Editing techniques for organizing large amounts of doc footage?

I organize by chapters or sequences of events. I find that by building my docs as "books" it is easier to go back and cut the "chapters" and make final revisions as necessary. That said once the chapters are "complete" I start to work on the segue process to move from one chapter to the next.

Best time spent is a good log of footage up front...so you don't get stuck later.

Mal: If anyone gets nosy, just, you know... shoot 'em.

Zoe: Shoot 'em?

Mal: Politely

I agree with everything Harry said...

BTW Harry, after prompting by Tim Wilson, I'm writing an article on the whole transcript thing that goes back to several posts you and I exchanged here months ago. Hope you'll participate in that article...

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™


A forum host of Creative COW's Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

Wow thanks guys, great info. I'm getting into editing with my rear end facing the wrong way, so it's great to get practical advice. For some reason, it's been difficult to find really good books on the thinking behind the editing process. It's almost all technical NLE stuff.

You may have heard about the Avid ScriptSync technology. If not, you really need to check it out. It automatically links transcripts to footage - as you cut and paste YOUR TEXT in the transcript, it automatically builds the radio edit. Seriously.

Demoing this was some of the most fun I ever had -- people would actually jump up and start yelling when they saw it.

Since I haven't worked there in a long time, this doesn't count as a commercial, but at $2495 for a new copy of Media Composer, you could save yourself crazy amounts of time, no less true if you do your radio edit in Media Composer and finish the edit elsewhere. For your 200 hours you might save, what, days? Weeks?

Also, if you've got any kind of budget at all, professional transcription services cost less than you'd think.

Anyway, the current presentation at Avid.com isn't quite as dramatic as what I did on stage back in the day -- how could it possibly be? :-) -- but it's still pretty remarkable.

PS. DRW - where's my dang article?

[Michael Wisniewski] "Oh my god! I'm crying it's so good. Didn't even realize MC had that feature."

Like I said, showing this was one of the great pleasures in my career.

The feature has been around for years and years with the less-glamorous name script-based editing. It demo'd well, but was a pain to actually set up. The people who did it though -- like the folks at Arrested Development who endorse it at avid.com -- were crazy about it.

The integration of the phonetic recognition technology from Nexedia makes all the difference in the world. (Nexedia's core expertise is speech analytics - healthcare, telecom, etc. Michael Phillips at Avid was among the guys who applied the technology to something useful for film and video editing.)

The example that I was showing right before I left was from Monster Garage, where they typically worked with 400 hours of footage per episode. Open a transcript, DOUBLECLICK ON A PHRASE in the transcript, and the exact clip opened, WITH THAT PHRASE MARKED WITH IN AND OUT POINTS, ready to be cut into the timeline.

So yeah, cut up the text, cut your radio edit. That's about it.

A couple of years on, I can still only barely believe that I saw it with my own eyes, and that it wasn't demo sleight of hand. It really works, with a workflow and a price well within the reach of even small-ish productions.

Sorry, hard to shake the marketing patter...but it really is that cool.

Tim Wilson
Associate Director, CreativeCow.net
Associate Publisher, Creative Cow Magazine!

Hi Andrew,

What is a radio edit, exactly?

[Michael Wisniewski] "What techniques do you use to organize & handle large amounts of documentary footage for the editing process? Think 200+ hours or more."

Okay, there are two possibilities here.

Possibility 1. You have no clue what the documentary is about. Hence the 200 hours. Good luck. I've been there. It's just hard slogging until you find the story, and whatever technique you use, it will be a lot of work, whether you choose to view all the footage several times, make/buy transcripts, or commit to endless hours of editing. You will probably lose all perspective rapidly.

Possibility 2. You are making an exploratory documentary which requires you to gather the footage first, find the story later. The most instructive article I ever read on this topic was by the Indian writer, Ved Mehta, about the making of "Chachaji, My Poor Relation," directed by Bill Cran.

My dim recollection is that Cran shot about 40 reels of 16mm, of the usual Indian stuff: Ganges bathers, funeral pyres, the Taj Mahal. He then found his story: the interplay between Mehta's immediate family of middle-class Indians, and his "poor relation" Chachaji.

Great documentary, and it was easy to edit because all 40 reels of "typical Indian" stuff went out immediately. In just a few hours of footage they found a masterpiece.

So ask yourself: in the 200 hours of footage, did you collect anything that the world hasn't seen before, and that is worth seeing? Keep that stuff and throw out the rest. If it isn't a great documentary, then it will at least be a useful one.

Bob C

MacPro 2 x 3GHz dualcore; 10 GB 667MHz
Kona LHe
Sony HDV Z1
Sony HDV M25U
HD-Connect MI
Betacam UVW1800
DVCPro AJ-D650

[Noam Osband] "Does anything like Avid ScriptSync exist for FCP?"

Affirmative!!! I'm writing a review that's soon to be here on the Cow. The app is called GET, and it's great...

Here's the link: http://www.getphonetic.com/

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
http://www.drwfilms.com

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW's Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.