DOCUMENTARY EDITING
WITH AVID MEDIA COMPOSER
TABLE OF CONTENTS
01 AN OVERVIEW OF THE FARM TO TABLE PROJECT
Interpreting a creative brief to establish goals
Embarking upon the art of documentary editing is definitely an exciting and challenging task. Just as with other type of video projects, documentaries can run the gamut of content, style, and perspective, but all share the common goal of recording real events, hopefully by revealing an intimate look into the worlds of people and places. Specifically, our task through this course is to approach a project from start to finish. Analyzing goals and evaluating our raw materials, then fashioning a game plan in order to prepare our project, and cut a solid rough cut, and then craft a meticulous fine cut through a thorough review process, and then deliver a product that ultimately pleases our client.
This project called the Farm to Table Project will be a short documentary of around five to six minutes, on the practice and delivery of sustainable agriculture in the Santa Barbara, California region. We'll be following one farmer, BD Dautch, along with the people in his life as he explains to us why local farming is so important. OUR CLIENT, THE MAYOR OF SANTA BARBARA, HAS DELIVERED TO US A CREATIVE BRIEF, WHICH IS A BASIC SUMMARY OF THE CLIENT'S DESIRED MESSAGE FOR THIS PIECE. So, let's take a look at this Creative Brief. Now, you can find the entire Creative Brief in the exercise files that come with this title, if you're a lynda.com subscriber, and I'll put a bit of it up on screen here.
But we won't read the entire thing, rather I'd like to draw out some key points to talk about, quickly, becoming the focal point of a movement that merges ideas from agriculture, cuisine, and ecology. Now, here we're getting the main thesis of the piece, explaining the major areas we'll be exploring in our documentary. Shoppers looking to support area growers, help the environment by reducing the need for shipping. Now, here we're delving into the importance of local growing, one of the preeminent messages of this growing movement.
Chefs and restaurants looking for a way to distinguish their offerings while providing flavor and nutrition are turning to local organic growers. All right, so here we're going beyond the grower/consumer component and are talking about restaurants. Getting across the point that this movement isn't just for the common consumer is important for our client. And the Farm To Table Project aims to support this movement towards locally grown, ecologically sustainable produce by promoting key local growers and the weekly farmers market.
And here we're focusing on the importance of the Farmer's market itself. There will be a lot of great footage of the Farmer's market, so it promises to be a fun scene to edit. But we are also tasked with the job of showing how important it is to the Farm To Table movement. So as you can see, we have about 5 or 6 minutes to find an interesting, educational, and creative way to focus our piece on these important points. We'll have many tools in our arsenal, everything from interviews, to video footage, to still images, to graphics, to music, the list goes on.
We'll have to take a look at these assets and our project goals in order to help start the process of defining exactly how we'll go about editing our documentary.
Now that we have a pretty good idea of the basic thesis and main points that we need to get across in our short documentary, let's take a look at what assets we have in order to tell our story. Now first of all depending on the editor's involvement in the production phase of the project, you as the editor may have more or less say on the assets that you have to work with. For this project, however, it's important to note that an entire production team went out and shot a bunch of footage and provided us with our raw materials, and now it's up to us to assemble the best product possible from what we have got.
So in this case, we had relatively little to do with production. This is completely a post-production venture. So let's take a look here. I have a hard drive provided to me by the production team, and if I go ahead and just take a look and see how much I've got, about 432 gigabytes of mostly HD footage, and this is really common to shoot a lot of footage for documentaries and so it's a big job for us to go through everything and make sure that we know what everything is and how it can best be used to tell our story.
So as you can see, everything kind of has categorical names. We have various parts of the Farm to Market process, loading on the farm as well as some shots of the farm, packaging process, and picking, and I'll just kind of go through so you can see all the stuff we have to work with, shots at the farmers market, and down here towards the bottom we have our interviews. So these are our raw materials, we have over 400 gigabytes of stuff to sort through, nothing has really named, we don't know what anything is unless we would actually click on it and play it.
So there is going to be a lot of this in our future and going through in organizing it well so that we can work with it in the best way possible. We also have some music and some other things like Archival Images and some still images that were shot on DSLR as well as the iPhone and some graphic stuff as well. So lots and lots of stuff, really not organized very well right now, but what I want to do is actually show you the project once it's been organized so you can see kind of where we are headed.
I am going to open up Media Composer and show our Assets and dig deep here. All right, so here's our Audio and Graphics, our Interviews which no longer are they 30 minute long interviews, but these are interview selects where we have gone through and determined what part of the interviews are going to be most useful to us. They are named. We have all of our video B-roll, which is going to help us tell our story, and if I kind of look in here, you can see that now we have all of these clips that are named appropriately and all the stuff that was not useful for the documentary is not going to be here.
So I know that I've gone through, and I have really made sure that everything in the project is stuff that I really think I am going to work with. So as you can see, we have a lot of stuff to work with. It's still hard to really find it all, but fortunately over the next few chapters, I am going to go through some really useful Media Composer searching techniques so that we can find exactly what we want when we need it. So as you are crafting the story, it's so important to be able to recall this perfect sound bite or the perfect video to slot in at the perfect moment.
Fortunately, there are quite a few organizational tools as I was saying that can help you arrange your assets in a way that makes sense and allow you to immediately recall those essential moments which we'll explore later. So hopefully we now have a good approach and know our project goals as well as the tools we have to make these goals a reality. Let's be sure to remember all of this as we continue to fashion a plan to craft our documentary.
So we know we're slated with the task of relaying several important points within the parameters of the Farm to Table project, and we have a general idea of the assets that are available to us. In order to figure out our approach and style, let's take a look at some possible options and then decide how we'd like to move forward. Given our assets we're probably going to let the interview footage and B-roll tell a large majority of our story. The interviews have been shot rather traditionally. So we've already got that part largely decided for us. They will serve as the backbone of the piece.
We have one main documentary subject and about a half a dozen secondary subjects and they'll each get there chance to help tell our story. The video B-roll as all of the primary and supplemental video footage that was shot that'll be inter cut with the interviews. B-roll can be anything from beauty shots to intricately shot process footage. We'll explore all of this later. What else do we have? Narration, or voice over, is common technique in documentaries to relay information to the audience. The style amount and content of the narration can vary drastically from project to project, but in general voiceover narration gives a documentary a somewhat observational feel where the audience is getting a guided look at the topic at hand.
Text is another tool that can help relay important information to the audience. Text has the ability to slow down a piece, allowing the audience to soak in essential information. Usually, filmmakers tend to use text more as a punctuation device where there are fewer instances of it, but it can really feel like its own character within the film. Sometimes documentaries don't use any formal channels of information relay. Indeed you can just let the footage tell the story, and that's what cinema verite is. A technique commonly used in documentaries from the 60s is truly a secret look inside the lives of others.
Now because we already have a somewhat formal or a traditional method in the form of our interviews, we won't be employing true cinema verite in our documentary, but I think it could be great to use a little bit of this technique. Sometimes documentary film makers choose to take a very creative, artistic approach to their storytelling technique perhaps in the form of eccentric graphics, cartoons, or music. Being a little out of the box can really make a documentary interesting and exciting to watch. So let's keep that in the back of our minds. Of course, many documentaries choose to take a combination of these approaches and may even employ techniques we haven't mentioned. As I said we have an arsenal at our disposal.
So we shouldn't be afraid to use what we've got. Give it all of these considerations we need to figure out how we're going to tell our story. Sometimes the technique is boiler plated for us, and we don't have too much freedom, but in this case, we do have some leeway. So how do we decide? We want to take a look at a few things our content/subject, our audience, and our intentions. Our content, or subject, is a progressive movement involving focus on agriculture, cuisine, and ecology. Nothing too formal about this. In fact, it's got a very organic natural feeling to it.
Our audience is mostly people who would likewise be interested in this type of progressive practice and lifestyle. Also, the Mayor of Santa Barbara hired us. So we've got to try to appeal to his basic desires. Again, we'll probably be going with a more organic approach here, but we also have to be concise and educational. Now our intention is to paint the farm to table process in a positive light while trying to educate and enlighten, and it'd be great if we could also try to be a little artsy about it. So based on all of that our basic strategy is going to lead us to go for an organic film to try to match our subject matter, but we still need to be educational and concise, and we'll let the interviews tell the story.
It'd be great to use some cinema verite where we let the footage speak for itself, and we probably won't be using any narration or text. So we definitely have a combination of tools we can use here. So we know we're going to keep it fairly organic and natural, but also be concise and informative. So hopefully we now have a good approach and know our project goals as well as the tools we have to make these goals reality. Let's be sure to remember all of that as we continue to fashion a plan to craft our documentary.
02 THE DOCUMENTARY POST PRODUCTION PROCESS
Before diving straight in, let's take a step back and look at a high-level view of the entire documentary post-production process. Early in the process you as the editor may get a chance to communicate with producers, directors, and other stakeholders about how the film is planned and shot. I highly recommend you do this if you can. Before editing, do as much research as you can. Try to familiarize yourself with the content, style, and workflow of your documentary. ADDITIONALLY, BECOME FAMILIAR WITH FORMATS, DELIVERABLE REQUIREMENTS, AND OTHER TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR THE POST-PRODUCTION WORKFLOW.
Once you get the footage it's time to log and annotate. You'll need to sort through your raw source materials and all notes pertaining to the documentary. DEVELOP A SYSTEM FOR ORGANIZATION HERE. THEN IT'S TIME TO BRING IT ALL IN. NAME YOUR CLIPS INTELLIGENTLY, GROUP THE MATERIALS INTO BINS, AND ORGANIZE THE BINS APPROPRIATELY, IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE QUICK ACCESS TO ALL FOOTAGE. YOU CAN ALSO LINK YOUR SOURCE CLIPS TO IMPORTED DIGITAL TRANSCRIPTS. NOW, FINALLY IT'S TIME TO EDIT THE PROGRAM AND POLISH IT TO THE BEST OF YOUR ABILITIES USING THE AVAILABLE TOOLS.
Screen your rough cut to several audiences and get as much feedback as you possibly can. After the screening of the rough cut, meet with people invested in the project to work toward a locked cut of the program. This is a big collaborative stage. THEN IT'S TIME TO DISTRIBUTE LOCKED PICTURE AND ROUGH AUDIO TRACKS TO SPECIALISTS FOR FINALIZATION, OR IF YOU'RE DOING ALL THE FINISHING YOURSELF THEN YOU NEED TO SPEND A LOT OF TIME ON EACH OF THESE PHASES. FINALLY, YOU'LL ASSEMBLE THE FINISHED PROGRAM BY INTEGRATING THE FINAL AUDIO MIX AND GRAPHICS, AND CREATE PROGRAM MASTERS FOR DUPLICATION.
Now, many of these steps are very similar to those from other types of editing projects, but as we'll see there will be particular emphasis on the research and organizational parts. SINCE, WE WILL LITERALLY BE CARVING OUR STORY OUT OF A VIRTUAL MOUND OF RAW MATERIAL. BUT AGAIN, THAT'S THE FUN PART OF EDITING A DOCUMENTARY, YOU HAVE THE DUTY AND THE RESPONSIBILITY TO FIND THE BEST STORY OUT OF A THOUSAND POSSIBLE ONES.
BECAUSE OF THE NATURE OF DOCUMENTARIES YOU CAN OFTEN END UP WITH HUNDREDS OF HOURS OF FOOTAGE AND UNLESS THE FOOTAGE WAS SHOT WITH A SPECIFIC SCRIPT IN MIND YOU'RE OFTEN CARVING THROUGH ALL THIS MATERIAL TO EXTRACT AND SHAPE THE BEST AND CLEAREST STORY. REMEMBER, IN A DOCUMENTARY THOUSANDS OF STORIES CAN EXIST, AND IT'S UP TO YOU TO FIND THE BEST STORY FOR YOUR PURPOSES. So in order to set yourself up for the most success you'll need to prepare well. Let's take a closer look at the preparatory phase.
EARLY ON IT'S BENEFICIAL IF YOU CAN MEET WITH THE PRODUCER AND DIRECTOR SO YOU CAN GAIN INITIAL INSIGHT INTO THE FILM'S FLOW AS WELL AS BE AVAILABLE TO CONSULT WITH ON TOPICS RELATING TO THE POST-PRODUCTION SCHEDULE AND BUDGET. It's good to also be aware of all the assets coming in from the production team and determine how much you will need to acquire and create on your own. You'll also need to start planning the distribution requirements. The research stage is an important part that you should not overlook. WITHOUT A CLEAR SCRIPT, YOU WILL NEED TO SPEND TIME FIGURING OUT THE STORY'S THESIS OR MAIN IDEA. YOU WILL NEED TO DETERMINE HOW YOU'LL BE ABLE TO SUPPORT THIS THESIS, AND YOU'LL NEED TO ASK YOURSELF SERIOUS QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR DOCUMENTARY'S AUDIENCE. ADDITIONALLY, YOU WILL NEED TO WORK TO CONSTRUCT A STYLE, AND YOU WILL NEED TO SEE WHAT TOOLS AND ASSETS YOU HAVE THAT CAN HELP YOU ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS.
NOW TECHNICALLY, YOU WILL NEED TO BE AWARE OF ALL MEDIA FORMATS, TYPES, AND FRAME RATES THAT WILL BE USED TO ASSEMBLE THE DOCUMENTARY. With documentaries, you'll often be working with a plethora of material of all different types. So it's good to know this information sooner rather than later. YOU'LL ALSO NEED TO MAKE DECISIONS REGARDING THE USE OF HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE IN THE POST-PRODUCTION WORKFLOW, AND YOU WILL NEED TO FIGURE OUT WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE AND WHAT YOU NEED TO BUY OR RENT. You will also need to go through all your material and log all applicable shots.
Use the production crew's production notes and take plenty of notes yourself. Occasionally, you will get the chance to screen the material with the director, which is nice so you can establish a link to the vision of the project. During this process, you will ideally boil down the footage to 30% to 50% of its entirety to make selects. Essentially, you are mentally carving out the material that you think you'll need even if you choose to capture it all. You should however appreciate your role of objectivity as the person who was not in the field.
Detach yourself from the footage and judge it as the person who is delivering the product to the audience. BEFORE CAPTURING DEVISE A PRECISE LABELING AND LOGGING SCHEME. If you're editing for a post house, there's most likely a naming scheme already in place. PERHAPS THE MOST COMMON METHOD IS TO DEVISE A CODE THAT INVOLVES BOTH THE NAME OF THE SHOW AND THE NUMBER OF THE TAPE OR DIGITAL FILE FOR THAT SHOW. ONCE THE MATERIAL IS IN YOUR PROJECT ORGANIZE IT INTO CONTENT AND SUBJECT SPECIFIC BINS. ALSO, ADD CUSTOM INFORMATION TO YOUR CLIPS, LIKE RATING, QUALITY, DESCRIPTION, AND COMPOSITION SO THAT YOU CAN EASILY FIND CLIPS BASED ON QUALITATIVE DATA.
Remember, hunting and pecking through hundreds of hours of material is not good for the creative process. By the time you found what you're looking for the magic is gone, and you've lost your momentum. FINALLY, IF YOU HAVE SCRIPTS OR TRANSCRIPTS, IMPORT THEM AND THEN LINK YOUR MASTER CLIPS TO THEM USING SCRIPT INTEGRATION. As you can see, there is an awful lot of things you need to figure out before you make your first edit. Indeed, organization of documentary projects is absolutely critical in order to maintain creative momentum and to tell the best possible story.
ONCE YOU'VE SCREENED YOUR FOOTAGE, TAKING DETAILED NOTES, AND PROPERLY ORGANIZED AND LABELED YOUR FOOTAGE IN APPROPRIATE BINS AND FOLDERS, IT'S TIME TO BEGIN EDITING THE ROUGH CUT. The rough cut is the fun part. It includes all the major story formation in which the editor constructs the scenes and assembles the narrative. Often, once the main project goals are defined the rough cut is constructed in relative separation from the film's other invested stakeholders in order to let the editor flesh out the documentary structure. Because of this the rough cut is often called the editor's cut.
Later in this course we'll discuss many elements of creating the rough cut. For now we'll just take a fairly high-level view of the story creation process. SO AFTER YOU'VE GONE THROUGH SOME OF THE FIRST STAGES IN FINDING OUT THE STYLE, AUDIENCE, AND INTENTION OF THE DOCUMENTARY, YOU SHOULD HAVE A PRETTY GOOD IDEA ABOUT HOW'D LIKE TO TACKLE THE PROCESS IN TERMS OF THE FORMATION AND ENHANCEMENT OF YOUR THESIS AND SUPPORTING POINTS. Now different people approach this phase in different ways. Some people prefer to loosely assemble a basic structure of the entire film in order, which is called a rough assembly, and then refine it further until arriving at a solid edited version of the piece called the rough cut.
With the documentary editing, however, because there's often no script many editors tend to take a more granular approach. Instead of laying out the entire movie in a general sense, they spend some time figuring out the general film grammar of one or more scenes and then take that basic approach and apply it to the rest of the scenes in the film. Now here are the elements that make up the grammar in which you will define your film.
FIRST, YOU HAVE THE FRAME, AND YOU CAN THINK OF THAT AS THE MOST BASIC UNIT. SO IT'S LIKE A LETTER. THEN YOU HAVE THE SHOT. A SHOT IS A SINGLE CONTINUOUS RECORDING MADE BY A CAMERA, AND YOU CAN THINK OF THAT AS A WORD. SO WE'VE GOT A FRAME, WHICH IS JUST A SINGLE STILL IMAGE, A SHOT, WHICH IS A CONTINUOUS RECORDING, AND THEN ABOVE THAT YOU HAVE A SCENE AND A SCENE IS A SERIES OF RELATED SHOTS, AND YOU CAN THINK OF THAT AS A SENTENCE. THEN FINALLY YOU HAVE A SEQUENCE AND A SEQUENCE IS A SERIES OF SCENES, WHICH TOGETHER TELL THE MAJOR PART OF AN ENTIRE STORY. SO THAT WOULD BE EQUIVALENT TO A PARAGRAPH.
