My latest editing showreel is now available on YouTube and Vimeo.

Larry Jordan explains just what the four scopes in Final Cut Pro mean, in his video “What are Scopes?”

I usually phrase that question as “What the fuck are these scope things? They look cool but I have no fucking idea what they do.”

So starts the full-time edit of After Birth. Of course, I had to start this process by getting a cold the weekend before. Fortunately I still have another day to recover, as the thinking work of the edit won’t start until tomorrow. Today was composed entirely of preparation. Namely, capturing and syncing the video and the audio.

The film was telecined over the weekend in Melbourne. In the process, Luke and Sian also had them do most of the grade, taking it from colour to black & white. It looks excellent. I may still have to do some adjustments at the end, but it won’t be major. This gives me a little more time in the third week if I need it for the main edit.

My previously discussed issue with clip management was resolved pretty quickly. I found the third way. Basically I do what I did with the non-nesting method, but instead of copy-pasting from one sequence into my work sequence, I drag the linked clips back into the project bin. I then have a new clip with the synced sound that I can use as if I’d captured it with sound in the first place. Huzzah.

Given more time to experiment with methods, I wouldn’t mind trying out something that assistant editor Nick suggested, which was to capture the tapes as single long clips and then break it apart into each take, and then make new synced clips from that. Essentially what I did last year on Hats, but with individual clips at the end. We weren’t sure though that we’d be able to properly organise the clips that the end of it. Capturing each take individually, I knew exactly what I’d end up with, so I went with that. I’ve now got a pretty damned organised project, so much so that at the end of the day (literally) I was able to just drag the clips straight from the project browser into a timeline to produce my 50 minute preview video. The whole film from start to finish.

Since I’m not working in that abomination of a format known as HDV, it only took me 5 minutes to export the video from FCP into DVD Studio Pro. Unfortunately I had to leave before I could also burn the preview DVD to disc. So at the end of day one I’m only 10 minutes behind schedule. Not bad.

Tomorrow morning I’ll screen the rushes on a projector. Sadly not the lovely HD projector in N409, but the less-impressive one in the DOS lab. After that, lunch. But after that, assembly!

Things I picked up today

A vastly improved workflow for working with audio and video captured separately. In addition to figuring out what seems to be an optimal way to manage the clips, I also learned how to properly use markers to make syncing the a/v to begin with a whole lot easier. It’s still a chore, but thankfully a fairly brainless one at this point. Especially helpful today given that I felt half-dead the whole time.

Things I wish were true

I wish the clapper board were some supernatural object which never went out of focus, never blew out, and never drifted out of the edges of the frame.

I wish all continuity notes could be recorded directly onto a laptop. As it is I haven’t copied the notes into the clip info, though I may get Assistant Editor Nick to do this later in the week. It would be interesting I think to look at the paper edit in terms of shot compositions.

I wish we had graphics tablets in the edit suites. Those things are too awesome.

I wish I were cutting on Avid. It’d mean learning all the little niggling bastard details over again, but I’m beginning to get a sense of why FCP often isn’t taken too seriously.

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.

Walter Murch

I finished reading Walter Murch’s “In the Blink of an Eye” yesterday. It’s a very brief book based off a lecture he gave almost 20 years ago now. Given that age, it’s comforting that the only part of it that feels out of date is the afterword included in this edition discussing the state of computer-based editing at that time. So much of that technical side has changed since he wrote that (and in fact Murch himself cut Cold Mountain on Final Cut Pro), but of course the fundamentals of a good edit don’t change. Particularly interesting was his opinion on how the editing equipment used (particularly linear systems vs non-linear systems) has a very real impact on the choices the editor will make. This is especially true today when comparing Avid and Final Cut Pro.

The plan is that on the After Birth edit I’ll consciously try to change my editing style to take into account the thoughts and opinions discussed in Murch’s book. The guy clearly knows what he’s talking about, but more than that what he had to say makes instinctive sense to me. Even concepts that have been talked at me for years now (such as temporal displacement) actually make sense now. I wish I’d read this in first year, so I wouldn’t have wasted all that time thinking about directing. Who wants to direct when all the real work is done in the edit anyway?

Editing Plan

After Birth shoots this weekend and the film will be telecined (I think in Melbourne) next weekend. The edit commences immediately after that, and my editing plan is thus: * An intensive two-week edit. The first cut will be completed at the end of the first week, and picture lock-off will occur at the end of the second week. No sense in letting anything drag on. * Each week will begin with a viewing of all the available footage from start to finish. Notes will be taken during each screening. This should be especially important after the first cut is completed, so that I (and the director) can be aware of what footage is available, and not constantly be working with (and thus only conscious of) the same bits of footage. * One week of grading. It’s unclear how much grading will be required (colour needs to be dropped, but this might be done in the telecine). It’s possible that if the edit runs over, I can take some time away from this stage.

Walter Murch in In the Blink of an Eye:

A beehive can be moved two inches each night without disorienting the bees the next morning. Surprisingly, if it is moved two miles, the bees also have no problem: they are forced by the total displacement of their environment to reorient their sense of direction, which they can do easily enough. But if the hive is moved two yards, the bees will become fatally confused. The environment does not seem different to them, so they do not reorient themselves and, as a result, they will not recognise their own hive when they return from foraging, hovering instead in the empty space where the hive used to be, while the hive itself sits just two yards away.

Believe it or not, this is about film editing. Quite the exception, this is an analogy I like.

As part of my Honours in Creative Arts, I need to conduct a research project. So I’ll do that. And I’ll document some of it here. How about that eh?