An editing challenge.....!

mitteg wrote on 3/15/2003, 11:58 AM
Hello,

I have shot a football match with my miniDV cam. It was a single camera shot. I tried to do both wideangle and close-up takes of the ball and the players. So now I have 45 minuts of garbage. Why? Because in close-up takes I zoom in a lot in order to get good takes of the faces, the ball and so on, and of course most of the times I can only utilize 1 or 2 secons of every close-up takes.

So, what I would like to do is to show a wide-angle video of the match and intercut close-up shots and then go back to the action in wide-angle. But the problem is that it is a single camera shot so then I will have to simulate that it has been shot with two cameras.

What is the best way to do these in Vegas ? I mean, what would you do in order to make a non-boring video having 45 min. of boring footage ? The footage contains wide angle and close-up shots.

Any tips, ideas will be highly appreciated !

Comments

Paul_Holmes wrote on 3/15/2003, 12:14 PM
One idea might be to lay it all out on a track, select the audio and then Edit | Switches | Lock. Then find the sections where you zoomed in, held the shot, and then zoomed out. His S just before the zoom and just after the zoom. Then go into the zoomed in shot and hit S where it first stabilizes and then S just before you zoom back. Delete the zoom in and out sections, then select the zoomed shot and press U to ungroup it. Then using the control key stretch it out to fill the gap.

Later you can edit this down.

This is somewhat simplistic, but this might be one way to get it started. You can refine things beyond just stretching the zoomed in sections. But your audio will always be in sync. You just have to make sure the zoomed in portions look synched also.
beatnik wrote on 3/15/2003, 12:20 PM

I will take a shot at this, I think the answer is this.....you can & you can't.
Since you used 1 camera and since "time is constant" you can't do what you want to do
unless you "fake" it. In other words you can portion the shots and edit them in such a way as to give it the "2 camera" look but it won't be "true" to the game.

I will give you an example, which is even trickier because of the singing, I shot
a band with one camera. I shot 3 songs. I wanted to give the "2 camera" look so what
I did was I cut out all clips that did not show the lead singer singing or the lead
guitarist playing a solo, or shots from "behind" the band and incorporated these shots into "ONE" song via transitions. Now, to someone who wasn't there that night
or at least did not pay too much attention to detail it WOULD seem that I only videotaped "ONE" song using a multi-camera setup. Since you don't have to sync to music and you don't care too much about continuity then you may be able to cheat a little bit. Just set-up an A and B roll on the time line in Vegas with A being your
"inserted 2nd camera clips" and B being your "main camera clips" and mix!

Experiment and have fun!

Regards,

Alex
BillyBoy wrote on 3/15/2003, 12:22 PM
You can fake the sync by using non specific background sounds from the crowd to fill in areas you extend. Also don't get too carried away with zooming in constantly, it gets tiring to watch over and over. There's nothing wrong with simple cuts.

You may want to strech out of some key action by isolating any key plays you caught while zoomed in. Again this is effective if not over used. With Vegas you can also zoom in when you didn't really while shooting. What I would go for to make it more interesting is slow the action down enough to catch the action of the ball being grabbed, fumbled, players falling down, getting knocked down etc.. Again don't over do it. Use it a few times and safe for the best plays.

If a typical game, you can cut down the total time a lot and not take away from the game. I hope you took some shots of the crowd as well which you should cut away too once in awhile.
mitteg wrote on 3/15/2003, 2:02 PM
Great ideas !

I didn`t mention that audio sync is not important because I will add music. And yes, the only way to make it fun is to cheat. Let's say, a player runs to the right with the ball, then I put a close-up of the ball which I shot 5 minuts before and such things...

The point here is HOW TO GET ORGANIZED ?? Since Vegas can't create subclips, I mean, create a new file of a region of the clip like Avid does. That would be the best way to get organized because I would be able to divide all the match in small sublips called "player 07 running to the left", "close-up player 02" and so on. I guess that Vegas regions will do the job, but..ummmh.

The purpouse of the video is not to be a truly caption of the match, just show what happened, the players running, these kind of things.

Of course, I know that the best way is to shot a match with 2 or 3 cameras and then sync them all together, but there was only me ;-)

Thanks !

Robert.
TorS wrote on 3/15/2003, 5:03 PM
What is the purpose of the finished product?
How long does it have to be?
Did you shoot some extras like spectators, arena details etc (or could you get some from another match)?

I ask because the answers may trigger my imagination, but others may benefit from them, too.
You might open your mind to the fact that what you call football is not football to the rest of the English-speaking world. If it were, you'd now have 2x45 minutes of boring football video to worry about.
Tor