So as you see here it really is a lot like writing. By using these elements you're basically establishing a set of codes that become the universal backbone of the film language for your documentary in terms of style and pacing, and conventions, and repetitive elements, and so on. Just like writing the style that is established early usually follows a basic structure throughout the book, or in this case, throughout the film. So how do you arrive at this grammar or convention for your film? Well, in the beginning the editor often spends a bunch of time combing through all the footage and trying out a lot of ideas and different combinations with different emphases and approaches and ultimately arrives with the general conventions.
Finding the style by trying many ideas is both fun and rewarding, but also very challenging. Once you've worked out the film style, and if constructed the thesis and supporting materials, then you can begin building out the rest of the film. Once you've arrived at your cut of the project, the rough cut, it's time to show other people and get feedback.
As some editors say, the film is mine until the fine cut. Reaching the fine cut means the film has entered a stage of intense collaboration. It is during this period that AN EDITOR MUST ENSURE THAT THE FILM'S STORY, DIRECTION, AND STYLE ARE IN SYNC WITH THE FILM'S VISION. This begins with a screening of the rough cut and proceeds through several more versions of cuts until picture lock. So, after you've completed the rough cut, you should screen it as much as possible and take very detailed notes on people's feedback, both good and bad.
You should not only screen it for a director and other stakeholders, but, also to general audiences that are not invested in the success of the film. Screening the film to people who are not too close to it can be extremely valuable in telling you what works and what doesn't. Now first, the editor usually works closely with the director to tweak, reorder, cut, and add scenes, combing through every shot and every sequence and discussing every element of the story and structure. Because of this, this version of the fine cut is often called the Director's cut.
For a documentary, the time spent on the Director's cut can be pretty extensive, especially if the editor was not working from a defined script. This collaboration is really important in closing the gap between the DIRECTOR'S ORIGINAL VISION AND THE EDITOR'S CREATION. So, if you think about it there exists this tension between three different stories that will flush out during this process. YOU'VE GOT ONE, THE STORY THE DIRECTOR TRIES TO TELL BASED ON THE ORIGINAL CONCEPT FOR THE FILM. IN ALMOST ALL CASES THIS IDEA EVOLVES DURING PRODUCTION AS DOES THE DIRECTOR'S OVERALL VISION. THEN YOU HAVE THE STORY THE EDITOR REALIZES THROUGH EDITING THE FILM'S ROUGH CUT. AND FINALLY, YOU HAVE THE FINAL EDITED VERSION, WHICH IS THE COLLABORATION BETWEEN THESE TWO VISIONS. Now, after the director has had an opportunity to oversee the cuts, he will often show the film to other important collaborators and during this period the film is further aligned with the interests of all involved. Of course, going through all of these various versions of cuts, that must address all of these people's intentions and desires can be interesting and sometimes stressful.
CONFLICT BETWEEN EDITORS, DIRECTORS, PRODUCERS, AND OTHER STAKEHOLDERS HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO OCCUR, WHETHER IT BE OVER CREATIVE CONTROL, BUDGETARY ISSUES OR CONTRADICTORY GOALS. But usually a successful film results with the picture lock aligning near the goals of most all involved. Once this agreement is reached, the editor arranges for the final color correction and sound design and then distributes the film in multiple formats depending on the deliverable requirements.
03 ORGAZNIZATION TOOLS: ASSEMBLING RAW MATERIALS
Beginning a project
As you've hopefully gathered from the previous chapters, there's a lot of things you need to do before actually tackling the edit. Once you've done them, however, you can begin really looking at what you've got in order to devise exactly how you'd like to organize everything. Now, before the days of file-based workflow, the editor would usually screen all footage out of the editing software and take detailed notes in devising the best way to tackle the capture. And certainly, if you're still working with tape, you'll want to approach it this way. However, in the tapeless environment, you can just bring the footage right into the software and screen from within media composer.
Now again, because we can't provide you with the 430 gigabytes of raw media, we can't include this step in the exercise files. So please just watch this movie for reference and then enjoy the organized footage for your own purposes later on. Okay. SO, FIRST OF ALL, I KNOW THROUGH MY CONSULTATION WITH THE PRODUCTION TEAM THAT THIS FOOTAGE WAS SHOT AS QUICKTIME MOVIES IN 1080P FORMAT WITH A FRAME RATE OF 23.976. SO, THAT'S HOW I WANT TO SET UP MY PROJECT. I'M JUST GOING TO NAVIGATE TO MY DRIVE, SO I CAN PUT MY PROJECT THERE, AND SELECT NEW PROJECT.
And under Format, I want to make sure that I am at 1080p/23.976, which I am, and I'm just going to name this Farm to Table, okay. And let's go ahead and Enter.
NOW I MENTIONED THAT WE WANT TO BASICALLY SCREEN FROM WITHIN MEDIA COMPOSER, AND THAT'S BECAUSE WE HAVE INSTANT ACCESS TO THE FILES. WE DON'T HAVE TO WAIT FOR THE TAPES TO CAPTURE. AND THE WAY THAT, THAT IS POSSIBLE IS VIA AMA, OR AVID MEDIA ACCESS. Okay. So, if I go into Settings and select AMA, I want to make sure that Volume Mounting > Enable AMA Volume Management is checked. This will allow AMA to work.
And it is by default so that should be good. Then under Bins, I LIKE TO CREATE A NEW BIN, AND I LIKE TO JUST CALL IT AMA SOURCE MEDIA, OKAY, AND YOU CAN SEE IT'S NOT CREATED YET, BUT IT WILL BE CREATED ONCE I BRING IN THOSE FILES. NOW, I'M BRINGING IN QUICKTIME MOVIES AND THE QUICKTIME AMA PLUG-IN IS INCLUDED WITH EVERY INSTALLATION OF MEDIA COMPOSER, SO I DON'T NEED TO DO ANYTHING EXTRA. But just in case you're working with another type of media, you want to go to Avid's website, avid.com/ama.
And listed at the bottom are all of the native file types that it works with via AMA. So, you'll just need to download the plug-in for the workflow that you use. SO AGAIN, WE ARE WORKING IN QUICKTIME, WE DON'T NEED TO DO THAT. SO, I CAN JUST GO RIGHT IN, AND GET THOSE FILES. I'M GOING TO CHOOSE FILE > LINK TO AMA VOLUME, AND I KNOW ALL OF THOSE QUICKTIME MOVIES ARE RIGHT HERE IN THAT FOOTAGE FOLDER, AND GO AHEAD AND OPEN. AND YOU CAN SEE THAT THIS BIN, IT'S CALLED AMA SOURCE MEDIA JUST LIKE I SET UP, AND HERE THEY COME IN MANY, MANY, MANY FILES, SOME ARE SHORT, SOME ARE A LITTLE BIT LONGER.
You can see that in general, they're categorically named. A lot of times you'll be bringing in files and all they are in numbers. And this is nice because I can set up some general loose structured bins, so I don't have just one giant bin that I'm going to be screening from. So just wait till these come in and then kind of get a sense of all the different categories that we're going to make bins for, and then I'm going to basically just drag the clips into each of those bins and begin screening. Now, I have a project set up where I have these bins kind of ready to go.
So I'm going to hop over there. SO, I HAD EVERYTHING IN THE AMA SOURCE MEDIA BIN, BUT NOW YOU CAN SEE THAT, THAT'S EMPTY BECAUSE I DRAGGED EVERYTHING INTO THESE JUST GENERAL BINS. Again, I'm probably going to tweak this in a little bit later. But now, it's time to screen. And this process takes hours, especially when you're going through interviews and lots and lots and lots of B-roll. So, I'm literally going to LOAD EACH CLIP, AND IF IT'S A GENERAL BLANKET SHOT, I CAN GO AHEAD AND SAY NAME IT, AND IT'S READY TO GO.
But if it's an interview or if it's something a little bit more complicated, I'm going to want to watch it, and then I'm going to want to name intelligently. And if I don't think I'm going to use it, then I'm going to delete it so that it's not cluttering up my project. But most of all, I'm probably going to sub-clip. So, I'm just going to load this into the source monitor, and I've gone through this and he's just basically talking to the videographer here in the beginning. I know I'm not going to use that. And then towards the end here, he's not really talking about too much important that I think I'm going to use, but this middle part is really, really terrific, and I think that him talking about these various herbs is something that I'd really like to use in the documentary.
So you are going to go through, you are going to make these decisions, YOU ARE GOING TO SUB-CLIP THE PART OF THE CLIP I WANT TO USE. SO I'VE MARKED MY IN AND MY OUT, I'M JUST GOING TO DRAG THIS INTO THE BIN, AND I'VE SUB-CLIPPED IT, AND I'M GOING TO NAME THIS INTELLIGENTLY. SO, JONATHAN TALKING ABOUT HERBS, AND SO NOW THIS BECOMES A USABLE CLIP THAT I CAN USE IN MY DOCUMENTARY, AND THIS BECOMES SEARCHABLE. I'M GOING TO ADD FURTHER QUALITATIVE DATA TO THIS CLIP A LITTLE BIT LATER ON AS WE'LL SEE IN FUTURE MOVIES. BUT THIS IS WHAT YOU NEED TO DO FOR EVERY SINGLE CLIP.
So, this again takes hours, you need to make sure that you have great care during this phase. I have here a bin where I've kind of gone through all of the interviews and sub clipped everything that I think is of use to me. So, this big Interview Bin, some of it is just not really going to be useful. But this here is kind of the subset of the stuff that I'm really excited about. Okay. So again, this is a meticulous and arduous process as you go through each clip in every single one of your bins, but don't skimp here.
You'll be glad you did all the leg work upfront as you go through the documentary post-production process. All right, so I can begin working with it. This is still AMA. You can see that the icon for AMA is kind of half clip, half chain-link. Once you bring it into sub-clips, it's just general sub-clip icon, and I can just work with this the entire time.
However, I should note that for this project, what I had to do was to TRANSCODE THE MEDIA, SO THAT IT WOULD BE A WORKABLE SIZE for the exercise files. So, if you want to do that, IF YOU WANT TO TRANSCODE YOUR MEDIA AND TURN IT INTO THE NATIVE FILE TYPE OF MXF, WHICH IS AGAIN AVID'S NATIVE FILE TYPE, ONE, IT DOES OPTIMIZE THE WORKFLOW, SO IT USUALLY WORKS BEST WITH MXF. HOWEVER, IT SHOULD WORK FINE WITH QUICKTIME AMA AS WELL. YOU CAN OPTIMIZE IT OR IF YOU NEED TO TRANSCODE IT TO MAKE THEM SMALLER FILES LIKE I DID IN THIS CASE, YOU WANT TO DO ONE MORE STEP.
AND IF YOU WANT TO JUST CLICK ON ONE OR IF YOU WANTED TO CLICK ON ALL OF THEM TO OBVIOUSLY DO THEM IN BATCH, I WOULD JUST RIGHT-CLICK, AND THEN CHOOSE CONSOLIDATE/TRANSCODE. THEN I AM GOING TO CHOSE TRANSCODE, I WANT TO CHOSE THE DRIVE THAT I WANT IT TO GO TO. HANDLE LENGTH, IT'S GOING TO BASICALLY DEFAULT TO ABOUT 2 SECONDS TO THE LEFT AND THE RIGHT OF EACH OF THESE SUB-CLIPS. BUT I'M FAIRLY CONFIDENT IN WHERE I MARKED THESE. SO I'M JUST GOING TO PUT THAT TO 0. AND THEN YOU WANT TO PUT IN YOUR TARGET VIDEO RESOLUTION HERE. NOW, FOR THESE EXERCISE FILES, WHAT I HAD TO DO WAS ACTUALLY TRANSCODE IT TO A STANDARD DEFINITION CODEC. BUT YOU SEE THAT NONE OF THOSE ARE AVAILABLE HERE. SO, WHAT I HAD TO DO, AND YOU MIGHT HAVE TO DO THIS TOO IF YOU WANT TO CREATE SMALLER PROXY FILES IS I CLICK ON FORMAT, AND JUST CHANGE IT FROM THE HD FLAVOR TO STANDARD DEFINITION FLAVOR.
SO NOW, WHEN I SELECT ALL OF THESE CLIPS AND RIGHT-CLICK AND CHOOSE CONSOLIDATE/TRANSCODE, TRANSCODE, I'M GOING TO ADJUST 0 FRAMES. YOU CAN SEE THAT NOW I HAVE A BUNCH OF STANDARD DEFINITION FLAVORS TO CHOOSE FROM, AND I HAD TO COMPRESS THESE QUITE A BIT SO THAT YOU CAN WORK WITH THEM, SOME ARE 14:1, SOME ARE 28:1, OBVIOUSLY NOT IDEAL. BUT AGAIN, THIS IS A DOCUMENTARY WITH LOTS AND LOTS OF FOOTAGE, AND WE HAD TO FIT MORE THAN 430 GIGABYTES INTO ABOUT 4 GIGABYTES. SO, A LOT OF COMPRESSION GOING ON HERE, BUT YOU WANT TO CHOOSE THE DRIVE AND THEN YOU CAN GO AHEAD AND TRANSCODE.
Now, you can see--I'm going to cancel this out--that I've gone through, and this is what you'll see through the duration of this project. But I've gone through, and I've organized my footage, you can see kind of in this Assets folder, Audio, Graphics, here's my Interviews, here's all of my B-roll, everything has been named, everything has been transcoded, and it's ready to go for you to work with.
I'm just going to close some of these bins so that we can reduce the clutter. And you can see that when I open up one of these bins, everything is named. These all used to be sub-clips. So I went in and I sub-clipped everything, but when I performed the transcode, it converted everything into master clips. And here it is, and this is a very low resolution file, but you'll still be able to work with it, and it's still for the most part looks okay.
ALL RIGHT, SO THAT IS A VERY QUICK CRASH COURSE ON ORGANIZING YOUR PROJECT WHEN YOU ARE SETTING UP A DOCUMENTARY. AGAIN, YOU WANT TO BRING IT IN AMA, THEN YOU WANT TO DIVVY IT INTO BINS, AND THEN YOU'LL WANT TO SUB-CLIP EVERYTHING OUT, AND MAKE SURE THAT YOU'RE ONLY USING THE STUFF THAT YOU KNOW IS OF USE TO YOU. YOU CAN WORK WITH THAT AS IS IN THE AMA FORMAT FOR AS LONG AS YOU WANT TO, OR IF YOU SHOULD NEED TO TRANSCODE IT TO ANOTHER CODEC, THEN YOU'RE JUST GOING TO RIGHT-CLICK TRANSCODE, CHOOSE YOUR OPTIONS THERE, AND THEN YOU HAVE EVERYTHING KIND OF CONTAINED WITHIN THE AVID MEDIA FILES FOLDER.
SO, I'LL SHOW YOU RIGHT HERE ON MY DRIVE, ONCE I'VE GONE THROUGH, AND I TRANSCODED EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING IS RESIDING RIGHT INSIDE HERE, AND AS I TOLD YOU BEFORE, AVID'S NATIVE FILE TYPE IS MXF. SO I HAVE BASICALLY CHANGED ALL THESE QUICKTIME MOVIES INTO MXF, AND I'M READY TO GO. SO THAT'S HOW YOU'LL BE WORKING THROUGHOUT THE REST OF THE COURSE. EVERYTHING IS ORGANIZED FAIRLY WELL FOR YOU. SO, YOU CAN ENJOY THE ORGANIZING PROCESS AND HAVE EVERYTHING ALREADY NAMED AND EVENTUALLY BEGIN EDITING. SO, GOOD LUCK.
When editing a documentary, screening is so important because it allows the editor to emerge into a world where stories can literally jump from the footage. Indeed, it is in this story carving process where the ability to find specific moments is crucial, but unfortunately not everyone has the memory of a steel trap. Often you need help, and that's where appropriately TAGGING YOUR FOOTAGE BECOMES SUCH AN IMPORTANT PART OF ORGANIZING YOUR PROJECT. Okay. So I'm in a project, and I have gone through, and let's look in our Assets folder.
I'VE ORGANIZED IT INTO BASIC CATEGORIES, WHICH IS WHAT MY BINS ARE NAMED. AND INSIDE EACH ONE OF THESE BINS ARE THE CLIPS AND THEY ARE APPROPRIATELY NAMED. AND I HAVE SOME OTHER INFORMATION HERE, WHICH IS REALLY GOING TO HELP ME OUT, BECAUSE IT'S INFORMATION ABOUT HOW MUCH I LIKE THE CLIP, AND ITS INFORMATION ABOUT THE SHOT COMPOSITION, AND ITS INFORMATION ABOUT WHAT TYPE OF FOOTAGE IT IS. We'll talk about Process Footage later. So this is really great. It gives the clips more depth and more searchable data, and so we are going to figure out how to actually add this custom information.
All right, so if I drill down into exercise files and go to Chapter 3, 3.2 is an exact replica of the bin we just saw. So, this is an exact replica of the farm picking and pruning. Okay? But as you can see, here, we don't really have any information yet. You might have something that has a bunch of information about the clips. In fact, if you come into the Fast menu and go to Choose Columns, there is over 100 pieces of data that you can add about all of your clips.
So it can be really, really overwhelming, all of the quantitative data that's available. But it's really through the qualitative data, again, how much you like it, the shot composition, description, keywords, that sort of thing that you can really dig deep and see what the clips are all about. So, depending on what you have here, we are going to just go to Custom, and that should clear it all out. And you can just click up here, and just type Rating. And you can also type Shot Composition, and it actually cuts you off after a few letters. I am just going to do Shot Comp. And again, we'll talk about Process Footage later. But we have some columns here that are of interest to us, and you can literally just start typing in here. So, if you go through, and you can do this while you're screening, or you can do it later once you've gone through, and you have named all of your clips, you can come through and add this data. I usually do it while I am screening, I'll just name it, and I'll see how much I like it.
All right, so you can come in here, and I think this is going to be useful because I think that these first three have him picking the lettuce in various focal lengths. So, that's very helpful. So I can come in here, and maybe, I like all three of those three stars, and a starred system is very useful as we will find out later. But you can just go through, and if you want to have a shortcut, if you go through, and you know that maybe all of these get three stars, you can actually right-click in the bin, and you can say Set Rating column for selected clips. And this is going to change based on what column you click in. I can just put three stars, and they all get added at once.
