Transcript
EDITING WORKFLOW Editing takes patience and attention to detail. It can be tedious at times, but with well-organized media and a plan, you can save time. When you edit you often work with many media files that can easily be moved or mixed up. By putting all your media files in one place and naming them appropriately you will save yourself a lot of time and confusion. Additionally, thinking about your workflow and the order in which you do each step can greatly minimize your time and troubles during editing. This handout is an overview of an editing workflow to help you plan out the post-production of your media project. Editors work in different ways, so these are not always hard and fast rules, but suggestions for keeping your projects moving forward.
OVERVIEW
Some of these steps can happen at the same time and others you may skip all together. Ideally this process will begin before filming is even complete. More detailed descriptions of each step are also included below. 1. Organize your media: Label tapes, create files for media, and edit your images and/or audio files before getting started. 2. “Log” your footage: Review all footage and create a detailed log to help keep track of your clips. 3. Make a paper edit: Craft your story before you begin by using note cards or post its. 4. Digitize video: Bring your footage into Premiere – either all of it or select pieces. 5. Create sub-clips: Once you have all of your footage digitized, create sub-clips of that footage and label them, this feature is only in Premiere Pro. 6. Edit: • • • •
Add narration and/or interview clips Add b-roll Add music and/or audio clips Add titles and transitions
7. Rough cut review: Share your media project and use Critical Response to get feedback from others. 8. Final Edits: • Mix audio levels • Color correction 9. Export finished piece
© 2014 Adobe Foundation / Education Development Center, Inc.
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ORGANIZE YOUR MEDIA
It’s important to keep editing in mind throughout the entire process of making a video. If you envision how the edited piece will look and sound from the beginning it will help shape how you plan and shoot. Think of a way to label your tapes before you shoot that will allow you to keep track of all your footage. For example, label each tape with the date, the person’s name, or where you filmed, and a tape number if possible. Though sometimes an inconvenience while you are shooting, this will prevent confusion while editing. File Management Once you have most of your footage ready to be edited, take some time to organize where you will save media on the computer you’ll be editing on. If you don’t have much room on your hard drive (you’ll need at least a 5 GB), use an external hard drive to hold your digitized footage. Do not plan on saving your media to the site or school network. Also, you should resize all images you will be using in Photoshop before importing them into your project.
LOG YOUR FOOTAGE
If you have more than 10 minutes of footage it is probably a good idea to “log” your interviews and other footage. Logging is when you watch your footage and make a record of what you shot. Logging helps you keep track of what materials you have available and where they are located on the tapes. Youth often resist this step because it can take time, but it is a best practice to get into.
MAKE A PAPER EDIT
This step is not necessary, but it can be very helpful in helping you organize your story. Once you have an idea of the major pieces of your story, you can use notecards to help you visualize what it will look like on the Premiere timeline. Take a bunch of notecards and write out a short description of each major element of your piece. This could be sound bites from interviews, b-roll, music, or narration. You can even make each kind of element (interview, b-roll, narration) a different color card to help you see where you might need more of one. Once you have all your elements lay them out on a table or pin them to a board and play around with the order until they seem to make a coherent story with a beginning, middle, and end. If there are elements that you’re not sure about, just leave them to the side, you can edit them in the real edit.
DIGITIZE YOUR VIDEO
There are many different approaches to digitizing footage. Some people like to digitize everything all at once, and others only digitize what they think they will need for their final piece. Digitizing everything at once is easier to start, but it means that you will have to sift through more video while you edit to find the best parts. It takes more time to find the parts you like and digitize them separately, but it can make editing more manageable down the line.
© 2014 Adobe Foundation / Education Development Center, Inc.
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Whichever way you choose to digitize your footage you should label your clips when possible. Premiere will give them a generic name that adds ascending numbers to the end as you edit, but using a more specific name that tells the editor what is contained in the clip will help them while they are editing. This is an extremely important step if your working in a group project and more than one person is editing.
