It's good - in it!?!!

Yeah, was it ever thus. - Laz, the day I stop learning is the day you can .....

Oh yes.... Just come back from a "Wedding Shoot" with Pro videographers. I belong to a videographers institute, as an unqualified member, and asked if any Pro would have this "newbie", who would be willing to fetch and carry for the exchange of pro info. The director asked me to film the event and what I wanted to do. Soooo....I planned a training vid of pros filming a marriage video! Simple really. I took my old Anny-Panny-Cammy along and used up 3 x 45 mins new film, and organised my batteries so that they spanned over the 8 hour session. I had a great day, learnt gazillions of stuff from the blokes as well as as being offered the main course at the wedding reception - mmh nice!

I've just watched the "rushes" this morning, and I think I've got what I want.

Just read an article on the Creative Forum, where there is an explanation of using "stills" from clips as an option for "organising" capture sessions, could be valuable for me for the type of cinema verita that goes with the approach I used with the wedding activities. I thought about this approach in the past and hadn't brought the salient points of the procedure together, until now. And that was a direct result of reading this Creative Forum "tip". I'm going to give it a go and see how I can improve my intial haul 'n trawl through the 2.25 hours of tape. I think I'll use the "free-download" timeline PDF format to make a quick and dirty PC version of the clip-flow. Yeah, I know I could "dump" all the hours onto the F or G drive - but maybe this might be better time spent. I'm going to have to review my work anyway in VF, soooo... I'm thinking I'll capture separate "stills" to identify the clips I want. Yeah yeah I can hear everybody saying - "Don't bother, Grazie - just dump it all on a drive, and be done!"

Anyway, I'm wandering off thread - as usual. Coming back to the Creative Forum, I've found it valuable and refreshing to get another view to this vid work too.

Regards,

Grazie

I have never captured a whole tape to the drive.

First of all, until recently, that was extremely hard to do. I've been interested in digital video ever since I first saw one of those 160x120 movies encoded in Cinepak, back in 1994/5. I began to digitize clips from my Laserdiscs in late 1996 with my brand spankin' new Cyrix PR-166+ system with 64 MB of RAM and a 2GB hard drive (Yup, I didn't have to worry about the 2GB file limit because my hard drive was ... 2GB). Capturing in YUV9 at 320x240, I could only fit about 30 minutes of video on my 1GB capture partition. You HAD to economical at what you captured.

Even in college, when I learned that pro's have interns who "log" footage (basically, you watch hours of footage and mark when the shots start and stop in SMPTE Time Code - horribly boring work). Still you have a logged tape, which make it easy to get only the scenes you need.

Basically, most of what you shoot is crap. So even in my own projects, I'll watch the entire tape and write down my favorite scenes even before I even touch a computer. Then I'll capture one scene, tirm a little, put it on the time line, capture the next scene, etc, etc. Basically, I'm doing linear editing at this point. Later, I'll do a second pass over the timeline, tightening edits, adding transitions, color correcting, etc. This method is very economical when it comes to both time and HD space since you end up not capturing most of the tape.

That's why I pay close attention to how well an video editing program trims a clip, and how well it does ripple edits. VF does trims on the timeline pretty well (although it's seperate Trimmer is only so-so, the one area where I thought Adobe Premiere was better). Ripple edits could be more automated than they are currently (for instance, automatically shifting footage for you). As you can imagine, automatic scene detection is a non-feature for me.

Thanks DD,

Having not gone to film college, its good to know that I was on the right track. Yes, I do do a film log now. And yes, it is boring. But, it does give me the added option of reviewing what I've shot and the "space" to think creatively 'bout what "could" be instead of being "retentive" 'bout what I thought was on the penny.

Ooooo I do like straight talk - "Basically, most of what you shoot is c@$%" - often I wish others would be more self-critical. There are plenty of excellent examples of very fine work being done all around us. TV commercials; travel shows; news reports; biogs etc etc. All these "creators" learnt somewhere - eh? I'd also promote the study in a short history of art programme - oh yes and a simple design course thrown in, just for luck.....

DD, I really think you are on to something here.

Regards

Grazie