Also, if you--let me just give it a couple more values here--if I then Option-click or Alt-click on a PC, the values kind of come up, and I can really quickly choose them. So, if you go through all of this, this is really useful in assigning this qualitative data to your clips. I'm going to just close this out. But feel free to go through yourself and assign this data.
But we have kind of an identical bin in Farm Picking_Pruning. And here we have it all assigned, and it doesn't take a lot of time to do. Again, if you do it during the screening process, it's just a little bit of extra time, and then if I come up here, and I double-click or double-click again, it's going to sort based on alphanumeric order. So, you can kind of see that it's sorting back and forth through the alphabet. But you can also sort based on rating. So, if I double-click here, I guess all of the worst shots are at the top.
But you can do it again to get all the best shots, and same thing here, kind of grouped together, all the clips based on your shot composition, and so on. So, sorting is great. You can also right-click and Sort on Column, Ascending or Descending.
BUT I THINK THE REAL POWER COMES IN SIFTING THIS DATA. SO, IF I COME TO MY FAST MENU, AND GO TO CUSTOM SIFT, I HAVE THE ABILITY TO DRILL DOWN PRETTY DEEP. So if I want to just bring forth all of my three-star clips and four-star because it contains three-stars--contains means that four-star clips also contain three-stars-- and I will go ahead and move this out of the way, and I apply, it filtered out the clips that were not three-stars.
And I just put the footage that was useful to me into these bins, so most of the footage is three-stars or more. NOW, I JUST WANT TO FIND ALL OF MY THREE-STAR MEDIUM SHOTS. SO, I WANT ALL OF THE SHOTS THAT ARE AT LEAST THREE STARS AND MEDIUM SHOT, AND I CAN COME IN AND LIKE TELL IT EXACTLY WHAT COLUMN TO LOOK IN. So, Shot Composition, and I'll say apply that. Now, I want all of the best medium shots, Process Footage Shots. So, I'll come in here and just type Y in the Process Footage category and apply that, and we are really, really drilling deep, so we can figure out exactly what we have and not have to search through it.
And a lot of times, you'll have bins with many, many more clips in it than this. If I wanted to cast my net wider, I could come down here, and I could say all of my three-star and Long Shot Process Footage. There we go, that should do it. And there we go. So basically, this will cast the net wider, basically we are performing an And search because it has to meet this criteria and this criteria and this criteria.
And we are also performing an Or search, because we're saying 'or' meet this criteria, and this criteria, and this criteria. So, this allows us to really get exactly what we want, but it does rely upon the fact that we've gone through and put in this custom data in the first place. So, my advice here is not to skimp on this step. I WOULD SAY THAT MOST DOCUMENTARY EDITORS WILL TELL YOU THAT FRONTLOADING YOUR PREP ON A DOCUMENTARY PROJECT WILL ULTIMATELY RESULT WITH A GOOD PAYOFF.
One common practice in documentary projects is using stock footage, which is video that you acquire from a footage library. Many filmmakers use it because it can often be less expensive and more convenient than shooting brand new material. STOCK FOOTAGE USUALLY FALLS INTO TWO CATEGORIES. RIGHTS MANAGED, WHICH IS COPYRIGHTED FOOTAGE THAT YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR AND USE WITHIN THE PARAMETERS OF THE FOOTAGE'S LICENSE, AND ROYALTY FREE, WHICH IS FOOTAGE YOU PAY A ONE-TIME PRICE FOR AND DON'T OWE SUBSEQUENT ROYALTIES TO. Now, there's a stock footage library maintained by a company called T3Media, which is a cloud-based service that offers both Rights Managed and Royalty Free media. Fortunately, you can access it right inside media composer contained within the Avid marketplace.
Okay, so in my menu Bar up here, I have Marketplace, and I am going to go to Media Libraries. And we have here a T3Media kind of launch page, and if you don't have an account, you will go ahead and register for one. I do, so I am going to go ahead and sign in. Okay. So, I am in here, I am ready to search for some footage, so I am just going to click here, and search for footage. And what I want is to gather some beauty shots of produce just some really nice looking shots of fruits, and vegetables.
So initially, I am just going to search for produce. And as you can see, here, I have over 100,000 results, so quite a few. I can filter it further so I can just keep filtering it down so that I can get to exactly what I want. I am going to just see what's on this first page and see if there is anything that might match what I am after. Now this is nice. I can just hover over to play it. And this is something that I would like to consider, for my beauty shots bin, I can just come down here and click Add.
And right now it's adding the clip to this place called My Clips. And if you come up here to this icon, you can click on it, and I automatically have this My Clips bin here. So ideally, I just go through, and I keep adding material to this My Clips bin. But when you are ready, so I am just going to go ahead and bring this clip into media composer, and I don't have to pay for it. If I wanted to actually go through and buy it, I could certainly do that. So, let's just say I just want to use this low-res copy of it.
I am going to come over to the left side here, and I am going to click on Download comps for My Clips. When I click on Download Comps, it brings me to this screen, and I can download multiple comps, but I just have this one right here. You notice that there is a watermark on it. So obviously, I can't use it without paying for it, but I can try it out in my sequence. So, I am just going to download comp, and you can see down here the progress, it's downloading.
And if I just move this out of the way, you can see that it downloaded it into this open Avid bin. And if I go ahead and load it, you can see that here is my nice shot. It does have my watermark, so I can't obviously use it without going through and paying for it. But I can edit with it, I can put it in my show, and I can make it an entire bin of my beauty shots, and then really determine later which ones I actually want to pay for. Notice that it is AMA, so it's linking to it. I haven't created any footage.
But it's very, very handy to just be able to bring it in, use it, and then pay for it later if I want to. And so, if I wanted to actually go through and buy it, I could just right-click on it, go down to Buy Stock Footage, it brings me back to the website, and I can go ahead and add it to my cart. You can see here that it's bringing me to the option to either do High Def, Medium Resolution, or Low Resolution. Let's say I want to go all out and pay $400 for High Def for this clip.
It's going ahead and adding it to my cart. You can see here that my cart now has one item in it, and I can go through and proceed to check out. Now we haven't provided you with any stock footage from the Avid Marketplace in your exercise files, but feel free to look around for any footage you think you might need and then go ahead and buy it if you want, or feel free to search other stock footage libraries. In the age of the Internet, they are literally everywhere, because if you are working in documentaries, you're certainly sure to use stock footage sooner or later.
Many times, you'll be working with documentary interview footage that doesn't contain the best audio. However, perhaps the production team recorded higher quality audio with a different camera or sound recorder. Let's take a look at how to marry a video clip that contains poor audio with an audio clip of higher quality. Okay, so I have here a bunch of interviews of our main documentary subject BD Dautch, and if I go ahead and play this, I'm going to show you what this sounds like. (BD Dautch: ...certifying organization, and we grow about 100 different--) Okay, so obviously we can hear it, we could use it if we don't have anything better.
But I was able to locate some audio that sounds a lot better than this. If I load this one, let's go ahead and just play this. (BD Dautch: ...and 5 acres in Carpinteria that we're farming on. It's all certified organic by--) Okay, so I actually pulled this from a different camera that was on him at that time.
SO INSTEAD OF HAVING TO EDIT THIS INTO THE SEQUENCE KIND OF HAPHAZARDLY, LET'S GO AHEAD AND PRE-MARRY IT. SO THIS IS ALSO JUST PART OF OUR PREP PHASE. So, what I'm going to do is go ahead and load this in. I'm going to clear my in and out points. You may or may not have in and out points in your footage here, but I'm going to clear them. And then WHEN HE SAYS HIS FIRST WORD, I'M GOING TO MARK AN IN. I'M GOING TO HELP MYSELF BY ACTUALLY PUTTING THE CAPS LOCK KEY ON SO THAT I CAN STEP THROUGH THE FOOTAGE WITH THE LEFT AND RIGHT ARROW KEYS AND FIND EXACTLY WHEN HE STARTS TALKING. Now, sometimes you'll actually have clapsticks and make this job easier, but you can easily do it with a word. So, I'm going to go ahead and just press Play and figure out where he starts talking.
(video playing) Okay, so he starts saying okay right about there, and so I'm going to just step forward one frame at a time. I'm going back, and I'm just going to press an in point where I know that he starts talking. Okay. So, that's basically where he starts talking. I was able to hear it because I have the Caps Lock key on. I'm going to make an in point there. And NOW LET'S GO AHEAD AND LOAD THE CORRESPONDING AUDIO FROM A DIFFERENT CLIP.
I'm going to clear my in and out points here, and let's do the same thing. Okay, now I'm going to go ahead AND STEP FORWARD AND MAKE SURE THAT I GET EXACTLY WHEN HE STARTS TALKING. (video playing) Okay, so right about there, I'm going to go ahead and mark an in there. It's important that you spend the time to make sure you have a perfect sync point at this stage, because honestly, tweaking this later isn't really an elegant solution.
SO, YOU WANT TO MAKE SURE YOU GET IT PERFECT, AND YOU DO THAT BY STEPPING BACK AND FORTH THROUGH YOUR FOOTAGE AT AN EXACT MOMENT WITH THE CAPS LOCK KEY ON SO THAT YOU CAN HEAR THE SPECIFIC DIGITAL HITS OF AUDIO. This is usually pretty easy to do when you line it up at the beginning of a word or sound. If you don't get it exactly right, you'll need to do it again. So I can go through all of the interview clips and do this together. If I wouldn't have already split all of my interview clips into different portions of the interview, I could just do this once, and then sub-clip it.
So, depending on your workflow, you may have to do this a couple times or just once. So, what I'M GOING TO DO IS CLICK ON BOTH OF THESE, SO I CAN JUST SHIFT-CLICK SO THEY ARE BOTH SELECTED. AND THEN I COME UP TO BIN > AUTOSYNC. I WANT TO SYNC CLIPS USING IN POINT, AND I'M JUST GOING TO USE A1 TO A1 AND A1 TO A1. SO BASICALLY, WHAT THIS IS DOING IS SAYING I NEED TO REPLACE THIS AUDIO ON A1 WITH THIS ONE.
SO, THIS IS KIND OF OVERWRITING HERE. OKAY. SO I'M ALL SET. I'M GOING TO SAY OK. I HAVE A NEW SUB-CLIP, AND IT SAYS .SYNC.01. So, I'm going to just load this, and let's see how he sounds. (BD Dautch: And we've got about 10 acres in Ojai and 5 acres in Carpinteria that we're farming on. It's all--) All right, so we have the high quality audio married with the video that it's associated with. And as you can see, this is a sub-clip.
If I burrow down into my Assets and take a look at my interviews, you can see that all of these are sub-clips because I've already done this with the footage. Okay, so it's all set to go. You can definitely practice on your own if you like. Everything is here, ready to go. But this is a really great way to associate higher-quality audio if you have it with video clips that contain poor audio.
Once you have gone through and organized your entire project, you may still find that it might be difficult to find what you need. However, if you've taken the time up front to intelligently name your clips as well as add custom data to your clips, you will be in luck when you need to find exactly what you are looking for. That's because Media Composer contains a really nice Find tool which has capabilities to search for both the written and spoken word. SO YOU CAN FIND THE FIND TOOL FROM THE EDIT MENU OR JUST PRESS COMMAND+F, AND UP HERE AT THE TOP IS WHERE YOU'RE GOING TO PUT IN YOUR INITIAL SEARCH CRITERIA.
BEFORE YOU DO THAT, HOWEVER, YOU WANT TO LOOK DOWN HERE IN THE BIN INDEX, AND IF YOU USE PHRASEFIND, WHICH WE'LL TAKE A LOOK AT IN A SECOND, YOU WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT THESE ARE FULLY GREEN. WHEN YOU OPEN UP A PROJECT FOR THE FIRST TIME, IT ACTUALLY HAS TO GO THROUGH ALL OF YOUR BINS AND ANALYZE ALL OF THE CLIPS AND GET IT ALL LOGGED, IT MIGHT TAKE A LITTLE BIT OF TIME, SAME THING FOR PHRASEFIND, IT ACTUALLY GOES THROUGH AND ANALYZES THE SPOKEN WORD, SO THAT MIGHT TAKE A LITTLE TIME AS WELL. You will also want to make sure that you have the appropriate language selected. So if you come up here and put in your first search criteria, for example, let's say we want to find a clip that I was looking at the other day, and it's of BD, the documentary's subject and talking to his friend Jonathan.
So I am just going to type in BD, and right now we just want to press Find, and you can see here that it found 59 instances of BD. So I can go through and try to find the one that mentions Jonathan as well, or just come right down in here and filter it further, and I am just going to type Jonathan, and you can see that I've got it, it automatically filters it. So it found 59 and then ultimately came up with one result.
I CANNOT DRAG THIS ANYWHERE. THIS IS JUST A RESULT LIST. So it's not like you can use this to bring footage from bin to bin, but what you can do is load this into the Source Monitor and here we go, okay. So basically, Find is pretty easy. You could also filter on a specific column, if you wanted to make sure that you were searching for columns of information that you input or one of Avid's own columns, you can certainly dictate that in this pulldown menu.
Okay, so that's the Find tool, it's fairly intuitive. Right now we are looking through Clips and Sequences, which means that we're looking for all of the clips and sequences in our Bins. We are going to take a look at Script Text later where we actually import digital scripts and search for words on those scripts, and we'll also take a look at Timeline and Monitors later, once we have actually edited something and have something in our Timeline. But I do want to also go over the PhraseFind. Now
PhraseFind is $500. So it's an extra $500, but it sometimes just can make or break your experience, especially with documentary editing. So it actually will go in and analyze the spoken word. So that's really great if you don't have the money to send a way to do transcripts, you can actually have Media Composer go in, analyze every clip, and when you put in a keyword here, it's going to bring up the moments in all of those clips that match that keyword. Let's go ahead and say that we want to find some clips where they're talking about Santa Barbara.
We really want to focus in on the parts of the documentary where we're talking about how Santa Barbara is the up-and-coming region for farmers markets, so I'm going to just type in Santa Barbara, and this time I am going to press PhraseFind. So, it's going to go through and find all of the instances in which it found Santa Barbara being spoken, and you can see that there is only two. Now look, here it says Found: 68, after filtering: 2.
The reason for that is because Jonathan is still in here. So we want to take him out, so he says Santa Barbara twice--ah, here we go. So here we have all 68 results of people saying Santa Barbara, and if you take a look in this column here, the Score column, this is basically Media Composer's guarantee that it got it right. So here it says that I'm about 98% sure that right now he's saying Santa Barbara. So if I go ahead and load this, let's just check it out.
(BD Dautch: ...Santa Barbara, the first one--) Yup, that worked out fine, and I'll keep going. (BD Dautch: ...the Santa Barbara, the first one--) And that actually is from the same moment, and you can kind of go down. (BD Dautch: ...Santa Barbara market--) All right, so I would say that pretty much anything above 80% is really, really accurate. If we come down here, let's just pick something more towards the cusp. Let's do here 81% sure that this says Santa Barbara. (BD Dautch: ...Santa Barbara, a slow growth area--) Yeah, so pretty good. And let's pick something way down the list.
(BD Dautch: ...come to the market, rather than--) See, didn't exactly work there. So my experience is that if you pick from the top of the lot there, it will work out really well. And again, this is really, really nice if you don't have the opportunity to send away for transcripts and match your Master clips to your transcripts. This is really great because you can sift through the spoken word, and it's doing that for you. So both Find and PhraseFind are tremendous time-saving tools when you need to immediately find a specific shot of B-roll or that perfect sound bite.
I really think you'll find that you use them often, especially in documentary projects like Farm to Table.
So I did want to address one note before we launch into other parts of this course, it's half housekeeping and half logistics. As we saw when we brought in our AMA media we have instant access to work with this media. Now if you like you can work via AMA through the entire duration of the project. There is a chance that your system performance could suffer a little bit, but by and large my experience working with QuickTime AMA is a very good performance. However, sometimes it become necessary to transcode the media to Avid's native file type of MXF.
For example, for this course, I had to transcode all AMA media to a very low resolution MXF file so that I could fit everything within the limit of the exercise files. So I want to show you how to do that. So here is all of the AMA clips, at least for the interviews, and again, we have total access to this, we can work with it, look at it, edit it, name it whatever, and I can continue to do that. Here are some sub-clips based on those AMA clips, I'm just going to take a look at these, these still point to those AMA files.
You can see that they are still looking in that Footage folder and these are still basically QuickTime. So I can continue working in this way if I want to, but I want to transcode, basically you select the clips that you would like to transcode and then you right-click and choose Consolidate/Transcode and Transcode is actually going to change it into another resolution. So like I said I need to make all of the files in this project very, very low resolution so that we can fit them in the exercise files, we're basically going from 430 plus gigabytes down to 4, so a lot of compression here. I'm going to choose my Drive.
I've taken great care in making sure that I have enough handle or extra media to the left and the right of my in and out points, so I'm going to select zero here. And then in Target Video Resolution, I have all of the available HD resolutions to me, and the reason I had HD resolutions available to me and not Standard Definition is that I am still in an HD project. So in my case, because I would like to actually transcode it to standard def I'm going to need to change my project Format, which is right now at the 1080p/23.976, to just the standard definition 23.976.
So that now when I select these files and right-click and choose Consolidate/Transcode, I'll choose Transcode and drive, zero Handle length and here are my standard definition resolutions. So like I said, I really, really compressed these files, and this would not be something that you would normally do during any regular workflow in working with the documentary most likely, but what I did was I compressed most of them to a 14:1, and you also need to convert your Audio Sample Rate, you can do that on the fly during the transcode process and then I just click Transcode, okay and then basically new media files, MXF media files were created.
And as you can see, I kind of already done this as we have seen throughout the rest of this chapter, but I have everything organized and transcoded in each of these bins. So as you can see, if I kind of go through here, it's not the best resolution, but it can certainly work, as we're going through we can still see everything pretty well, we can hear everything, we can still edit our documentary, it's just we're at a either 14:1 or 28:1 resolution.
So it's up to you, leave the files linked as AMA if you like, or if you want to transcode to Avid's native file type of MXF if it makes sense in regard to your performance or your workflow.
