Re: Edit Times

"...The cynical answer is perhaps that it takes exactly as much time as you have before the deadline. I.E. a lot of folks just keep working at it until they run out of time, the saying goes: "a project is never truly finished, merely abandoned at some point". In news cutting, you definitely have a short deadline most times, and you just throw things together as best you can in the time alloted and that's all you can do. ..."

Oh how true how true!

I just shot a school play for my friend who is a teacher at the school. The sound guy there, well... not good. Fortunately I had a clue that this was the case from one of the rehearsals I attended and made some other arrangements

Long story short, my 3 cam edit took:

- Roughly 4 hours to capture (most of which was un-attended)(hour and a half run time)

- Roughly 4 hours to cut which includes synching the camera's and since I'm using Adobe Premiere these days, I just went through the whole thing switching it in real time. Then I went back and tightened up my edits, put a dissolve in here or there for a couple of the songs where it sort of fit and that's about it video wise..

- Putting the DVD menu together took a few hours because I was using Encore for the first time (I also was playing around in After Effects for the first time too) and I kind of over did it a bit (it's nice - not cheesy over done, but for what the project was I spent way too much time on it if you know what I mean.)

- Then came the audio. If I didn't have a deadline I'd still be working on it today! My plan was as follows:
- Take a line straight from the board which I did (too bad the audio guy moved my line to one of his aux outs which didn't have all of the mic's assigned to it)
- I had a shotgun mic and
- I put three of my own wireless mic's on the main characters and ran them into a field mixer and pumped them into my third camera.

Well, since the Audio guy was so... eh.. how do I say this nicely? Horrible at his job (in his defense he's just a techie type guy for the school district - not a "real" audio guy), anyway I wound up with the feedback in all of my sources (about every two minutes or so). Then the open mic's that kept rumbling and rustling around - constantly - hardly any breaks where you couldn't hear a mic rustling against clothes extremely loud or some kid whispering to another kid back stage) were being pumped through the speakers loud enough that again, they were an issue on most of my sources most of the time.

Alright, you probably got the idea and it was so recent that I'm starting to get frustrated again just typing about it so I'm going to stop posting about it right now. My point was that I'd still be trying to clean up the audio now (two weeks after I shipped the DVD to the duplication house) if I could.

But back on topic, like the others have said, it all depends. Real helpful huh? In my case, there really wasn't much creative decision involved - just switching and cleaning up. Your stuff is different - it'll take more time than my school play (video) did. (Here's hoping that your audio guy has half a clue!)

Once you've done a few, you kind of get into your own rhythm and at that point you'll be able to give more realistic quotes until then, if you can, allow yourself a lot more time than you think anyone could possibly need - just in case my audio guy happens to be your audio guy! :) And the more creative license you'll have with the piece, the more time you should expect to spend on it (at least that's how I tend to work!)


--KTFA