Editing Workflow

dalibor-saula wrote on 4/16/2018, 11:41 PM

Hi Guys,

I want to know what your editing workflow is and to share mine. So that if you have suggestions that would cut my time editing down to bare minimum, I think a lot of us would appreciate that and not just me :-)

This is when I'm editing interview,vlog, doco type footage.

  1. Load footage into the projects window
  2. Grab all talking clips, open them in trimmer, rough trim and add to timeline.
  3. Go through the timeline and trim the humms and arhhhs from the clip etc.
  4. Go through and add the BRoll footage also insert footage in between the talking bits where I feel a break is needed.
  5. Color correct footage and brighten/darken footage as needed.
  6. Apply a project wide colour
  7. Add music to the video and tweak the video slightly where needed so that music fits in naturally
  8. Normalize the audio throughout the entire video. Some call it compression.
  9. Export
  10. Upload

Most of my time is spent on step 2 and step 3. I am trying to find the most quickest way to go to the project media, load the project media to the trimmer and then load it into the timeline. So far I use ALT + 5 to go into project media, with arrows select a clip, I then press the right click equiv. on the keyboard and press T, to open the file in trimmer. I set my In and Out points then press A to add it to the timeline.

For color correcting and grading I find it a but quirky with adding effects and it doesn't always appear in the preview window. Hopefully I can get this process better aligned.

I am coming from a more polished adobe premiere pro CC so I need to lower my expectations a bit in some aspects. However, VMS seems to do about 98% of what I need and for the price you can't go wrong.

Comments

Musicvid wrote on 4/17/2018, 3:45 AM

Thanks for sharing your workflow.

Many of us prefer to edit directly from the timeline, bypassing the trimmer.

dalibor-saula wrote on 4/17/2018, 5:46 PM

@Musicvid do you find that it slows you down? So what happens if you have a 3 minute speaking part and you only want some pieces out of it. Do you then cut all of that in the timeline, then re-arrange where it fits best? I find the trimmer in VMS is not as efficient as premiere. SO might have to start trimming directly in the timeline as well. Should be able to put in and out points from the media browser directly.

Richard Jones wrote on 4/18/2018, 6:07 AM

You can mark the section(s) you want in the Trimmer by using I and O and then pressing A to add from the cursor on the Timeline. This is extremely accurate and you can use Tab to transfer the Video only, the Audio only or both. I love the Trimmer but recognise that this is subjective asothers have different work patterns.

Richard

cris wrote on 4/18/2018, 11:49 AM

Same here, rarely use the trimmer but rather cut on the timeline.

I have a "holder track" (often more than one), one or more "main tracks" and "muted tracks" below the mains.

I drop the clip I want on a holder track, set a low zoom level to shrink down the footage to the point I want very quickly, zoom in to perfect, move left or right on the empty track to position it, and then move it down to the main track.

If I think the clip has more than one useful/nice scene that I might reuse , I tend to keep it a small piece on a muted track - sometimes on the far right of the project, outside the estimated length, and often looping over. Since I make often music video, not losing synchronization is critical for speed, and doing so allows me simply to move the boundaries again without losing the synch work, which is very time consuming.

The Trimmer is useful to me when I have a clip in place and want to look for some other scene I think it's there.

Besides that, whenever possible, I make the surce material so it's about a scene per clip, so things are easy to spot.