04 SCRIPT INTEGRATION
Preparing a script for script integration
Most documentaries contain many interviews, and it can often be a challenge to find that perfect bite. But when you do, it can truly make a scene glow. Now before the age of digital editing with script synchronization, editors relied upon their copious handwritten notes with exact timecode linked to every single major sound bite that they took during the screening process. Fortunately, we now have the ability to immediately find any sound bite anytime through the incredible practice of Digital Script Integration. This is a very powerful tool, but it doesn't come without some prep work.
In this movie, we will take a look at how to set up your script in preparation for script integration. Before I do that, though, I just want to show you this in practice. In the Transcripts bin I have everyone that was interviewed for this documentary, and I am going to go ahead and open up the BD interview transcript. This is the main documentary subject, and this is about a 30-minute interview, and you can see that I've gone through, and I have made selects, basically those parts of the transcripts that I felt were the strongest and what I would add to my documentary.
So I can click on any one of these Script Marks, and it would basically link to this line. So if I double-click on this script mark... (BD Dautch: ...sell to caterers, schools, restaurants--) So as you can see, the written word is synched directly to the spoken word. Very, very powerful thing. So that's just clicking on a script mark, but mostly you would use this in conjunction with the Find tool. So we know that the Find tool is accessed via Command+F, and this time I am just going to go to Script Text and then type in here.
I want to basically bring up something about Santa Barbara. I know he talks about the Santa Barbara Farmers Market. So I am just going to type in Santa Barbara and Enter, and he talks about it quite a lot, so I can use this to really narrow down exactly where he does. But if I click on any of these and I go over to the script, you can see that it finds it. Now this doesn't have a Master clip linked to it, so if I just continue, here we go. So if I just double-click on this script mark...
(BD Dautch: ...market in Santa Barbara, the first one. And so we--) So again, every line is synched to one of these script marks which in turn is synched to the Master clip, a very, very powerful thing in documentary editing. So I am just going to close this out, and let's talk about how to bring the script in, and we'll go ahead and minimize Media Compose, and I'm going to go and get my transcript. I have it inside the Transcripts_Titles folder, and in Transcripts, and I just want to open up the BD interview document. It's a Microsoft Word document.
You will notice that my margins are fairly wide, and I've done that on purpose so that I have more lines to sync. It's just a case of simple math. The more lines you have, the more sync points you can have, which is very good for script integration. So we just need to save this into a format that Media Composer can read. So I am just going to go to Save As, and we need to save it as a Plain Text document and then when we click Save, we're going to choose Other encoding, Western (ASCII), and Insert line breaks.
Now if you're in Word, great. If you're in another Word Processing program, Final Draft or something else, you just want to make sure that get this right. You need a Plain Text document, a .txt, with the Western (ASCII) encoding and line breaks, and I will say OK. And here it's saved there right inside that Transcripts folder. What I have done is I have provided you a folder full of already formatted transcripts, so you can go ahead and practice on the Word documents if you want or just pull them straight from here. Or in Media Composer I have actually also imported all of them and they are ready to go and they also are all synched. (Make a Transcripts Folder and put each file in the folder)
So depending on what you want to do, you have various levels of practice that you can perform. But basically now that we have our transcripts ready to go, in the next movie we are going to take a look at exactly how to get them into Media Composer and ultimately how to sync them to our Master clips.
Once you've gone through the steps in setting up your script for entering into Media Composer, it's time to bring it in and then sync it to the associated Master clips. So I just go to File > New Script and then in the Transcripts formatted folder I've gone through, and I've prepared and made them all Plain Text documents so that you can bring those in. So I'm just going to click BD interview.txt, and I'll click Open, and here it comes into the software. And you can see this is just a 30-minute interview, and we're going to sync our master clips to this using ScriptSync.
So here I have six interview selects, and I've basically gone through and chosen the parts of the interview that I felt would work best for the documentary. So what you need to do is actually find the moments in the script that match with these Master clips. I'm just going to load this into the Source Monitor and play it so that I know what part of the script this covers. (BD Dautch: My name is BD Dautch.) All right, so the beginning and then we come to the end here, and I'm going to play and see how far it goes. (BD Dautch: ...in the community.) And I'm just going to back up a little bit and play a little bit more just to make sure.
(BD Dautch: ...so it's all staying in the community.) Okay, great! So I'm going to come back here. Okay. My name is BD Dautch, and it goes to, "So, it's all staying in the community." And I'm going to just lasso this from the script in MC, you can see it just becomes a light gray color, and you just drag the clip from the Bin and release it within that lassoed section, like so. So we have six more to go. You could definitely go through and again just test what section it is, lasso it, and then drag it, and so on.
I do have kind of a finished version here in the 4.2 folder, and I'll just show you this here. So here we go, we have all of these clips just synced to these moments, that's the longer one, and so on. So we have six moments synced to this script. Again, a lot of times it's the entire clip synced to the entire script, but for this we do have some sections of this interview.
So what I'm going to do is just click in the script and press Command+A so all of them are selected. Basically, you're looking for this little take box right here to be highlighted, and you can see that when I do that, all of the take boxes are highlighted, so we're ready to go. And if I come up to Script > ScriptSync, we have this ScriptSync dialog box. Now ScriptSync does not come without a hefty price tag. This used to be included in the price of the software for several years, the licensing ran out, and now it is $1,000.
So a lot of post houses will have like one station that has ScriptSync enabled, and that becomes the syncing station, because you can use synced scripts on any version of Media Composer. So as long as you have one station that has ScriptSync enabled, you can do that, and boy is it worth it. Okay, so you come in and enable the Language and then the Tracks that the audio is on that you're going to sync. And this is nice because I'm able to Skip lines that only contain CAPITAL letters, which, as you can see, are my speakers.
You can also skip things in parentheses or brackets or before a colon, so this is all set up to basically ignore stuff that you don't want synced. You can also come in and say Select Dialog and then basically select a line of dialog, and it's going to know that this indentation level is going to be the dialog and anything at a different indentation level is not going to be there. All right, so we were ready to go. I'm going to just go ahead and press OK, and it's going through, and it's going to sync those six clips to the script. Again, this is very, very fast.
You can do a 30-minute interview or a 2-hour interview in just a matter of seconds, and let's go ahead and just choose one of our script marks, and we'll double-click and play. (BD Dautch: ...certifying organization, and we grow about 100--) So you can see that, that worked perfect. Now we'll try one more. I just like to spot check it a little bit. So we're looking for the still of the morning. (BD Dautch: ...the still of the morning. It's a time, a contemplative time, and a good time to really--) So, a really tremendous way to find exactly what you need.
Again, you can use this with the Find tool. Just press Command+F and type in a few keywords, find that moment on the script, and then double-click the script mark and then load it and then work with it. Really, really fast, really, really easy, and if you have a station that has ScriptSync enabled, again it is $1,000, but if you have one station that has that, you can go for it, and it is included on the trial version of Media Composer. So at the very least, you can try it out.
If you watched the last movie, you saw how incredibly fast it is to automatically sync your master clips to your script using the power of ScriptSync. However, if ScriptSync's $1,000 price tag is too high, or if you need to correct a couple of sync marks from a ScriptSync script, then you'll need to learn the manual way. Let's take a look. So I am going to open up my keyboard, and I am just going to go to Settings and Keyboard and then I am going to press Command+3 to open up the Command palette.
What we need to do is map the Add Script Mark button to our keyboard. So that's contained in the other tab, and here's the Add Script Mark button. We want a button to button Reassignment. I am just going to map this to Shift+S for Script Mark. So I am just going to drag this over, and you can map it anywhere you like. And I have my script right here, and I've already kind of attached the master clips to it.
It doesn't have the Script Marks yet, but I am going to do that the manual way. So I'm just going to load this into the source monitor. You can load this clip into the source monitor simply by double-clicking, and I am going to just get rid of that end point and come to the beginning here. What we need to do is actually manually map the spoken word to the written word. So I'm going to find the first line, and then I am going to pause. (BD Dautch: Okay, my name is--) All right, so I had it lined right before he says okay, right here.
Then I am going to come to that line, and I am going to click right here right on this line. So I have the intersection of the line, and I've clicked on this Script Mark line, and I am ready to make the mark. So all I do once I've lined everything up, I have the spoken word ready to go, and I have the written word all ready to go. I am just going to press my keyboard shortcut, so it's Shift+S. And as you can see, I've added a Script Mark. And it gets really, really tedious if you go line by line by line.
So you can just kind of skip a few lines. Some people actually go straight to the next paragraph, but I am going to go ahead and just skip a couple more lines to about right here. So I am going to find when he says different herbs, and then I'm going to map another Script Mark there. (BD Dautch: I have Earthtrine Farm, and we've got about 10 acres in Ojai and 5 acres in Carpinteria that we're farming on. It's all certified organic by CCOF, which is a certifying organization. And we grow about 100 herbs--) Okay, so right here is where he is about to say different herbs.
Again, I'm going to come up to this line, intersect, I'll press right here, and then I'm going to press on the Script Mark button, Shift+S, and I've got another one. So every few lines go ahead and add one. Again, this is a lot more tedious. I mean we could have synced multiple scripts with ScriptSync in the amount of time that it took us to just do those two marks. But it still does work. Again, if you do not want to pay the ScriptSync price tag, but you do want this, this is the manual way, and every so often ScriptSync misses a line.
So you'll need to actually do this manually anyway. So if I click on this right here. And here. (BE Dautch: ...about 100 different herbs, vegetable, flowers, fruits--) And you can see that I'm not as accurate as ScriptSync. I got right before a hundred rather than right before different. So that will happen, that's fine as long as you get just some spot checking of each one of these clips, and you can basically use the Find tool, find the text that you would like, and then find the nearest by Script Mark that's mapped.
So maybe every few lines you would have one. Then double-click on it and then use it just like you would with ScriptSync. It's just that you don't have as many points of sync. So while this process is quite a bit more arduous than the automatic way, sometimes if you don't have access to ScriptSync, it's certainly worth it to put in the effort up front to sync your script so that you don't spend too much unnecessary time breaking the flow of your creative energy as you're actually cutting the piece together.
05 STORY AND SCENE CONSTRUCTION: TELLING THE STORY IN THE ROUGH CUT
An overview of the rough cut process
So we have gone through all the steps of evaluating the approach that we want to take in creating this documentary. We have done all the legwork in setting up our entire project in an organized way so that we can easily and effectively find our raw material. We are finally ready to start editing. But how should we begin? While there isn't any one right way to start out an edit, there are several approaches that many editors take. Let's lay out the basic process that we'll take in editing this documentary. Believe it or not, you may not want to dive immediately into the edit in Media Composer.
Many editors prefer to attack the general structure and flow of the edit first on paper, which is why this stage is called the paper edit. Once you've worked out on paper how your scenes will be arranged, it's not a bad idea to pre-create your sequences. It can become overwhelming to start editing an entire documentary in one sequence. So tackling one scene at a time is often a great way to limit your construction of ideas to a manageable chunk. Then you can combine the sequences later once each is fleshed out to your liking.
As you can see, here, I have six sequences, which represent my six scenes, and then a master sequence where I will later combine them all together. Then it's time to tackle a sequence. I'd recommend that you focus on settling your audio track first. This pass therefore is called the radio edit. When you create your radio edit, you are not worrying about how the video works. That can always be changed later on. But by focusing on audio, which is made up mostly of interview footage, but can also be narration or verite footage, you can begin building a solid backbone for the documentary.
We'll take a look at exactly how to go about this in the next movie. If you take a look right here, I have a radio edit where I have just my Interview footage. I've really concentrated on what I want him to say, but there is no video B-roll yet. That will come later. Once you get your radio edit worked out, you can begin adding supplementary video or B-roll to accompany the main audio. This part is fun because once you have worked out what you want your documentary to say, you now have the opportunity to guide your viewers in exactly what you want your documentary to show.
It's this play between audio and video that truly makes the art of documentary design so dynamic. You can get creative, artistic, and really dive into the viewer's subconscious in ways that only documentarians can do. If you take a look at the Radio Edit, I have just the Interview footage, but if I take a look at the Radio Edit plus the supplementary B-roll, I now have all of this gorgeous video footage to help tell my story. We'll definitely take a look at that later as well.
Once your main audio and video elements are laid down, you can really begin playing around in adding similar creative elements. This is where you can add montages and parallel editing and process footage editing. We'll take a look at each of these design techniques a little later. Finally, once you have laid down everything, and you're sure of your cut, you're ready to show your rough cut to a captive audience. It's important to show your rough cut to as many people as you can, both to people invested in the film as well as to those who have no stake in your film's success whatsoever.
In this sense you want to make sure that you deliver a product that is true to the vision of the director and other stakeholders, but also deliver a product that makes sense to the new viewer. So that's just a high-level overview of how you can go about putting together your rough cut. Let's take it one step at a time and begin editing our documentary.
Making a paper edit is often a good idea, because it forces you to comb through your materials and chunk your main ideas into tangible decisive pieces. Then you can begin arranging this not only in your head, but prior to the edit you can start working it out on paper, either with paper and pen or like I like to do on note cards. We'll simulate this process now. Let's just start writing down the main ideas in any order. So, we've got a lot of material on understanding who BD Dautch is and why he thinks local growing is so important.
We were introduced to life on his farm, and we see how he invites classes full of school children on to the farm to learn about sustainability. We get a sense of what it's like to prepare for the farmers market. And we get to see how they transport everything and begin selling the produce. We get a great look at the vitality and vibe of the marketplace. And we get to talk to several customers to see how important local growing is to the community. And finally, we get an intimate look into the relationship between the growers and the local restaurants.
So, let's take some time to start arranging these main ideas in a structured order and see where we end up. Okay, so we know we need a structured intro and conclusion. Then we've got all the rest of these ideas that come into play in some way. First is there anything that doesn't belong, anything that doesn't serve the mission stated within the creative brief. Well, the only thing I think I take out completely right off the bat is the stuff of the kids learning about farming.
It's great stuff, but we don't have much time, and that might take us on too much of a tangent. So, we'll get rid of that. Now, let's figure out how the rest of the materials can now fit together. I think first we need to learn about BD. It will humanize the Farm to Table movement very well. Then I think we need to get to know the farm. This will bring as a back to the importance of agriculture and local growing. Then let's explore the market itself, its vitality, and energy, and its purpose. This is going to be really big.
Finally, we need to hit on the restaurant angle. This will go perfectly at the end, since the chefs shop for their food at the farmers market, and we'll have just covered that. Then we're left over with a few extra topics. I think we can fit these into our main ideas. The importance of local growing has to go with BD, no question. And all of it, it takes to get prepared for the market can go with the explanation of farm life. That does go hand-in-hand. And the market setup and the customer angle should go along with the umbrella topic of the market itself.
Most of this can be accomplished by intelligently combining good sound bites with good B-roll. And then our restaurant bit and then the conclusion. So, while this may have been grossly oversimplified, you will need to go through the process yourself in real time. And as you can see, being able to organize your ideas on paper can be a great way to actually see how a documentary is going to come together. Remember, there can exist literally hundreds or thousands of stories in the raw material of a documentary. It's your job to find the best story.
So, it's important to start out with the best approach.
Once things are looking good on paper, you may want to get started with your Radio Edit, working out the audio foundation for each scene in your documentary. And that's fine. If you're someone that just needs to get started, then by all means do so and skip to the next movie in this chapter. However, as you've no doubt caught on by now organization and preparation are a common theme for effective documentary editing. So I thought I'd throw one more big thing your way in case you wanted to really get everything inline for your edit. I'm talking about writing a script, specifically a two column script.
This is common practice if you have transcripts of all of your interviews. Now a two-column script is a documentary script with the left column tells us what we see and the right column tells us what we hear. Now this is just one possible format, but it's the one that we'll be exploring in this course. So based on the Paper Edit we know we're going to need an intro and a conclusion and the four main scenes in-between. So you can build your two column script to include that main structure. Now let's just take the first section, the introduction. After screening and organizing all of the footage, I am imagining a sort of audio montage of interview subjects praising the main principles of the Farm to Table movement.
Then I'm imagining the visuals to basically take us through the entire movement starting with a single piece of fruit and then we'll get bigger and bigger, and we'll see the orchard and the farm, the workers, the market, and so on. Now I don't have to write out specific shots here. I mean you can, some editors do, but I just like to work with visual generalities that I can later flesh out. So I just keep going like this with each scene. Again, because I have my transcripts, I can just go through them and find my favorite sound bites and then include them in the script just pasting ideas together and forming conclusions.
Then I can decide later how I'd like the visuals to play into everything that's being said. Now I'll just quickly show you the entire script scene by scene so you can briefly see what I'm thinking. Scene one is where we meet BD and learn about his ideas and get an intro of the farm and scene two is where we get a sense of the importance of the farm in a local growing movement and where we focus on what it takes to get ready for the farmers market. And scene three is the big one, we are at the farmers market, and we not only talk to BD, but with all of his workers as well as with the customers, this is sort of a culmination of everyone's efforts to make the Farm to Table movement happen.
So this'll kind of be the largest scene. And scene four is where we get to explore the relationship between the growers and the restaurant owners and chefs. And finally, the conclusion is short, just a sound bite by BD, but I think it sums up everything pretty well. So, again, the two column script is a great idea for documentary editors that have the luxury of transcripts for each of the interviews, because it just basically becomes a matter of copying and pasting the moments that tell the story you want to tell.
It gives you a chance to imagine the visuals, but again this part is slightly less important since you can always change the visuals later. You really need to see that to make it work. So again these are just generalities, but the part where you can really get specific is with the audio. It gives you a chance to lay an excellent groundwork for how you'd like to tackle the documentary, and if you'd like to check out this editing script that I've assembled for this documentary, you can check it in the exercise files if you're a lynda.com Premium Subscriber.
Okay, we've got the documentary looking good on paper. We've even taken the time to create a two-column script that details the specific audio foundation and basic visuals that will define our plan of attack. We've set up six playing sequences for each of our scenes. We're ready to go. Let's start with the first scene and take a stab at putting together a radio edit. So I am going to load my blank Intro sequence here, and let's take a look at our script and remind ourselves how this is starting off.
