I found myself at Uni on Friday with not a whole lot to do. It’s an hour each way getting to campus, so when I only have a 5 minute task to take care of it all feels pretty stupid. So I did what I could to get ready for the After Birth edit, which given my current lack of footage was not a whole lot.

The project was shot on 16mm film and is being telecined to DVCAM, cut in Final Cut Pro, and delivered on DVD. What this means, delightfully, is that the very first thing we’ll need to do is to sync up the video to the audio. I assume given the large amount of .WAV files sitting in my edit suite folder that the audio was recorded on one of the flash recorders. I really know squat about sound.

Unfortunately the sound sheets have apparently gone missing, so all I had to start with was a big long list of sequentially numbered .WAV files. About an hour later and I had a new list showing what scene/shot/take each sound file corresponded to. Another half an hour later and I had a FCP project up and running with each sound file sorted into a folder corresponding to the appropriate scene/shot.

The plan is that on Monday Nick (Moss, assistant editor) will capture the video and start syncing each clip. I haven’t decided yet just how this should be done. Two choices come to mind, nesting and not-nesting.

Nesting would mean essentially building a sequence for each take. This would certainly make the project bin a bit neater, but it’s not a process I like. It’s hard to explain exactly why.

Not-nesting is the process I did on Hats last year. I captured the video as one single sequence (not a huge problem since we only had a single reel of footage), then used the blade tool to cut it into each take. I then synced each sound clip to the appropriate take, and linked the sound and video. Any time I wanted a clip, I’d go back to this sequence and copy+paste it.

The process sounds cumbersome and vaguely insane, but it worked for me just fine. The Hats cut was probably the most pain-free edit I’ve ever done. What I like about this process is that it lets me interact with the video and audio directly on the timeline. I don’t have to drill down into a nested sequence to fiddle with something, and then come back out to work on the rest of the cut. I don’t have to wrestle with FCP to let it know that I want to bring up the sequence in the viewer, not open the sequence on the timeline. I like this process because it lets me work without having FCP get in my way.

After Birth is a larger project, with 50 minutes of footage and a 7 minute final run-time. I’m not entirely sure if the non-nesting process I used on Hats will scale up sufficiently. There has to be some third way I’ve been missing, which will let me have the workflow benefits of non-nesting, and the organisation benefits of nesting. That or FCP sucks.