey my "vision" to the main editor later on.

So I will print out your advices and keep it taped near my monitor for the foreseeable future. Before I'm done, I have to find a royalty-free recording of Beethoven's 9th Symphony....
vitalforces wrote on 11/15/2004, 12:46 PM
UPDATE re: The excellent advice on long-form edits from filmy & BrianStanding: I have followed advices and it has been great, reducing a 1:45 hour film to its individual scenes & editing each scene in order. I divided the piece into about eight different projects each covering about 20 min. of the 24p timeline (20 min. is the length of a film reel if a distributor likes it at a festival and we start thinking film transfer--hey, I can dream, can't I?).

The 8 projects are subdivided into regions, and each region corresponds to a scene, with 3 to 5 scenes per project depending on their length. At the end of each project, i.e. far right of the timeline, I put an "End of Project" marker so that beyone that point I can toss on various takes and angles a la Liquid Edition, previewing them by soloing the vid. & audio for that file.

I noticed some audio sync issues when rendering straight from a multi-track project region to an MPEG file for DVDA2, so I simplify the MPEG rendering calculations by first rendering the regions / scenes to a simple series of DV-avi files on a single video & one mixed-down audio track. I can then line up the scenes in a separate project which lets me play the whole film straight through, and the avi's along the timeline can be rendered from there as MPEG video and AC-3 audio for DVDA2.

Over the weekend, being about 18 script pages from finishing the rough cut of the film, I noticed that audio seems to have drifed 6-10 frames ahead of picture sync. I may have "bumped" something which reminded me (thus this post): LOCK IT when you're done editing the timeline up to that point.

We should have a web page set up by December and will try and post some trailer footage there. Still amazing to have come this far with Vegas, Sound Forge, Boris FX and a Panny DVX100.
BrianStanding wrote on 11/15/2004, 1:38 PM
Thanks for the update. Good luck with the project!