So we have an audio montage, we have basically four different speakers talking about various things in the Farm to Table movement. Starting with BD, there's definitely a movement happening. So again, we're just concerning ourselves with audio. We'll deal with visuals later. We need to find this moment, there's definitely a movement happening. So I could go into my Assets into my Interviews, and you know try to find it through here, or better yet I could come into my Transcripts, because I am using Transcripts and look in my BD Interview, and you know try to find it in here.
But we already know through previous chapters that Media Composer has some really great searching techniques. So I am going to use that. I am just going to open up the Find window, Command+F or Ctrl+F on a PC, and because we're using Transcripts, I can click in Script Text and just type a little bit of that line. There is definitely a movement. That's probably enough. I'll go ahead and press Enter. So my search results, I am going to go ahead and just double-click here, and it brings up my transcript, it highlights the line.
Then I have a Script Mark here, and the reason that I have these Script Marks is--as we've learned in previous chapters--we use ScriptSync to basically map the spoken word to the written word. So if I double-click on this Script Mark, we have this moment, and I am going to go ahead and play this to make sure it is the right location. (BD Dautch: Yeah, there's definitely a movement happening. It's not just here, it's worldwide. In a way, like I said, it's a renaissance.) All right, I think that is kind of where we should stop, because if we look at the script-- let me go ahead and just minimize this and put it side by side-- It's worldwide, and in a way it's a renaissance.
Then I have a like a different moment kind of pieced together after that. So many people now are aware that getting it directly from the producer is the way to go. If you take a look at the transcript, in the interview he goes on and starts talking about refrigeration and how people used to eat versus how they eat now. He doesn't actually say this until down here, directly from the producer is the way to go. So this is what the radio edit is all about. It's about finding these moments and piecing them together to build this audio foundation.
There is going to be lots of jump cuts, but that's fine. We're going to fix that later. So I think I've got everything kind of--let me minimize this and this. I am going to just splice this in. I am going to press V, and then let's go ahead and find that next part. So many people now are aware they're getting it directly from the producer. I am going to go ahead and double-click on this Script Mark, and I am going to play until I get to the correct word.
I am just going to use J, K, L, and then as soon as I hear the right words I am going to reach up and press I and O to mark my in and out. All right, I think that's it. I am going to go ahead and just go forward. (BD Dautch: So many people now are aware that getting it directly from the producer is the way to go.) All right, so good enough. Let's go ahead and splice that in and next up is Justin, I don't know how I'd run my restaurant.
So again, I am going to come in to here and type that in, I'd run. Now again, having transcripts is great because you can find these exact moments. If you don't have transcripts, then you may want to sub-clip your master clips into very individual sound bites so that you can easily search for them when you need them, or you can add markers to define exactly where your specific sound bites are located. So I can show you how I would do that once I find this moment.
Again, I am going to double-click here, I don't know how I'd run my restaurant. I am going to go ahead and just load this into the source by double-clicking. (Justin West: I don't know how I'd run my restaurant without all these farms, that's for sure. This is where the magic starts.) All right, and then just a little bit further back. (Justin West: I don't know how I'd run my restaurant--) All right, we can kind of fix that later in the timeline, but I can go ahead and just put a marker here. So say, for example, I didn't have a transcript, and I needed to find this moment later on, so because I couldn't search through the transcript, I could just put a marker and say I don't know how I'd run my restaurant.
Now I have this moment that's tied to this part where he says that. So again, you don't really need markers so much when you're using transcripts because you can find the exact moment that you want simply by using your find tool. But if you're not using transcripts, markers can be your friend. Anyway, I think I have this marked correctly. So I am going to go ahead and edit that in with a splice, V. And next up we have Owen, eating local is the way we should be eating, and you just keep doing this.
So, eating local is the way, like this is it so go ahead and double-click, and I am going to build this into the source. (video playing) All right, I think this is it, go ahead and mark an in. (Owen: Eating local is the way we should be eating.) All right, short and sweet, very good! And we'll go ahead and splice this in, and so on and so forth. So you just keep following the script, laying in the audio foundation.
When laying down the radio edit, you're mostly concerned with getting it in there, but once you've done that you can begin timing it out. You can add pauses in the appropriate places, you can tighten gaps. It is a good idea to work on that timing at least a little bit before you begin adding your video B-roll, but this is the main part is getting in your main audio. Again, it's a lot easier when you do have those transcripts, and you can search. But if you don't have them and you just want to find these moments, then you're just going to be laying it in using other strategies, using sub-clips, using markers, finding those moments in a different way.
But I do have a couple of finished radio edits here and some Radio Edit Examples. I have the Intro here, so you can kind of see that when it's done, and I also have the second scene, Meet BD. So I have basically a bunch of his talking heads edited, ready for B-roll as well. So definitely practice this out, and it's a great thing to start laying in your audio foundation, because that's the first step.
Once you have laid out your main audio foundation in your scenes, it's time to begin supplementing video footage to help tell your story. This supplemental video footage or B-roll serves multiple purposes. Not only does it enhance your narrative, but it also helps to both cover up and smooth out the jump cuts and chopped up audio that inevitably results from the construction of your radio edit. Now you want to make sure that when you use B-roll, it helps set the scene, that it adds further detail and enhances your story.
Don't use it to just show exactly what's being said. This gets monotonous and uninteresting pretty fast. So try to work to engage the viewer, rather than spoon-feed the viewer. So I have my radio edit of my Introduction. This beginning part right here is where BD is talking about this growing, changing, exciting movement, basically the farm to table movement and then we have a few talking heads at the farmers market and in restaurants talking about it as well. So I think I'll probably allow this last part to stay as talking heads, and we want to just have B-roll really tell the story and enhance the story here.
And if you take a look at the script what I'm thinking is that we kind of underscore what he is saying by starting with a single piece of fruit or vegetable and then just backing out getting bigger and bigger. So it's an idea, it's a spark and then you get bigger and bigger, picking, we are packaging it and then we get to the farmers market, and it's this big important thing. And I think this is going to be engaging enough to really hold the audience's interest especially since this is the introduction, the first scene that they are going to see.
So I am going to climb into my Assets folder and my B-roll. And we need to find the footage that we are going to use. So we are going to start on the Farm, we are going to open up the Farm Orchards bin, as well as probably Farm Picking_Pruning. So I can literally just read through these, I can load each one and take a look at them. I have already screened it all. So I have a good sense of what this stuff is, but I want to quickly find what I need.
I don't want to lose my creative energy. So one thing I can do is just change to Frame view and take a look at the thumbnail version of what all of these clips are. The same thing here. I am looking for a single piece of fruit, I have probably I want to stay here in the Farm and Orchards bin. So I am going to go back to Text view. What I would like to do is actually use the qualitative data that I added to these clips in a previous movie and use that to figure out exactly what clip to use here.
So I'm going to Custom Sift. I am going to go up to Custom Sift here. I already have some data there, and I am going to clear that out. Let's see, right here I want a good shot. So I want something that contains three stars or more. So four stars also contains three stars. Then I want that close up. So I want to just type in close-up, and I want that to be on the Shot Composition column and OK. Now this I really helpful, because now we have just two shots.
Let's go ahead and take a look at them, okay, and our Produce box. Well, I think that this is the winner. This is perfect. This is exactly what I'm thinking. Let me start small. So I'm going to just mark an in and out right before that zoom out. I am going to just patch V1 to V2, turn off my audio, we are going to get some probably nat sound in there a little bit later.
So I am just going to make this a video-only edit and overwrite B. And I am going to go ahead and play through it and just remind us what's right after this. (BD Dautch: There's definitely a movement happening. It's not just here, it's worldwide, and it's a renaissance.) All right, so I am going to just Command-click to snap to that edit point. Let's unsift this. So go to Show Unsifted. I think there is a couple more orange Orchard shots here. Yes, Orange grove solar flare. That's pretty lovely, I think that might work.
Now the second shot. Let's just try this one too. Not as lovely. So we will say that this is our second shot, and I want to get I think that solar flare right there. So I am going to mark an in, I am going to go ahead and play and just mark in out where I feel edit makes sense. Okay, so I have here a 3-second shot. I am going to just edit this in, again we are going to tweak this later, we are going to probably do some trimming and making sure that everything works out well.
But I am going to edit this in video only and overwrite B. Next up is a shot that does something like we are picking the fruit, we're bringing the fruit from the Orchard, something that is getting us closer to that farmers market. So if I--I think I am going to use my frame view for this one, and we have BD here carrying a box, and this is not quite right. Now this is better, because he is walking out from the orchard.
This has actually work out pretty well composition wise, start close-up, and then medium shot and then more of a long shot here. So I think that would work well. Let's just make sure there is nothing better. And we have the loading. So I think that's a little bit too far along. This one probably would work fine as well. The shot composition doesn't work quite as well as the long shot and then we have unloading as well.
So I think that's a little bit too far along too. So let's go ahead and grab this shot right here. That's okay I think, and let's overwrite this in B. Anyway, I am going to grab this unloading shot for my fourth shot I think. I think that's probably, yeah, I think right here set an in and out around that area right there.
Okay, so 2 seconds 23 frames, overwrite that in, and it's probably a little bit too long. I want to make sure that I get my farmers market shot in the end here as well. So I might have to come in and do a little bit of trimming. So go over to trims to make room for everything. So I am going to be doing some tweaking, and that is just part of the process. You definitely need to make sure that what is being seen make sense over what's being heard, and that everything is concise and tight or that it breathes and that we have enough room.
I have kind of a finished version of this. Well, a version that's a little bit further along, B-roll examples, and here is the intro. You can see here to build a little bit more room I have the video starting first. And there is going to be music under here as well as nat sound, but for now I am going to go ahead and play through this so that we can see how it's working. (BD Dautch: There's definitely a movement happening. It's not just here, it's worldwide, and it's a renaissance. So many people now are aware that getting it directly from the producer is the way to go.) (male speaker: I don't know how I would run my restaurant without--) All right, so it's doing what I wanted.
We have you know the shots telling a story so we kind of have the audio telling a story, and we have the video supplementing that and then adding to it and enhancing the story. One thing I would do kind of right away is add some long dissolves here, effects work usually comes later, but one thing that strikes me right away is that dissolves while they can be used to sort of smooth out transitions, they can also be used to juxtapose images and ideas. What I would like to show is that basically all of the shots of the producer all the same goal, the same angle were approaching the same basic idea.
So I am going to just quickly add some dissolves here. I am going to mark an in and out around the range where I would like my dissolves added and quick transition, and 24 frames, or 1-second dissolves, I am going to just apply to all transition between in and out and add those. And so I am just going to play through a couple. (BD Dautch: Yeah, there's definitely a movement happening. It's not just here, it's worldwide, and it's a renaissance--) Okay, so I do like that. I think the long dissolve is working out really well to sort of enhance my ideas.
So I am going to leave it just like that for right now. So once you are happy with the way your audio and video are coming together, you are one step closer to a solid rough cut. There are a few more tools you may want to use in creating some deeper and more personal editions which we will explore in the next few movies.
Once you have used B-roll to enhance your scene, you might want to consider adding some deeper and more connective visual elements to your documentary in the form of Process Footage. Process footage at its most basic level is footage that shows a person completing a task in clean continuity. It's kind of like B-roll, and it's kind of like cinema verite, but at its heart process footage is footage that draws the viewer into the documentary subject's own experience. To understand how to edit process footage, I want to first show you a little bit of footage here.
I am going to just go into Assets and B-roll, and I am going to open up the Farm Picking_Pruning bin. I am going to take a look at these last few clips here, Wrapping herbs sunny 2, 3, and 4. So here is a guy and he is picking these herbs and he's cutting them and then he's wrapping them and then he throws them in a box. So that's all shown in a long shot. Here, the same thing, picking, cutting, throwing in the box in both a close-up and then a medium shot and then this one here, same thing.
So we get them in basically four different frame compositions, which is really helpful. This footage is of a repetitive task, and the frame was reconstituted many times, giving us close-ups, medium shots, long shots, and so on, and this allows us to seamlessly cut back and forth between these various shots, thereby creating a sort of fluid scene. Additionally, what it does is it lets us create an intimate glimpse into this person's process, and this type of continuity editing is naturally built into narrative footage where you have multiple takes and multiple angles, and in documentary, however, this creation is more complicated, more intricate.
Process footage is most often material in which the subject is filmed doing a task that is usually wholly central to his or her profession or personality or environment. So if you take a look at sort of the after, once this has been edited, I have this here to show you, and we have the shots together, and it's right after this bit of B-roll. So I am just going to play this whole thing and then we have the process footage at the end and hopefully it sort of slows you down and makes you kind of watch.
(BD Dautch: And we grow about 100 different herbs, vegetables, flowers, fruits, and we sell mostly at the farmers market, and also we sell to caterers, schools, restaurants. We try not to do any shipping. We try to keep it all local.) (video playing) As you saw, you know I kind of let it linger there. I tend to do that with process footage so that some of it does have some narration or interview underneath it, but some of it is just kind of there for you to watch.
And I am using this as a sort of element of my film grammar. So we talked about film grammar before, how we build in some constructs that define this film. This is one of mine in this film. I have a lot of these parts where we are watching someone do something, and I really feel that it enhances the documentary viewing experience. So let's just practice some right now. If I go back to this here that needs a little bit of process footage, I am going to just find some if I climb into my Assets, and I am going to go to Farm Picking_Pruning, and I have here BD picking lettuce, and here I am doing the same thing in the long shot and the same thing in the medium shot.
As you can see, I already have my in and out points here. If you don't, you can go ahead and lay them in wherever you like, but I'm going to start with his hands and go ahead and patch A1 to A2 so maybe we can get a little bit of sound of his picking the lettuce, and let's go ahead and Overwrite, B, and I am going to play. (BD Dautch: ...Earthtrine Farm, and we've got about 10 acres in Ojai--) Okay, and now let's go to his face, okay, I have set my in and my out, and I am ready to edit, Overwrite, B, and then finally in the long shot.
Okay, great, and Overwrite. All right. I am just going to watch, and let's just see how we feel about it. (BD Dautch: ...name is BD Dautch, and I have Earthtrine Farm, and we've got about 10 acres in Ojai and 5 acres in Carpinteria that we're farming on. It's all certified organic. And we grow about 100 different--) All right, so it's coming along. This one does not have the process footage by itself like we did before, but I did want to show one more example of where I do have it, and it hopefully makes the viewer engaged with the footage.
I am going to go back to number 2 here, load it up, and it's just this bit at the very end here. So we kind of have our B-roll, and I am going to start playing right here. (BD Dautch: ...time to really get perspective on the whole farm and the progress, the problems, so when everybody arrives I'm ready to direct them.) Okay, so he is talking about the contemplative nature of the farm, and then we see him in long shot, we see him in close-up, and then we see him again in the long shot, and this footage basically has reconstituted the frame several times, so this works.
Process footage, like I said, can be put over interviews or narration, it can exist alone. Whatever you choose to do with it, I am sure you will find that working with it is really rewarding and brings another layer of visual and emotional interest to your documentary.
As you're working to build an effective narrative for your documentary, you will inevitably need to figure out ways to both compress and expand time, both for logistical reasons--like to fit a lot of information in a short period of time-- and also to engage the audience in more exciting ways. Now as you do this it's also nice to be able to combine different ideas and make that work for your film. Now there are a few ways you can tackle time and idea manipulation. Here we're going to take a look at two, Montage editing and Parallel editing.
Now in the last movie we took a look at Process Footage editing, which is basically editing with continuity, where we see a task that is actually not filmed in real time, but we present it as if it were. So here we have our guy wrapping the herbs and here we have him in close up and then we cut out to him in a medium shot and then a long shot and everything is matched on action. So we have him basically holding the herbs like so, in both of these shots, and we have him cutting the herbs in both of those shots, all right.
Now, this is something that was filmed over several minutes, and we are basically condensing it into a few seconds. Okay, so we are not trying to really manipulate time in this way. We're trying to kind of recreate reality, all right? So we're going to do something slightly different with Montage Editing. When we edit Montage, we're taking multiple separate shots and combining them one after another. Now this is often used to convey a passage of time or a convergence of ideas. Here I have a montage. I am just going to go ahead and play it so you can see what I am talking about.
(video playing) So all of these events happened in the same general time period, in the same general space, but the shots are totally separate. When we combine them, we see something that happened over a period of about an hour condensed into a period of about 15 seconds. Now montage can be used as B-roll.
So this isn't much different than when we were talking about B-roll. However, the very nature of B-roll is that it is supplementing the A-roll, which in our case is the interview footage. So if it's not supplementing the primary audio, then video like this can be combined as a stand-alone montage like we see here. The only thing that's really underneath it is music, all right? So we have basically a time condenser in the form of these separate shots coming together to form one idea.
Now I want to take a look at Parallel Editing, and so parallel editing, or crosscutting, is another way to manipulate time. This is where you edit two or more storylines so that each scene advances forward in isolation while visually interacting with the other. So often use Parallel editing when you want to show a convergence of subjects or ideas that are simultaneously occurring. Usually it not only serves the purpose of bringing together these ideas, but it also effectively condenses time, letting you sort of dynamically show multiple ideas in less time than if you strung them end to end.
All right, so here I have our farmers market scene as well, so I have the same basic shots. But they are sort of occurring right in between this scene of BD driving. So I won't play the whole thing, but I want to give you a sense of what I'm talking about here. Here he is talking about the farmers market, and then we cut to the farmers market. Then he is going to be talking about the farmers market, and then he cuts to the farmers market, so that when he actually drives up, we already have a sense of what the farmers market is all about.
All right, so let's go ahead and play this. (BD Dautch: The Santa Barbara markets are some of the best in the world. The vibe of market, everything about it is--it's just so personal, there's such direct contact, so many people--interested people and interesting people.) All right, this is, you know, an example. These events aren't happening at the same time, but you have basically the idea of the farmers market, then you see it, then you talk about it, then you see it.
So this is you know one example of what I am talking about. I have here another example where we basically have one subject that is present in both scenes, but the scenes occur in different times in different places, and we're going to talk about some strategies about how to make this more interesting. (video playing) So here we have the guy with our herbs, and here we have a girl with the same herbs, but now she is at the market preparing them for sale, and then we cut back to him and then back to her, you know sort of underscoring the idea that this comes from the earth, it is farm to table, so it really kind of cuts back and forth between these two scenes.