CREATE SUB-CLIPS
* this option is only available in Premiere Pro If you have a lot of footage that you digitized as long clips, you can make them more manageable by creating “sub-clips.” Sub-clips are reference clips that are portions of larger clips. For example, if you had a digitized clip of a whole interview, you could make a sub-clip of each question and answer that happened in the interview. You should name these sub-clips in way that helps you quickly recognize what they contain.
EDIT
Add Narration and/ or Interviews If you have a narration, many editors like to put that clip (or clips) on the Timeline first. This helps create the backbone of the edit and give you a structure to put the other clips into. If you are making a music video, the same goes for laying down the music track first so that you can edit the pictures to the music. Organize Clips in Timeline Once your clips are organized and you have a sense of your story, you’re next goal is to create a Rough Cut. A Rough Cut is basically an assembly of your most important elements in the order you think they should go. In general, the clips that create your backbone should go on the Video 1 and/or Audio 1 tracks. B-roll should go on the Video 2 or higher tracks and background music and sound effects should go on the Audio 2 or higher tracks. If you have overlapping video clips on different tracks, you will only see the clip that is on the highest track. You will hear all the overlapping audio tracks at the same time. If you don’t have music or narration to begin with, then you should put your best interview clips on the Timeline first in the order that you came up with in your Paper Edit. This can change as you edit, but it’s helpful to have them all on the Timeline first and then start playing with the order. Trim Clips There are several ways to trim a clip once it is on the Timeline, and the two main ways are using the Razor tool and the Trim tool. These can be found in the Tools window. Add B-roll B-roll is any footage you use to cover up interviews or narration. Usually it is video or images related to what the viewer is hearing from the audio tracks. B-roll is usually placed on the timeline once your other main elements, like interviews, are in place. Use b-roll to fill in any gaps or to illustrate a point being made during an interview.
© 2014 Adobe Foundation / Education Development Center, Inc.
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Add Music and/or Audio Clips At this point you should have a Rough Cut. If possible you should start creating or finding music or audio clips that you want to use in your piece towards the end of compiling your Rough Cut. Place these clips in their own Audio Track on the Timeline. Add Titles and Transitions Once you have all of your audio and video clips where you want them you can add titles and transitions to the Timeline. Titles are their own clips. Use the Title Tool to make them and then place them in the Timeline on their own track. If you put them on a Video Track above another clip, you will see the title over that video. Otherwise, the Title clip will default to show over black. Transitions can be added between clips to cover up jump cuts or move from one scene to the next. The most commonly used transitions are dissolves, fades, and wipes. Feel free to play around with transitions, but be careful too many different transitions can become distracting to the viewer.
REVIEW YOUR ROUGH CUT
After you have your clips in order with your narration and/or soundtrack, titles, and transitions it is a good time to review your Rough Cut. Take the feedback you receive from your Critical Response and decide what changes you need to make to the Rough Cut. Repeat the above steps as necessary until you have what we call the Final Cut, which is almost ready to be exhibited.
FINAL EDIT
Mix your Audio When you are finished with your edits, you will probably need to mix your audio. This means setting the audio levels so that they are even throughout the piece. The easiest way to mix audio is on the Timeline. The idea is to make all of the different audio levels consistent so that the viewer does not have to turn the volume up and down as they watch the video. You can also add Audio Transitions to the beginning and end of a clip to make it fade in and out. Color Correction Color correction is used to even out the colors of your video. Sometimes clips you shoot come out too light or dark or too blue or yellow. You can apply auto or manual Color Correction effects to your clips to make any adjustments you need. This step is not required, but it can help your piece look more cohesive.
EXPORT
When you finalize your piece, you’ll need to think about exporting it. How you export will depend on how you want to exhibit your piece. Exporting means creating one video file from the project file and many media files that make up your project.
© 2014 Adobe Foundation / Education Development Center, Inc.
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