Dynamic Trimming

I mentioned the other day that as my experience has grown as an editor I have strayed from the step by step way of crafting a scene and instead fluidly move between the different stages as I edit. That got me thinking about how else my editing style has changed since I first started. One significant thing I have noticed is that I use dynamic trimming (or trimming on the fly) more and more when refining a sequence. For anyone who doesn't know, trimming is a way of adding or removing footage to the beginning or end of clips in a sequence. So in a dialogue scene, it can be used to remove a word that shouldn't be there or add a word that should. But perhaps more importantly, it can be used to control the length of the gap between the lines of dialogue. For me, controlling these gaps is one of the most important part of making a scene feel natural and right. They can also add a layer of subtext to the dialogue itself. If someone takes a moment to think before answering a question, it can add a new layer of meaning to their response. Perhaps they are lying? Or maybe they just don't want to answer? When I was a teenager learning to play guitar, my dad would often say to me "It's not the notes that are important, its the spaces in between." I apply that logic to my editing today. So how does this link to dynamic editing? Well early on in order to control the length of the pauses between lines I would trim using numbers. I would preview the edit by looping it and then remove or add a set number of frames, then preview again. This gave a good degree of accuracy and I would always find the frame eventually, but there was a significant amount of trial and error. Dynamic trimming allows me to hit play on an edit point and wherever I hit pause, the edit will move there. Sounds simple enough, but this allows me to feel where an edit should be, rather than find where it should be through trial and error. I know that using this method has sped up my work, but I also think that it has improved it. Hopefully it has made my work more emotional and less mechanical which, in filmmaking, can never be a bad thing.

FCPX

A quick aside from all the Turing Enigma stuff, to comment on the details that are floating around about the new version of Final Cut. A lot of people have been commenting on it after the NAB supermeet, and I have been putting off forming an opinion. Firstly, late me be clear that I am an Avid editor first and foremost but I do use FCP and I am soon to become an Apple certified trainer. I use FCP for corporate's and documentaries and find it works really well for fast editing where I am just simply assembling things on a timeline or where I want to create flashy sequences over music. I don't mind it for music videos and I also grade in Color, so I often use FCP to prep sequences for grading. But my ambition lies in editing feature films. And when I do that (as I am doing at the minute2) I want to do it in Avid because frankly, its perfect for it. I honestly can't understand how people craft dramatic scenes quickly in FCP. So my main reason for watching the sneak peak at FCPX was to determine whether this situation will be changing anytime soon. Short answer, no. FCPX looks like a great tool and will likely make what I use it for now, even easier, so I may even start using it more. But for editing features, it has moved further away from what I want. I'm sure there will be keyboard shortcuts but the focus is definitely on drag and drop editing, even more so than FCP7. And I don't want to drag and drop. I will race anybody, anytime, editing a rough cut of a dramatic scene if I can use the keyboard and they only have a mouse. There will also only be one window for viewing clips and sequences and it will alternate depending where your mouse is. Which sounds great, for when your editing a corporate on a laptop and screen space is minimal, but again, when I edit dramatic scenes I want to see the last frame of the sequence, when I'm finding the first frame of the next shot. Surely thats a must for any cut on action? The randomly appearing "magnetic" tracks also disconcert me because they will remove the idea of keeping the same stems of audio on the same track. That's important for me, when I build indivual scene sequences and then want to assemble them into a master sequence. Who knows, maybe I'll be proved wrong and by editing corporates on FCPX i'll be converted, but these are my initial thoughts. Anyone else?

Black & White

So yesterday was day 4 of "The Turing Enigma" shoot and today we have the day off (so a chance to recuperate after going till 4am last night). Now we have changed tic-tacs (or tactics), we are keeping up with production pretty well. I have edited 11 scenes of the 12 they have shot (number 12 wasn't finished till 4 so I'll be editing that tomorrow) and there are some amazing looking scenes coming out. The longer scenes especially are seeming really slick. Some screenshots after the break.

Crafting a Scene

Yesterday was day 3 of "The Turing Enigma" shoot. After spending the night before retranscoding the rushes from day 1, it occurred to me that we had been wasting a lot of our time on day 1 and 2, watching the blue transcoding bar creep across the screen. So we decided to leave leave transcoding unless there was time for it and focus on syncing so I could start editing. As it happens, the crew were working on some fairly complex scenes and so footage came in fairly slowly, but from now on, we will likely leave transcoding and just set it going after the day is over.

Make Your Mistakes Early

Day 2 on "The Turing Enigma" has just finished. At the beginning of the day we caught a mistake that has meant a little setback in the editorial dept. Inside Avid Media Composer 5 there is an option for how you want to deal with AMA linked files called "Reformat". Unfortunately this option does not come up when you first link to a folder of R3D clips. You have to add it in the Bin -> Columns setting. This fact, combined with some confusion over what Quicktime player was doing when we played back the proxies (cropping the top with the quicktime bar) led to us transcoding the first days footage in DNxHD with the left and right of the image severely cropped into a 2:1 aspect ratio instead of the 2.4:1 that we should have had. So everything has to be retranscoded correctly, with Reformat set to "Pillarbox/Letterbox". A lengthy process to say the least, but it will be done by tomorrow. If we had noticed the mistake later, then we would have pushed ourselves so far behind we would have been catching up all the way through the shoot. And I would likely not have got much actual editing done. So make mistakes, but make them early on. Some wisdom we should all be able to take something away from.

Keeping Up With Production

Its Day 1 of "The Turing Enigma" shoot. The morning started slowly but as production kicked into gear, we have had to work hard to keep up. We are holed up in our own room, backing up and transcoding footage as it is being shot. We have networked 2 macbook pro's together, one is reading the CF cards from the Red One, through an expresscard reader, the other is connected via eSATA to a GSpeed Q and it has become a juggling match between transferring data and transcoding inside Avid to DNxHD 36. The first scene (only 2 shots) is cut and the master of the next scene has been finished. As the medium shots and closeups come through, a third ball will enter our juggling trick. Should make for an interesting afternoon.