Now, right now it's not as good as it could be. I have a few strategies that can help this out and make it a little bit more interesting and help these ideas come together a little bit more. Here she comes, and we definitely have different sounds. I am going to make that work for us, all right? So I am going to just get into Trim mode, press U, and I am going to just trim--Dual-Roller trim--over about this much so that we actually hear her scene before we see it, all right? So this is a J cut--a J cut because it looks like a J--and we've basically split the edit.
And let's go ahead and play this out, and you'll see what I mean. (video playing) So, sometimes this can work when you have two scenes, and you want to basically make sure that these ideas are linked, this is one way to do that. Another way which I really love doing is matching on action. We have here he's throwing the herbs in the box, and she's putting the herbs in the box, and I think we can cut this so that it actually is one fluid motion.
All right, so I am just going to get into Trim mode, and I want to do an A-side trim. And I am just going to rock back with J-K-L so that we find the moment right before it gets into the box, right there, and I'll release. And then the same thing over here we want to make sure that we get the moment right before it enters the box. So... (video playing) About right there. Okay, I am going to try that, and let's go ahead and play around the edit, I'll press spacebar. (video playing) All right. I am going to just give this just one more or two more frames of room, okay.
And now I am going to play it and see how that works. (video playing) All right. I think that works, so as you can see, just a little visual change here really kind of brings those ideas together even more. And these are things that you can do not only when parallel editing, but also with continuity editing. But when you do it with parallel editing, it's kind of little bit stronger because we have these two places, these two locations, these two subjects kind of performing a similar motion so that we basically see that come together on screen.
So there are other editing devices that can help you manipulate time, but Montage Editing and Parallel Editing are certainly several good tools to try out. Used in conjunction with other methods, they can certainly help to engage the viewer in exciting ways.
When editing a documentary, you are often working with footage that was not shot with the quality or the consistency of audio as its highest priority. Unless the material was shot with a dedicated sound recorder in the field, the sound from any non-interview shots were most likely just recorded with the onboard camera mic. Interviews of course are probably recorded with more care, and with a lavalier or a directional handheld mic. Now, sometimes rather than cutting in a lot of disparate audio from individual shots, you may want to find some blanket, natural, or environmental sound and use that instead.
All right, so here I have my intro, and it's the radio edit plus my B-roll, so it's coming along. It's almost maybe at the rough cut stage. But we need some audio here. It's totally quiet when this starts out. (BD Dautch: There's definitely a movement happening. It's not just here, it's worldwide.) And the birds you hear there were actually squawking in the background of his interview.
So, we also need to find something that goes with that as well, knowing that, that was one of the challenges they had at the interview. All right. Just so you know, the audio that was recorded with this, just a lot of different stuff. I mean there was like loud squawking crows in back of this shot, and something that was very different here, and then this one was very, very quiet. So I mean, we need something that kind of just is a background blanket audio bed underneath everything. So, I'm just going to climb into some of my B-roll so that I can try to create this, and I might not even have to go to a sound library.
So, I am going to go into B-roll, and then I am going to go to that Farm Bin, Farm Orchards, and I am showing tracks. If you need to show tracks, so you can see which ones contain audio, you can just right-click up here, choose Columns, and then just make sure that Tracks is selected so that you have that information. All right, so I probably don't want to pick anything where people are walking or carrying things or unloading, that's probably going to have some clicks and footsteps and things that I'm not really going to want.
If I want just some background environmental sound, I am going to choose something like Field mountain in background. That sounds like a good candidate. I am going to go ahead and play this. (video playing) All right, well, there was definitely some clicking, like some camera noise right around here, but that's not to say I can't use any of this. I can just put an in and an out around the part that I do want to use.
(video playing) Okay, and it's not the best, but at least I'll have it in my library, and I can always get rid of it later if I find something better. But I have some sound started in this natural and environmental sound bin. I am just going to drag this over, and I am just going to call this Quiet farm presence distant birds.
Okay, then we'll just try one more. Go ahead and get my flowers here. (video playing) Okay, so I'm starting to hear some like crunching and footsteps right here.
I'll just mark an in and an out around that area there. It's about 21 seconds of okay, and that sound, again, this is going to be very, very low-level audio underneath my principal video. So it doesn't have to be perfect, just something that kind of gives it that presence. This is much more chirpy, a little bit more immediate presence, so I am just going to say Field presence with chirps. So let's go ahead and close this up, and we have a bin started.
We can go ahead and just make sure that you are patching your audio down to A2 and A3, or if you want to, let's see, Command+U to add an audio track if you want your that sound to be on A3 and A4. Just patch appropriately. I think I am going to have mine on A2 and A3 for now, and I need to basically get it probably right before the farmers market because I'll have a different type of ambience at the farmers market.
So I am going to just mark an in and an out around this area, and I am going to go ahead and try my Field presence with chirps. I just need to turn off my video, and I'll overwrite, so press B. And now we should have some presence underneath our B-roll here, and I'll probably need to lower it just a little bit, but at least we have something. (BD Dautch: There's definitely a movement happening. It's not just here, it's worldwide, and it's a renaissance, and many people now are aware that getting it directly from the producer is the way to go.) Okay, so again, I'll probably need to come in there with the Audio Mixer.
I might need to keyframe when he starts talking and just sort of lower that just a little bit. But we have some blanket natural sound underneath our principal video at least to start with, and we can continue on, find some other stuff, and really kind of just build a patchwork of audio throughout our piece, and we might not even have to go to an audio library at all.
Once you've got good solid scenes, you want to make sure to go through all of them with a fine-toothed comb, and make sure you've got a good audio mix. Now, even though this is the rough cut and an audio mix will be performed on the sequence later in the post-production workflow, you still want to make sure that everything is sounding good. Now, for a fuller explanation on audio editing, you can see my Media Composer Essentials course on lynda.com. But here, I'll go through a basic overview of making sure you have got a good sound mix. All right, so I've got the second scene here, my Meet BD scene, and I want to play it.
But first I am going to open the Audio Editing Workspace. And as I play this, I want you to notice where it's peaking. I will tell you that normal sounds, so the human voice or BD's voice, should peak right between -20 and -14 here on the digital scale, or between 0 and 6 here on the analog scale. Loud sounds can peak higher in this region, and quieter sounds or background sounds can peak lower. We of course don't want anything to distort, so we'd have to fix that.
But in general, the levels need to be in this general area. All right, so I am going to go ahead and play, and let's just try to notice where things are peaking. (BD Dautch: My name is BD Dautch, and I have Earthtrine Farm, and we've got about 10 acres in Ojai and 5 acres in Carpinteria that we're farming on. It's all certified organic, and we grow about 100 different herbs, vegetables, flowers, fruits--) General observation is that he's peaking too high.
He was between -14 and -8 and occasionally peaking up here to -4. So, we are going to need to bring that down. Other things like the nat sound, the presence, as well as my sync sound here sounded just fine. So, let's adjust the interview audio first, and then we can make further adjustments later if needed. All right, so I am soloing A1 here. This is basically going to solo it here as well, and I am going to mark an in and an out around just the short region, and that's because this is going to loop when I do an audio play loop.
And then I am going to make an adjustment, and then when the loop goes over again, it's going to reflect that adjustment. So, I want this to be a relatively short period of time in this loop. The Audio Loop Play is right here. So, I am going to go ahead and press it, and then I am going to make an adjustment and then take a look over here on my Levels, and then make further adjustments as necessary. (BD Dautch: ...and we've got about 10 acres in Ojai and 5 acres in-- ...and we've got about 10 acres in Ojai and 5 acres in-- ...and we've got about 10 acres in Ojai and 5 acres in--) All right, so I've lowered the levels by 6.8 decibels, and things are looking good.
It's peaking properly. Now, BD's audio is on A1 throughout this entire sequence, and this is how you should do it. You want to make sure to incorporate all of your interview audio on the same track. I have my sync sound on another track, I have my nat sound on another track. This is going to really help me out because once I've made this one adjustment--let me just go ahead and remove my in and out points--I can make this a global adjustment. So, my position indicator has parked right here, I have A1 selected.
Just come up to the Fast menu, Set Level On Track - Global, and then now take a look down here at this -6.8 number because everything on this track has now been adjusted by that amount. Otherwise, it's just a clip-based adjustment, and it just affected this clip and nothing else. But we've made it a global adjustment. All right, so this is basically how you should do it, adjust it in isolation, then listen to it with the Mix, so I am going to unsolo it. We are going to go ahead and play through it again. Make sure things sound good with the mix, and then move on down the line.
Now, audio is additive. So you'll occasionally need to do some tweaking even after you've adjusted individual audio elements. That's why it's important to make the adjustment and then make sure to listen to it in the context of the mix. (BD Dautch: My name is BD Dautch, and I have Earthtrine Farm, and we've got about 10 acres in Ojai [00:04:22 .53] and 5 acres in Carpinteria that we're farming on. It's all certified organic, and we grow about 100 different herbs, vegetables--) All right, so things are sounding good.
Again, I would make further adjustments, make further tweaks going on down the line in this general way, but so far so good, and you want to do this for each one of your scenes. You want to make sure that even though this is the rough cut that everything is sounding good and you're able to screen it properly so that no elements are drowning out others. Now, I do want to mention one thing, organizationally- speaking, IF I WAS TO HAVE ADJUSTED THIS INTERVIEW BEFORE I EVEN EDITED IT INTO THE TIMELINE, THAT'S A PRETTY SMART THING TO DO. SO I AM JUST GOING TO MATCH FRAME-- SO RIGHT-CLICK, MATCH FRAME TRACK-- AND THIS BRINGS UP THE ACTUAL SOURCE CLIP FOR THE INTERVIEW.
And if I make the adjustment here, then basically any time I edit this in from now on, the adjustment will be made, and I don't have to make it in the timeline. But you do it in the same basic way. You just want to make sure to click in the Source Monitor, because when you click in the Record Monitor or the Timeline, it's the timeline-based adjustment that's being made. So I am going to just click in the Source Monitor. You can see that there is only one track of audio, one track of audio, and I am going to mark an in and an out. And let's go ahead and again Audio Loop Play and...
(BD Dautch: ...acres in Ojai and 5 acres in Carpinteria-- ...acres in Ojai and 5 acres in Carpinteria-- ...acres in Ojai and 5 acres in Carpinteria--) There we go! Okay, so it's peaking properly. I have made the adjustments in the source clip, therefore whenever I edit this into the timeline from now on, the adjustment will be made. So essentially, if you can do that before you make any edits, it's probably the smarter way to go. All right, so that's basically all there is to it. Again, first make the adjustments in isolation, then unsolo and make sure it sounds good against the mix, that's all there is to it, and you will be able to screen the rough cut in confidence.
Okay, by now you've laid out the entire audio foundation for each scene in your documentary. You've added supplementary B-roll to help advance your narrative. You've included additional visual elements that help deepen your story, like montage editing, parallel editing, and process footage. You've established a structured film grammar to define your film style. Now it's time to bring the scenes together and add finishing touches for the rough cut. Now logistically, combining your scenes is as simple as just editing them together.
You just need a master sequence, and you need this to contain as many tracks as your scenes do. So I think the most number of video tracks that I have is at least one more, maybe two. So I'm just going to press Command+Y twice, or Ctrl+Y on a PC, and I think the most number of audio tracks I have in any one scene is four, so I'm just going to press Command+U twice more, or Ctrl+U on a PC, and instead of double-clicking on the sequence to load it, I'm just going to drag it into the source monitor, make sure everything is patched correctly, and then splice, and just keep doing that on down the line.
You want to make sure that the playhead is at the very beginning, and there is no in or out points in the sequence that you are editing into your master sequence, so I'm just going to keep going. Okay, everything is looking good. All right, so I'm going to definitely I'm going to watch this a lot, I'm just going to run my position indicator over everything just to make sure that everything is there, everything is looking good.
All right, so now once I've combined them, it is time to watch and watch carefully. If the scenes work well separately, do they work well together? Spend a lot of time making sure that the structure actually works, you'll no doubt had to do quite a bit trimming and extracting material to make sure all the scenes flow well together. You'll also no doubt need to add transitions between scenes. Now these can be just straight cross dissolves, or you can imply some creative transitions like L or J cuts that we explored in a previous movie.
But bottom line, you want to make sure that the rough cut is really solid. After all this is what's known as the Editor's cut, so you want to show your best work. All right, so again this is about this 6 minutes, so we won't have a chance to go through and watch and watch and watch as we should, but you definitely, definitely should do that in order to make sure that we have the best product to present to the producer, the director, and other stakeholders. So also, once you've laid everything in and then have one master sequence, you may want to tackle the idea of laying in some temp music.
Most likely, you'll need to do some research about the type of music you'll ultimately want to include in the film and then plug it into your sequence in the location that you expect the music to go. We won't have time to do it for the entire sequence now, but I just want to show you the music that I am going to be working with for my temp music, right here just so you can see kind of where I'm headed. This Silent charm, here, is going to be for the first part, and I'm thinking just like a general music bed underneath everything, so I'm just going to kind of show you what this sounds like.
(music playing) And then I have this piece of music that I was thinking of bringing in at the farmers market scene. (music playing) All right, so again, this sort of sets everything up when we're talking about BD, we're talking about the farm, we're talking about preparing for the farmers market.
This is we're here, we're ready to go. It's a little bit more upbeat, and it gets us to the end. So I want to show you kind of how this looks in the finished assembly. All right, so like I said, it's just a general bed. There weren't a lot of edits that I made since it is just a background music, but there were a few, and I did kind of bring it up in a couple of places, and I just want to show you just in general how this starts out, how it starts to sound. (BD Dautch: There's definitely a movement happening. It's not just here, it's worldwide, and it's a renaissance, and there's so many people now are aware that getting it directly from the producer is the way to go.) (male speaker: I don't know how I'd run my restaurant without all these farms, that's for sure.
This is where the magic starts.) (male speaker: Eating local is the way we should be eating.) Once I've gone through, once I've made sure that everything is flowing okay, I've made my trims, I've made some extractions, I might have moved some stuff around that's totally fine, I've put in my temporary music, we're getting very, very close to the finished rough cut. After you are pleased with the layout of your rough cut, there are a few effects that you might want to add to enhance and correct your shots in the documentary. I will cover some popular ones in the next chapter.
And then the following chapter covers screening the rough cut which is a very, very important step in the process and then on to picture lock.
O6 USING DOCUMENTARY EFFECTS: REPAIRING AND ENHANCING FOOTAGE
Documentaries are complex, structurally yes, but also technically. As the documentary editor, you often live under the I'll take what I can get mentality, and it's up to you to tell the best story possible, using the materials you can acquire. Therefore, many times material will be shot on multiple cameras, with varying formats. Let's take a look at a couple of format discrepancies scenarios and talk about some ways to deal with them. All right, so here is my Intro scene and everything is looking great and just kind of serving everything's, ah, when I get to this shot and he looks a little stretched and squeezed definitely, not the correct shape we have these three people in a row and he definitely stands out.
So he's at the wrong aspect ratio. I can always check if I right-click on my Record Monitor here and say Project Aspect Ratio, 4 x 3 now he looks okay, when I'm in 4 x 3 and everyone else looks stretched and squeezed. So with documentaries, this is so, so common, you are always working with either archival footage that is shot 4 x 3 or just footage from another camera that's at a different Aspect Ratio, but you will have to deal with it, you can't output it with the varying aspect ratios.
So I'm going to go back to 16 x 9 because that's what the rest of my show is at. And let's go ahead and take a look at how to deal with this. Okay, I go into my Effect palette and the Reformat effect. The first thing that I could do is apply a 4 x 3 sidebar. So if I just apply a 4 x 3 sidebar, this is actually going to reformat it, so it's not just a mask, but it actually resized this image, so that it basically shrunk in and stretched it.
So that now I'm at a correct 4 x 3 Aspect Ratio, and it's pillar boxed on the left and the right in order to make that happen. Now this isn't the best solution because nothing else in the show is pillar boxed, this would really stand out, okay. So while it does fix the problem aesthetically, it doesn't look that great. So I'm going to remove that, and let's take a look at a better solution. The Pan and Scan effect, if I apply that, you can see that nothing happens initially, but when I open up the Effect Editor, this will allow me to choose my source video, which is 4 x 3, and my Target, which is my sequence which is 16 x 9 Anamorphic.
Now when I do that nothing happens regarding reformatting immediately, but what happens is I get this wireframe and so if I close the Effect Editor you can see it fixes it, it basically reformats it so that it fits in the 16 x 9 video frame appropriately. Now it doesn't look that great because the top of his head is cut off. So you do have some flexibility with this. If I go back into my Effect Editor I can basically use any part of this frame.
I have all of this down here to play with, and I have all of this down here to play with. So if I move up with my vertical position and sort of just have that be the portion that I show and then I'm going to go ahead and close it out. You can see that now his Aspect Ratio is fixed, and we're not cutting off the top of his head. So I think that's how I would like to keep it. Now if I open up the Effect Editor one more time, you'll see that I can also keyframe it over time if I need to.
So if this was a very active shot, and I had some important information down here to begin with, I could keyframe it here and then we'll just move this over, so you have access to it, and then I can move that down there and then let's just have it move up to the top over the course of the shot, this would be obviously possible, and if I close that you can see what's happening, and kind of an added camera movement.
Now this is not that practical for the shot, this is a lockdown shot and obviously unnecessary, so I'm just going to delete those keyframes and have it be the way it was, so I'll move that back up to the top. Okay, obviously we also have some scaling parameters. So if you wanted just a portion of it, if I wanted to have a super close-up I could do that and then really zoom into any portion of this video frame, but again, I do want it to be all the way zoomed out and up here at the top so that he is fully included, and I'm just going to move that down just a bit so that I include him fully, and we'll close this, and it looks like it's okay, all right.
So he's in the correct Aspect Ratio, the Pan and Scan has fixed it for me, and I'm ready to go. So again, this is a really, really common thing you'll have to do with documentaries when working with various aspect ratios, but fortunately it's very easy and very flexible.
