February 2008

Don't Worry, We'll Save You In Post...

Well, everything's shot, and you now want to edit it.

First thing you'll need to do is get your footage onto your computer to edit.

"On the computer?" you may ask. Yes, on the computer.

Modern computers have enough power to edit, render, and add special effects to footage that would make mainstream filmmakers from even ten years ago drop their jaws in wonder. What used to take a Cray Supercomputer now can be done with something you can pick up at Best Buy or Circuit City.

And NLE software - the sanctified "Non-Linear Editing" of a few years back - can be yours for a few hundred bucks instead of the five figures you used to need to buy an Avid system.

Of course, it's what you do with it that counts, and that's what I'm going to tell you about here.

The most common way to get footage shot on digital camcorders onto a computer is by using a FireWire cable - also known as IEEE 1394 cable, or iLink. Most editing software has provisions for controlling an attached camera by the cable, rewinding it, playing and capturing the footage on the computer's hard drive, and stopping the camera when either the tape is finished or the footage ends with nothing after it.

Most analog camcorders, while lacking the FireWire output, can send the audio and video messages through the A/V outputs (the RCA plugs like on a stereo system or a VCR). If you hook up your analog camcorder to the audio and video "in" jacks on your VCR, you'll record a straight "dump" of what's on the camcorder. Great for home movies, or those vacation pictures of Junior getting dive-bombed by the seagull flock, but not too useful for editing.

There are attachments you can buy in your local computer store (again, Best Buy, Circuit City, Fry's, Micro Center, CompUSA, or whatever), that can hook up your analog camcorder's A/V jacks to your computer, digitizing the footage. I have one, an older model from Dazzle (bought by Pinnacle Systems, which was swallowed by Avid). This hooks up to a USB (Universal Serial Bus, a newer-fangled way of getting information in and out of computers) port, and the footage is digitized and stored on the computer.

There are also other ways... many are much more complicated, and if you can get them to work reliably, me 'at's off to yer, mate.

So... the footage is now on your computer, ready to edit. (However it got there.)

First, you probably want opening titles. (It's the traditional thing, you know.) Most software applications have what they call a "Titler". You select the color you want, the background (if any), and whether it's still or moving. You type in the information, and voila! The title is a "clip" in what is usually called "the bin".

Don't worry about these terms... they're hangovers from the "old days" of shooting on film, and editing with scissors and glue. A "clip" is a piece of footage. That's all. "The bin" is a place to put clips, because they had (and still have) large, cloth-lined laundry baskets with frames sticking up, from which you can hang clips you're using. The end of the clip that's not attached spools down into the bin, which is why you have the cloth lining. (Dust and scratches on the film are Not Good Things.)

You then take the pieces of footage you shot and place them in order on what is called "the timeline". The timeline starts at 0 hours, 00 minutes, 00 seconds, and 0 frames, which is shown in the following format:

00:00:00;00

The semicolon between "seconds" and "frames" is used to highlight the difference.

Now, you may have always heard that "film runs at 24 frames per second". That's quite true... for film. Video, on the other hand, runs at 30 frames per second - 29.97, actually, but we round up to thirty because unless you work in broadcast engineering, you don't need to worry much about that three hundredths of a second.

The frames counter will therefore run between "00" and "29"; when it passes "29", it goes back to "00", while the seconds counter increases by 1.

Have I confused you yet?

Don't worry, you'll get the hang of it.

Oh, and don't forget to SAVE YOUR WORK OFTEN!!!!

Put the first clip (the girl sitting on the bench) after your titles. Then put the next clip (the geek walking up) after that. Continue putting the clips in order, until you reach the end. When you put your end titles (like the stuff you see at the end of a movie, when people walk out of the theater), make sure you save your work. You can then look at what you've assembled.

<<pause>>

Kinda sucks, doesn't it?

Most first efforts will.

You need to go back to the start, and remember the editing maxim near and dear to all of our hearts: "Enter Late, Leave Early". Basically, what this means is you don't want "dead space" where nobody's doing anything important to the movie. If the girl hesitates a second before starting to act like she's crying, that second of hesitation comes out. Maybe even the first little bit of her starting to cry, too... you want it to look like she's been crying for a while.

Also, when the geek boy walks up, start your shot of him in the middle of a step. Don't make it look like he's waiting for his cue.

Don't cut things too tightly; you don't want to lose any information. Just leave enough to show where you are and what's going on.

Now, once you trim things down, it'll probably look better. This is natural. So you're tempted to just save it again, and burn it directly to a DVD to show everybody.

You should resist that temptation for now. Because there are more things you could do to make it even better.

I'll go into that in the next entry... I've been running on a bit here.

Cheers!

Al B.

After The Party's Over...

Last time, I said I'd go into more ways to make your movie better. Well, here we go... and I want to thank Peter John Ross of Sonnyboo for the inspriation. (Even though he didn't know he did it...)

I told you about basic "straight cuts" last time; one scene ends, and the new one begins. There are many effects in most editing software now that have "transitions" (a two-dollar word for a four-bit concept: cuts) like you've seen in Star Wars, or some European films, or things like that.

You don't need to play with those transitions. [I don't need to play with those transitions.] Those aren't the effects you're looking for. [Those aren't the effects I'm looking for.]

Sorry... I couldn't resist the Obi-Wan Kenobi schtick.

What you need are a few simple things... Cut On Motion, Matching Action, and Ell-Cut Audio.

No need to look so puzzled... I shall explain.

Cutting on motion is simply cutting the scene when something is still moving... Say, in our hypothetical film, you want to cut between the geekyhero running out to search for the dog, and the less-than-savory sort sitting somewhere else with a dog. As the geekyhero runs, you CUT in the middle of a run; when you bring in the next shot, of the LTS sort with a dog, start the shot on LTS doing an action.

Here's a (very poorly drawn) sample storyboard to try and show you what I mean:

 

Now, my drawing skills on the computer are something less than breathtaking, but I hope I'm getting the point across, at least.

Matching Action is showing people in one shot performing what looks like a continuation of the same action in two separate shots. Say the crying girl had received a mysterious note; she crumples it up after reading it, and throws it down onto the sidewalk. Next we see a crumpled note on the sidewalk, picked up by a hand... which is not hers, but the geek's, and he deposits the paper into a trash receptacle. This changes scene on the audience, but they don't notice as much as they might.

Ell-Cut Audio has the picture from one scene, say the one ending, overlap with the audio of the scene coming in. Say, as an example, the girl puts her head in her hands and begins to cry inconsolably. On the soundtrack you hear "I swear, you cry like a girl!" The picture changes to the geek and say, his father. The father's voice, which was over the previous shot, continues: "I never saw any real man who could cry like you do!"

There are other techniques, of course... like using something blocking the camera to switch scenes... say, a cab pulls in front of the girl on the bench, and when the cab pulls away, it's at another house, with a new character in view.

Or, perhaps, using a letter, or a newspaper, or some other thing of that sort to be the intermediate focus point in the scene shift. Say Hero writes a letter to Girl, with whom he's had a fight. He's trying desperately to make things right, and he pulls a copy of the letter off the printer, and reads it. When we pull away from the letter now, Girl is reading it.

These techniques aren't good to use indiscriminately. Just because a pinch of salt makes your soup taste better, you don't put a cup of salt in to make it even better still. Use these techniques in moderation - a pinch, or a dash, here and there, once in a while - and it'll make your film better to watch.

Okay, next time, we'll talk about distribution - for the sake of this series, we'll limit it to DVD, and YouTube/Google Video/FaceBook/MySpace. (Festivals are a topic we'll talk about at a future date... I promise.)

Cheers!

Al B.