Editing
I always give myself at least a week between filming and editing. When you’re shooting film, this buffer is built in to your schedule because you need to wait for your film to be processed and digitized at a lab, but when you’re shooting digital, there’s nothing to stop you from immediately hopping into the editing booth. So even though the film just sits on my hard drive for a week, I let it sit. There are two reasons for this. The first reason, this is the one I tell everybody, is because it’s virtually impossible to look at what you’ve shot objectively when you shot it hours earlier. You need a breath of fresh air before you come back and look at what you’ve got. My second, and more palpable reason for waiting a week, is that I’m scared shitless that I’ve screwed everything up.
Editing is a strange, purgatorial experience. When you’re writing, the possibilities are endless, and working on set everything is organic and kinetic and has life, but when you’re editing, to a certain extent it feels like the film is already made and you’re just pulling it apart and piecing it together. This is, of course, not true. And while it may give you vertigo to go from sitting in a tub filled with fake blood to sitting in a small dark room with large computer monitor, you need to be equally creative at doing both.
The first thing you need to do when editing digitally is transcode your video. While this might seem unnecessary, as the Canon 7D and Mark IV, both save the to .mov files, which is an incredibly common file type that can be read by Final Cut Pro, it is actually a crucial step. All .mov files are not created equal. Video files need to be read by something called a codec that decodes encrypted digital information, in this case it turns the digital information into video and audio. There are dozens of different codecs for .mov files, and while the one used for the Canon camera files can be read easily by virtually every media player, it’s a disaster to edit with. So you have to transcode.
Transcoding takes a very long time, it works at a ratio of about 1:1, as in it takes a second to transcode every second of video. While you can batch files together and let this run overnight, I like to stay in the room while my files transcode, not only because I enjoy the sense of progress, but also because if one file has a problem, the entire process stops nothing gets transcoded until you fix it. So the first four or five hours of my “editing” process were spent reading a book looking up ever so often to make sure things haven’t gone awry. Nothing went wrong.
My fears during the filming have been realized and I’m finding myself unable to wake from the nightmare that is sync sound. To put it plainly, I’m finally being forced to reconcile all the mistakes I made while I was bumbling around, not knowing what the hell I was doing. For example, I completely forgot to tell the PAs to call out the scene and take number before slating, so I now have a huge collection of audio files, and I have no idea what video files they match. Oops.
Some of the recordings are so low that they’re unusable, but others seem okay. For now I’ve decided to not worry about it. I organized all my clips by scene, which makes the whole editing process just so much more enjoyable, as you don’t have to constantly hunt for clips. I’ve been going through and picking my favorite takes, and crudely editing them together, just so I have everything in the right order. Once I’ve got my favorite takes in the right order, then I go back and snip them to the proper size and make everything fit.
So what else do I have look forward to besides long hours in a tiny editing suite? Post dubbing and foley. Once I’ve done the best I can with the unholy mess of audio that I collected during filming, I have to go back and add additional sound effects and music. This additional audio is often the difference between you having a very pretty home movie, and something you can ostensibly call a film. But more on that next time.
Cheers,
John
Photo Credits
1. Flikr - SirronWong
2. Flikr - Average Jane
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