Adding still images to your documentary is a really nice way to advance the story, even when it's among lots of footage. Here I have my conclusion, and I have lots of nice footage to help sell my story, and I have this shot of BD at the market, and it's surrounded by a lot of movement, but it is so still itself. Now, if I applied a resize to this, it really wouldn't be the best solution because what I have done is I have imported this image into my project and therefore I've converted it to the video resolution that I'm working with.
So here is the image that I've imported, and we know that we are working in a standard definition project for the purposes of this course, and so we are at 720x486 pixels. Well, I'll tell you that this image was shot on a Canon 5D Camera at more than 5000x3000 pixels. If we look at it exactly, we can see that we have it at 5616 pixels by 3600 pixels, so a very, very large image, and we want to take advantage of every single one of those pixels.
So, if we did a resize effect, it would get really soft, really fast, and that's just not what we want. So I'm thinking that we can just stay zoomed out to begin with and then slowly zoom in on BD as we are talking about him. Instead of applying a Resize effect to my image here, I'm going to apply what's called an Avid Pan & Zoom Effect, and that's going to allow me to link to the original source image and allow me to access every single one of those pixels.
So, in the Image category, Avid Pan & Zoom, I am going to go ahead and drag that onto the effect. You can see that it immediately goes dark, that's what happens when you add the Avid Pan & Zoom effect. This clip was more or less just a placeholder. You can put the Avid Pan & Zoom effect on any clip or any space in your timeline. As you can see, you can also put it on just blank filler, and you could do the same thing that we are about to do. I am going to undo that and go back over here.
You just need a placeholder with some boundaries. So I'm going to go into my Effect Editor, and I am going to click on Import image, because we need to go find that very large image, okay, our 5616 pixel by 3600 pixel image (navigate on the drive to find it). I am going to go ahead and open. By default, it starts off looking a lot like it used to, but when we start zooming, you will see how different it really is. So I am going to add a couple of keyframes, one at the beginning, and one at the end.
And like I said, we want to start zoomed out, like it is now, and then zoom in on him. So I am going to increase the zoom factor, and you can see that I get this box zoom in, and I can choose where it is that I am going to zoom in while still taking a look at the entire image. So I'm going to make sure that it goes just right over his face, like so, and let's see how that looks, okay.
And then I'm going to just choose both keyframes, I am going to click on one and then press Command+A to select both of them, and I'm going to kind of get rid of that Ease In and Ease Out. I am going to just do a Linear Motion from keyframe to keyframe, and I've got a Linear Path, and I think, I like that a little bit better than that dip that was happening. Okay, so let's go ahead and take a look at what this looks like. I'm going to switch over from Source to Target, and I am going to go ahead and play through here.
(BD Dautch: ...to economy, to community--) All right. You saw that it was dropping frames. The reason for that is that this image is so incredibly large, so I am going to need to render it, but I do like this motion, I think that will work really well for my sequence. So I am going to render it. You first need to choose a render method, and you most certainly want to change it from Triangle. These first few are not good enough quality.
I will recommend that you choose Gaussian, I think it's kind of a sweet spot between a very nice quality render and super, super long render times. If you choose one of these, it's just going to be very, very long renders. These are very high quality, but this is I think good and fast enough. So I'm going to choose this, and as long as you like your animation, and you think it works well in your sequence, you can go ahead and render it. So I have changed my Filter.
You can see that there's other parameters down here as well, so feel free to experiment with those. But I'm going to go ahead and render (click on the bottom left button of the Effect Editor), and pick a drive to render to, let's say OK. Okay, not too bad, and let's go ahead and play through and see how we like it. (BD Dautch: ...to economy, to community. I mean--) Okay, so again, I might want to tweak that just a little bit, maybe I want it to hold at the very beginning and very end than I would go in and just tweak those keyframes, but you can see that you can zoom in quite a bit. I really don't have it as much as it could, I could really just zoom in straight on his eyes, and it would still be as clear as day because I am zooming in on that 5000x3000 pixel image rather than converted video resolution to 720x486. So, if you are working with high-resolution still images, definitely use the Avid Pan & Zoom effect instead of importing the images, you won't be sorry you did because you will be able to take advantage of every single pixel in those original images.
With the spontaneity of documentary shooting comes a fresh, exciting approach. However, it also comes with inevitable shaky footage. Hitting that perfect shot to fit into scene may require that you spend some time stabilizing your footage. So take a look at how to do that. All right, so I have here the main farming sequence, and I have a shot of BD driving to the farmers market. I'm just going to play it for you so you can see that it just pretty shaky. (video playing) Okay, so let's try to smooth that out.
I'm going to go to the Effect palette and in the Image category, I'm going to just choose the Stabilize effect and apply it right on top of the shaky clip in the timeline. Now this is an automatic effect, the tracking window opens, and you can see lots of little green points, and basically they're just attaching to places within the field of view and locking those down. And by default, I have something called Auto-Zoom on because what it's going to do is actually zoom in as it reverses the direction that each of those points is taking during the entire shot. So it's saying this data, you can see this little white squiggle here, that's the tracking data that is basically all of the places that the shot has moved during the duration, and it's going to say basically reverse all of that so that you can lock the shot down and allow it to be as smooth as possible. So I'm going to turn off Scaling, which is basically going to disable that Auto Zoom or just not show it. And I'm going to show you kind of what's happening on the outside and then I'm going to enable scaling so you can see you know how that helps.
All right, so you can see that the truck is now fixed in the middle of the frame but you definitely have all of that compensation happening along the outside, but when I come in and enable Scaling and let that Auto Zoom function, you can see that we're zoomed in a little bit but the truck is not bouncing all over the place. It is in the center of the frame. All right, so I should mention that by default, the Stabilize effect uses an engine called the FluidStabilizer.
There are some other stabilizing engines, the FluidTracker, the Correlation Tracker. We will take a look at the Correlation Tracker in the next movie doing something slightly different, but I do want to mention that if it doesn't come out quite as you had planned you may want to change the tracking engine that it's using, you also may want to Disable Steady Glide and Enable Smoothing. Basically what Steady Glide does is it maintains any inherent camera movements so if there's some pans and tilts, it will keep that while still stabilizing the shot.
So occasionally, you'll want to uncheck Steady Glide and check Smoothing. It's not going to maintain that camera movement, but it's going to apply smoothing nonetheless. So those are some parameters that you might want to adjust if it doesn't come out the way you like it, but in general it is as simple as just applying the Stabilize effect, letting it analyze the image, and then it stabilizes usually pretty well.
As we've been talking about throughout this chapter we're often presented with footage that is less than ideal. Sometimes you'll need to correct a portion of your video frame, whether that means fixing scratches or color correcting and underexposed or overexposed area, or blurring faces for people that didn't grant their image to be released. All of this can be done quite easily with the Paint Effect. Now for a full explanation of the capabilities of the Paint Effect you can feel free to take a look at one of my other lynda.com courses, Editing with Compositing and Effects in Avid Media Composer.
But here we'll just visit some of the most commonly used documentary centric Paint Effects. All right, so I have my scene here of the farmers market, and I have a piece of footage here near the end where I think the sky is a little blown out, it's just bright white, and there's little blue tinges around the leaves. So what I'd like to do is just make the sky, in general, just a very light blue, I think that would look better. All right, so I can do this with a Paint Effect, I can just go into my Effect palette, and it's in the Image category, Paint Effect, go ahead and apply it and open up the Effect Editor, and what I want to do is just draw a shape right around here, and I am going to include the leaves because I'll be able to cancel those out using one method, so I am just going to zoom out just a tiny bit.
And I have my shape drawing tools over here, I am just going to grab the Curve tool and just trace an outline around this general area, like so. And we've got a bright red shape, and that is because in my mode menu I have Solid selected, and it's also because the Color is red. So I have a lot of options in here that are good for color correcting, as you can see, most of them are color correcting options.
Before we actually choose one, what I am going to do is I am going to change Solid to Outline and all that does is just make a general outline around so I can look at the video underneath. I'm going to choose this white color, because I want to say that anything that is white, I want to turn blue. So I do have a few things that I want to ignore, and I do that with the Magic Mask. So I'm just going to use my eye dropper and click, and without releasing the mouse I am going to come over here and sample the white and then I'll release the mouse.
And so now Magic Mask is enabled, I have white elected, and now I'll come back into the mode menu, and I am going to choose subtract. Now subtract basically subtracts the color from the shape that I have selected, so I'm going to choose subtract and then go into Color, and I am going to take a look at my color wheel. So this is the general area where I want the blue sky to be, and I am right here right now, so I am just going to move this up a little bit. Got that orange and the opposite of orange is blue, so it's going to take away orange from this area, and it's quite dark right now, so I am going to just come into mode and dial it down may be to right there, and I am going to click away to show you one more thing.
It's a very stark edge, so I'm going to select the shape, come over to Feathering and increase the Horizontal and Vertical parameters under Feathering, so it's sort of blending the shape into the background, and then I am going to decrease my Bias a little bit, okay. So here's my new sky. It might be a little obvious to you, since we just worked on it, but go ahead and look away and then look back and look at obviously our subjects, and it's not so noticeable.
We'll do before and after, I have a dual split here. Here is before, and I have my white triangle is all the way over here, it probably is going to open up for you just in the middle here. To do it before and after you can just drag that all the way to the right and here's before and here's after, all right. So looks pretty good, I'll keep it and any other overexposed or under exposed areas I can draw a shape around. And do a little bit of experimenting about what works. I tried Colorize before but I did like the results with subtract a little bit more, so that's why I chose that.
So, there's a lot of options but I did want to show you one more thing before we stopped, it's on this shot here. Let's imagine that this woman saw us taping and then came over and said you know I really don't want to be on film, I don't grant permission for you to use my image, so we've got to blur her out. Do the same basic thing, if I click on the Paint Effect and drag that over, I am going to open it up. And I am going to go to the first frame, and I just, I am going to take the Oval tool and draw a shape around her face. And there's too obstruction commands in here. One is Blur, so she'll look like that and the other is Mosaic which I like a little bit better. All right, but as I move through, she obviously walks out of her Mosaic, so we need to have it move with her. I can add keyframes and do it, but I want to show you how to do this via the Tracking tool. All right, so we've seen the Tracking tool before in a previous movie. This time I am going to open it right here, this button opens up the Tracking tool (bottom right of Effect Editor). And I have the tracker, and what I want to do is just place it right on an area of high contrast, okay.
So it basically works best when you have an area where it is dark and where it is light right over the X. The inside box is where it's going to focus and the outside box is basically where you're saying don't go out of here when you're looking for it. So, initially, I always start my track just in the default mode, and here we're using the Correlation Tracker engine. What you want to do is just make sure that the yellow X sticks onto this place as she's walking through the frame. So I am going to start my track. All right, so it probably is going to be fine, it sort of moved.
You'd like it to stick a little bit more than that, but let's go ahead and try this tracking data, this yellow part right here is the tracking data, and it's not too much movement, but I think it'll work fine. If not, we'll go ahead and redo the track. Okay, so I am going to come back here, select my shape which it is selected and then I am going to twirl down tracking and then just attach the tracking data to it. So now when I go through you can see that the Mosaic shape goes with it. Now she is walking towards us, so she's actually getting larger, which means that the shape needs to get larger.
So I'm going to just click on this last keyframe and just increase the size of that shape and then now, not only will it move through space, but it's also going to grow in size. Okay, so I am just going to play it in the Timeline. Okay, so there is our two Paint Effects. Obviously for this one what I probably would do instead of destruct her face is just use a different crowd shot and not have her on it all, but sometimes you can't do that, sometimes you have no choice, you need a shot and so you need to Blur or Mosaic somebody out of out.
So it's quite easy to do, once you've drawn the shape and have changed your mode you might have to add a track to it. And as long as the track is successful, it's a really nice quick fix. So this type of editing is called inter-frame editing, because we're literally climbing inside of the frame to make visual adjustments. This type of quick fix can be extremely valuable in documentary editing and can mean the difference between scrapping a shot and saving a shot.
If there's one thing about documentary editing, it's that you're constantly dealing with trying to compress or stretch time. Almost never are you dealing strictly in real-time, and we've already learned some great techniques for dealing with larger time issues like montage editing and parallel editing and process footage editing. Here however, we'll take a look at a very powerful speed tool called the Timeshift plug-in, and that allows us to make more minute speed changes. All right, so I have here, the portion of the documentary that deals with BD on his farm and here he's driving to the farmers market and he's chatting about what the farmers market means to him, but he's a little poky, he is not really spitting it out fast enough and kind of lags.
I'm not going to play the whole thing, but I will play a sample of it for you can see what the main issue is. And by the way, we do hear the truck we will I send that to sound design and make sure that we get some noise reduction here, but just take a look and hear his words and see how the pace is feeling to you. (BD Dautch: ...something bigger than your compost pile, bigger than your ego, and definitely bigger than your bank account, but the rewards--) All right, so it would be great if he was just talking a little bit faster.
I don't have any B-roll to put over him to just start slicing this up. So I just like this to happen faster, maybe 25% to 30% faster. All right, so what I'm going to is first affect my video. If I come over to my Effect palette, and I'm going to go to the Timewarp category, and I'm going to choose Trim To Fill. I'm just going to place that on my video. And you can see I'm just going to zoom in here, that I'm at a 100%, and if I start trimming like so, it's going to start making it faster.
So if I trim to about 130% I would like to try that out, I think that making it that much faster will improve it. But when I play it you'll see what happens. (BD Dautch: ...bigger than your ego, and definitely bigger than your bank account.) All right, so I'm out of sync obviously, my video is at 130% and my audio is still at a 100%. So I just want to enable A1 and then go up to Tools and AudioSuite, and as long as I'm parked here, and I have A1 selected, I'm just going to come into this menu and choose Time Shift and the plug-in gets deposited automatically, but nothing has changed until I activate the plug-in (by clicking on the plug icon in the AudioSuite Widow) and then this window comes up, and I'm just going to change from poly to mono.
And I come here, and this is the speed. So I can work this dial going slower or faster and they key is that it's going to make it faster without increasing pitch, so he's not going to all of a sudden sound like a chipmunk. And this is key, I need to be able to still know that it's him and make it go faster. So it's sort of compressing the space in between the words, but it's not changing the pitch of his voice unless I came down here and started messing with pitch as well, which we're not going to do.
So I'm just going to just type in here 130. So now I'm at 130% on audio and 130% on video, and there are some other parameters that I can change, but I think this is going to be just fine for what I want. So I'm just going to preview it and make sure that he sounds okay. It's just analyzing really quick. (BD Dautch: ...something bigger than your compost pile, bigger than your ego, and definitely bigger than your bank account.) Okay, so he still sounds like himself, I'm fine with that, let's go ahead, I'm going to go back in and Render and OK, and you can see that I'm showing my wave form, it ends at about the right location.
Let's go ahead and play it and see, how it works. (BD Dautch: ...bigger than your ego, and definitely bigger than your bank account, but the rewards are just like--) All right, so I might want to tweak it a little bit, he might be going just a tad, tad fast but visually it's okay, I mean, it doesn't seem like he's driving really, really, really fast. So visually it's fine. Audio wise, again I think it's just a tiny bit fast so I might slow that down, but when I do, I'm all set.
I have shifted the video, I've shifted the audio I can then just come in and extract this part right here at the end, I'm just going to lift, press Z, and there we go. I have increased the speed of both video and audio to 130%, and he's spitting out his words just a little bit faster. So as you can see, this is an easy thing to fix, it's also fairly common. You may not use it in awful lot but especially in documentary editing when you need something to last just a little bit longer or tighten it up just a little bit quicker, it can certainly become very useful in certain circumstances.
As we learned previously, stringing together multiple talking headshots and then covering the resulting jump cuts with B-roll is a standard way of working when editing documentaries. Most of the time, this works out just fine. You're able to cover up the jump cuts with the appropriate footage without any problem. Sometimes however, either because you don't have the right B-roll, or because you don't want to introduce a weird flow of too much B-roll in a certain area, you may just want to include two talking headshots edited one right after another. Fortunately, you can usually do this without the audience noticing by using the FluidMorph plug-in.
Let's take a look. All right, so this is the conclusion of the documentary, BD is talking about how much he loves his life and his profession. I've got a lot of B-roll here, and I just want him saying as a talking head right here I don't want any B-roll over this area. So I want him talking throughout this cut. So I'm going to go ahead and just play through the cut so you can see what I'm talking about. (BD Dautch: ...the luckiest person in the world, to be able to do what you feel is your calling.) All right, so what I want to do is just smooth that out, and so I'm going to apply the FluidMorph plug-in.
I'm going to come over to the Effect palette, and I'm going to go to Illusion FX and FluidMorph, and I'm going to just make sure to put that right on the transition. You want to make that it's on the transition and not on the segment (clip), or it will look like his face is melting. So, I'm parked on there, I'm going to open up the Effect Editor. And right away, it comes in at 1 second, as do all transition effects. You want to change that. You want to make it about 8 frames or so. So, I'm just going to type 8, Enter, and now we're at 8 frames.
I'm just going to play through it, so you can see kind of what's happening through these 8 frames. Again, this is the A side. So, this clip right here, and by the time we're finished with the 8 frames, we'll be to the B side. All right. Not bad. Could you tell where it morphed? It's literally happening throughout this transition. So, it's pretty hard to tell, and it's doing a pretty good job. I'm going to go ahead and render it, and then we'll play it in real-time.
So I'm going to Render Effect, okay, and I'm going to go ahead and play through, and let's see how it works. (BD Dautch: ...in the world, to be able to do what you feel is your calling. I mean, I just--) All right, well, you might have noticed just a tiny bit of a morph as you kind of look at his hair and the side of his face. I promise you though, if you were just watching it, and you didn't know that it was there, it really would not be noticeable. Now this is not really possible if the background changes significantly or if the position of his face or body would change significantly. But for an interview where the subject is usually situated in the same general area and the background is unchanging, this is a really nice solution.
Now, I'm going to go back into the Effect Editor, and I want to talk about a couple of other parameters. If this doesn't work, you'll probably want to come down to this pulldown menu and change the combination. Now, everything on the left represents the A side, and everything on right represents the B side. So right now, we're still on the A, still on the B. All this means is that this is the last frame of the A side clip, and the first frame of the B side clip, and that's what's being morphed. The stream is just the stream of video leading up to the cut on both the A side and the B side. And then basically it breaks it down from there, the stream of video on the A side with the still image on the B side and vice-versa. So, a lot of times if it doesn't work with Still->Still, I'll go to Stream->Stream and see how that works. So that's always a possibility. You also have the option of enabling Feature Match.
So basically, the way this works is it matches up the general Luma values of the face as it detects it on both the A and the B side. And so usually that's fine. But Feature Match goes a step further and takes a look at the features on the face and matches those up as well. So again, if you're not happy with the FluidMorph, you can come in and enable Feature Match, and then re-render it and see how it works. Okay? So, that's basically what I would recommend, change the way that the morph is happening throughout this dropdown menu, and then also enable Feature Match, and you're usually going to end up with something that looks pretty good.
All in all, I am pretty happy with this one. Again, I don't think you can tell very much if you don't know that it's there. So, I'm going to leave it as it is. So as you can see, the FluidMorph plug-in allowed us to include multiple interview shots without the need for B-roll to cover up the jump cuts. Now, while it won't work all the time, it's a great little tool to fix most small issues of this nature.
07 PICTURE LOCK AND FINISHING
So, you've combined and trimmed your scenes to complete the rough cut. Once you've screened the film for yourself many times to make sure everything is working, you're prepared to show it to others. This is because while you've been editing the film, you've been working in somewhat of a vacuum. Now you're ready for fresh eyes and ears to tell you what's working and what isn't. Truly, holding a screening in front of an audience teaches you a whole lot about your work. Sometimes screenings are exciting and sometimes they're hard. But you should try your best to get as much out of them as possible, so your project can continue to improve.
A few things about this very important phase, like I said previously, you need to screen it for people who are both invested in the film and for those that have no stake in the film's success at all. You want to make sure you get the sort of feedback that lets you know how your cut compares with the vision of the director and ultimately the client. But also you need to make sure that the film works for the general public, since that's going to be the majority of the audience that sees it. Prior to each screening, make sure the screening room is ready to go. Ensure the video looks good on your monitor, and the speakers are broadcasting the audio at the correct level.
Make sure the lighting in the room is just right, and that no one in the room will have an obstructed view. Now, you can also upload the rough cut online and ask people to watch and comment on it that way. Sometimes, when you're not in the room at all, you can make it the most honest feedback. If possible, start out the screenings with a small audience, and try to read their expressions. Keep your eyes on them more than on your screening. Try to gauge their level of attention at each section of the documentary. After the screening, begin asking broad questions, and then get more specific.
Try to get a strong sense for the audience's understanding interest and emotion. Sometimes, negative feedback might be vague. In this case, you need to try your best to figure out what exactly is working, and what isn't by asking good, and specific questions. You won't remember everything, so be sure to take plenty of notes. Be sure not to argue with your audience. Try not to be defensive even though that might be difficult. The point of the screening is to figure out what's working and what isn't. After all, no one says you have to listen to everything everyone says.
But that's why you should screen the film for as many audiences as possible. If you consistently get similar negative feedback, there may be something to it. Once, you've gained valuable feedback, it's time to make changes to the film. You will be collaborating heavily with the director during subsequent edits, and for this reason, the phase is often called the Director's Cut. You're essentially aligning your vision of the film with that of the director during this phase. You might be making small trims, or you might be moving entire scenes around or deleting scenes.
Going through this phase can be difficult, but it's often necessary and usually makes the film better. You will continue to screen versions of the working edit until feedback finally filters down to a trickle. And eventually, you will get the official blessing. Once you finally reach this phase, you have reached picture lock. Picture lock means that no further edits can be made and the film is ready to send for titling, audio mix, and color correction. We'll discuss these phases of the post-production process in the next few movies.
Once your documentary is ready to go, you'll want to add titles. Now, by far, the most common type of title for a documentary is the lower-third, which is a title that identifies a speaker. Depending on your workflow, you may send your titles to be created by a motion graphics expert who might use a third-party program like Adobe After Effects, and then you just import the titles during the final phase of the edit, and that's fine. However, there is a nice titling and graphics program right insight Media Composer called Avid Marquee that allows you to mass create your titles.
So that's what I want to show you. All right, so I have my sequence here, and it's ready for titles, and I want to open up marquee, so I'm going to go to Tools > Title tool Application, and there are Two Title Tools in Marquee. There is the Title Tool, it's very, very basic rudimentary editor, and then there's Marquee. So I'm going to choose that. And I can create my title from scratch, that's totally okay. If you want basic marquee instruction, you can check out my Media Composer Essentials course.
However, I'm just going to load a predefined Avid template to edit and then I'm going to show you AutoTitler, which is going to allow us to mass create those titles. All right, so here in the Templates Library, I want to choose Templates and then Avid Templates, and then Lower Thirds. And here are just a couple templates that I can use, and then modify if I want to. I can come in and grab it, and then modify it. I'm going to need to press Command+Z, or Ctrl+Z, to get rid of that. Okay.
I'm just trying to find one that I think would be a good base, simple one. All right, so I think I'm going to use this one, and then just modify it just a tiny bit. I can grab the color of this purple line and make it more of maybe a blue, and then I'm going to grab this highlight color, and make it more of maybe an icy blue here. Okay, so these are very basic modifications, you can go nuts if you want to. I do want to call out just a couple of things. This is a layer.
And if I take a look in Layers, you can see that it has four objects. It has two text boxes. So if I click on Text Box 1, that's associated with this, Text Box 2 is down here, and then I have my Purple Rule and my gradient. This must be named Text Box 1, and this must be named Text Box 2 in order for AutoTitler to work. I'm going to show you the document that I'm going to be bringing in, so this makes just a little more sense. I'm just going to minimize this, and this, and go into transcripts and titles, and my credits, and I just have six credits here.
I just want to show you that this line corresponds to Text Box 1, and then you just press Enter once, and this line corresponds to Text Box 2. And then you press Enter twice and then you do it again. This is the structure. This can be again 6 titles or 600, it doesn't matter just as long as it's structured like this, and it's saved as a plain text document, so a .txt. All right, so I go back into Marquee, and we want to now that we have created the template or actually used the template and just modified it slightly, and we've made sure that these are named correctly, I just go to File > AutoTitler, and I find that Credits list, and open, and Starting Title Number 1 is fine. So we'll say OK.
And as you can see, those six titles were created super fast, here, they are all available in the Windows menu. You can kind of see them here, and pretty good, huh? So, I'm going to go ahead and save these to the bin. So I'm going to go to File, and I can just Save to Bin if I just want the one that's loaded Save to Bin, or Save All to Bin if I want them all to go. So just creating the titles, creating the Alpha channels.
There was an untitled one, which is what I started with. I'm going to not save that one, we don't need that. But here they all are. They are just as I want them, and I can just edit them right into the sequence. So basically, I would just find my first instance of BD being on screen, which is not in the introduction. Actually, we'll just grab, well we probably won't identify them in the intro. So, I'm going to go get BD right here.
So, I'll just mark an in and an out, patch V1 to V3, and I'm just going to overwrite B. And there we go! And I probably should have paid attention to who I was overwriting? I need to get BD's title. So, I'm just going to quickly get him and overwrite. There we go! That's the right guy just full resolution there.
So, as a result of me using the template, this is probably not the best design for the titles, but you get the idea. You can certainly go in, you can make it look however you want and then just using the AutoTitler, you can create them all in mass. Again, whether you have 6 or 600, it's really created in the blink of an eye, and it's really, really convenient for creating lots of Lower Third titles for your documentary.
Once you have locked your picture, and have either sent away for titling or completed them yourself, you're ready to tackle other finishing stages of the post-production process. We are going to talk about two of these right now, the professional audio mix and color correction. Now, these phases of the process are extremely deep, and we won't be going through them step-by-step, but I did want to at least get you acquainted with them. Let's first address audio. Now, you have probably already done a general level of acceptable work in Media Composer regarding general correction of level and pan, and you may have addressed some corrective work via audio suite plug-ins, but by and large, most major audio corrections are typically done outside of Media Composer, most often in Pro Tools.
Whether the audio mix is completed in Media Composer or exported to Pro Tools, there are several issues that should be addressed in a general workflow by the audio mixer. The level and pan must be adjusted to balance the mix. Then the dialog, and in our case the interview audio, must be emphasized and all other supplementary audio must be mixed appropriately. Room tone or ambiance must be used to repair sections of audio that need to be replaced or re-edited. EQ should be adjusted to eliminate unwanted frequencies and enhance desired ones.
EQ adjustments should also be made to match audio quality between interviews. All attempts to eliminate or reduce unwanted background noise must be made and finally, damaged or distorted audio should try to be recreated. There are of course countless other adjustments that the mixer will make, but this is at least a high-level understanding of the process. If you're interested in learning how to mix audio, there are several Pro Tools audio mixing and mastering courses on lynda.com. To export your audio for Media Composer for Pro Tools, you will need to ask the sound designer how you should deliver it. There are a couple of options.
If you have a fairly small sequence, like less than 20 minutes, you can do an AAF export and choose to consolidate and embed the media. This results in a single file containing the edit and the media. Your Pro Tools Editor can then import that file into a Pro Tools session and all your cuts in media will be translated appropriately. If your sequence is larger, you might want to copy all audio media from your Avid MediaFiles folder onto a portable drive, export your sequence as an AAF, and just choose "link to existing" media. The result is a file that only carries your edit, not the media. Then Pro Tools can link to the copy of the original media that you supply.
Now, after all of this audio work is done, you will get the audio back from the mixer, and it will be one mixed file, usually a WAV file that you will bring into your project and edit into your master sequence.
Another large and crucial phase of the finishing process is color correction, which should also only be completed once picture lock has been achieved. Documentaries especially benefit from careful color correction since the footage is often been shot under so many different lighting conditions.
The color correction workflow is a deep one, and if you want to explore the entire process, you can check out my lynda.com course titled Color Correction: Creating a Polished Look in Avid Media Composer. This will take you through every stage. Again, here, I'll just give you a very high-level overview of the process. Color correction starts by analyzing and correcting shots on an individual level. You first get accurate black and white levels. You then work to remove any existing color cast. Finally, you improve the general color, the hue and saturation of your image, paying particular attention to your flesh tones.
Once the shots are corrected, your next job is to establish shot-to-shot correction. You want to make sure as best as possible that all shots from one scene look like they belong together, and that each scene fits together visually as well. Finally, once all individual shots are corrected, and you have made sure that all the shots fit together well, you can apply a broadcast-safe filter so that everything falls within legal broadcast levels. You can also apply a global look or style to one or more sections of the film if you like.
So let's just go over this very broadly. I have here a shot that needs to be corrected. It's a shot in one of my scenes. So by setting accurate black and white levels, removing color cast, and improving the color hue and saturation, it looks like this. This is correcting a shot on individual level. Then I want to make sure that all of the shots in this scene look like they belong together, like so. So we're paying attention not only to one shot, but a little bit more globally to all of the shots from one scene, and this is establishing shot-to-shot consistency.
Then once I've done the work in making sure that my shots look good and my scenes look good, I can then stylize the film if I like. So I might want to apply a filter, like so, and you can do this to the entire film, to certain sections, whatever makes sense for your documentary. Now, you can color correct your film in Media Composer, or you can send the sequence to a professional colorist that will complete the online color correction in Avid Symphony or another third-party program.
Now, both the professional audio mix and the color correction phase are just part of the essential steps in finishing your documentary. You may also send away for professional effect in compositing work or professional titling, but like I said before, these online editing stages are far too extensive to describe in detail. For now just realize how important they are in making sure you deliver the best quality product possible.
When all finishing stages of the post-production process are complete, you're going to need to reassemble your finished elements in a new master sequence. Then you've got to deliver the sequence to the specifications needed. And really, these delivery requirements are so important to the post-production process, so most good editors find this information out early as it can certainly influence your entire workflow. Now, delivery requirements run the gamut, depending on who you're delivering the product for and what they're going to do with it. You might need to deliver a high-resolution file. If this is the case, you need to research the format and codec information that the file needs to be delivered at.
Or you might need to deliver a master tape. Again, you'll need to research format and codec information, as well as tape stock requirements, as well as leader requisites, like your bars and tone and slate and countdown. Or you might have to prepare your project for a full online edit. This is where you deliver the Avid project folder, along with the Avid media files folder for someone else to perform an online edit.
And again, you'll need to do all necessary research for how you should deliver these project elements.
So just a little explanation about this process, when you're working with low-res files, you're essentially doing the offline edit, making all of the decisions about how the sequence will be edited. When you've reached picture lock, the low-res files will either need to be relinked to already existing high-res files, or the sequence will need to be decomposed and then recaptured or re-imported at a higher resolution. If this is the case, then you would need to wait on the color correction phase until this was done, then the high-res files would be color corrected and then ready for delivery.
Now, it's impossible to go through all of these various scenarios for final delivery, but I'll just take you on a very high level set of options that you may be presented with. Ultimately however, it's up to you to do that technical research upfront to see how the product should be delivered. All right, so here I am in Media Composer, I have my final sequence, it has its final audio mix, as well its color corrected video, I'm ready to deliver. Now, I cover both exporting files and printing to tape in my Media Composer Essentials course. If you'd like a step-by-step process of delivering a product using one of these methods, please check out that course.
So just very quickly however, if I want to export a file, I would right-click on my sequence and choose Export, and then if I wanted to export, for example, a QuickTime movie, I would select that under Export settings. And then under Options I would match up these options to my delivery requirements. A lot of times you choose Custom, Format Options, and then under Video Settings you choose the codec that you need to deliver at, and there are other options as well. We won't go through all of this, there's lots of things to choose, but ultimately you need to make sure that it matches your deliver requirements. And again, if you need that step-by-step process just check out the Essentials course.
If I wanted to deliver a master tape, I would do that through the Digital Cut tool, which is in my Output menu. And again, this process is laid out step-by-step in that Essentials course. As you can see, I don't have a deck connected, so I can't go through this process. But as you can see, there are a lot of options that you need to choose in order to optimize your Digital Cut experience.
Now, that last method I mentioned is something that I haven't covered in another course, and that's preparing a sequence for an online edit. Let me just briefly show you the files you'll probably be asked to deliver for an online edit.
On my drive here I have my Avid Projects folder. And again, this is the project where all of my bins are contained, and inside those bins are all of the clips and all of the sequences that define the decisions that I've made in putting together this documentary. So I'll definitely need to deliver my Project folder. I'll also want to deliver my Avid MediaFiles folder. In this case it's the low-res version of the files that I have been editing, and I want to deliver that so that the online editor can make sure that the online edit visually matches the offline edit.
So at the very least I need to deliver Avid MediaFiles as well as Avid Projects, and then any other files that I use that they don't have, I also want to provide those as well, like Images and Titles and Effects and all of that sort of thing. Back in Media Composer I want to take a look at a couple of things. Now, when the online editor gets your project he or she will do one of a couple of things. May relink your low-res files to the original high-res files, which they have. So if I right-click on this sequence and choose Relink, this Relink dialog box is often used to attach offline media to existing online media.
However, if you take a look down here at Video Parameters, Relink to, I can choose HD video format and Relink method, Highest Quality, so basically as long as my media files exist in an HD or higher quality format, I'm able to relink my low-res version to that high-res version, and it's as easy as that. Now, if no high-resolution files exist, you wouldn't do this, okay. In that case, the online editor would need to recapture or re-import those at this stage.
To do this the online editor will decompose the sequence, which actually sounds a lot worse than it is. Basically all a decompose does is break down the parts of the sequence that you edited, so not everything has to be recaptured or re-imported at a high-resolution just the elements you actually used in the sequence. So here I would just right-click and say Decompose. And I want both Captured and Imported clips to be decomposed. I can choose a Handle Length, so if I did want any flexibility in being able to trim these later I can choose 2-second Handle Length.
I am just going to put 0 here. And you can Create a New Sequence here as well. And I'd want to make sure that Offline media only is unchecked, because our sequence isn't offline so we want to make sure to decompose all of it. So I'll say OK and OK, the new sequence will be reeling to the new decomposed clips. And as you can see, here, I have got Final Delivery, which is currently loaded, and this is online.
And this one, Decomposed, this is offline, media offline. This is now linked to all of these clips, so I am just going to open up my Decomposed Bin, and I am going to click and then Shift-click to get everything in there, move it over, so I have my master sequence here, and my Decomposed sequence. So here you can see, here is all of the clips that I used in my sequence. Anything that I did not use in my sequence is not here.
And these are all video clips, my audio is going to remain my professionally mixed audio. So this is just recapturing my video. And again, I would do that at the higher resolution. Again, this isn't a process I am going to go through step-by-step, but I did want to show you how to effectively recapture or re-import your video via a Decompose. Also just so you know, this was more of a high-level logistical demonstration, because as I said before, I wouldn't have color corrected the sequence before performing the online edit, that would come after I up-rest.
So don't get confused by the fact that I left the color correction effects on the sequence in this example, I just wanted to show you how to decompose. So whatever your delivery method, you need to make sure that you do your research early so you're not surprised later. Even if you're not delivering the product for anyone else, and it's just for your own purposes, it's important to know where you're going, so the journey in getting there is relatively free from technical surprises.
Now that you've finished this course, you should have a new or renewed understanding into the art of documentary editing in Avid Media Composer. There is a lot to know about how to effectively organize your materials and your ideas in order to set yourself up for success, and Media Composer has so many tools that can truly help you out in your adventures to making interesting, meaningful, and creative nonfiction narrative. Now, if you want to join a community of other Documentary filmmakers for support, ideas, and collaboration, you might want to check out doculink.org.
I am member and so many Documentary editors I know are also part of this community. You can connect with people on topics such as equipments, editing techniques, screening information, funding sources, jobs, and the state of Documentary filmmaking. To subscribe to the email mailing list, which is really kind of the heart of doculink.org just click on Subscribe and follow the steps to join the Yahoo! Group. Also, because this lynda.com course is about one specific workflow, I frequently referred to other lynda.com courses for more exhaustive techniques in Avid editing.
So if you need further instruction in general editing or color correction or effects, please feel free to check out my other courses. Good luck as you embark on the exciting world of Documentary post-production, carving away the one best story in the mountain of possibilities.
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