Testimony Videos – Part 4 – Editing
Well it’s been a long couple of weeks working on the video Jennifer’s Story (Click HERE to see final product). The editing process went pretty smoothly.
Once all of the footage was captured (around 3 hours of footage from 2 cameras at 80GB), I lined up the clips from the two cameras on the timeline so that they would match up. The first step in the editing process for me is to go through all of the footage and take out anything that is unusable. This would be things like my voice asking questions, or mistakes that the interviewee makes, and things that could just never make it to the final project. Once I have that done I go through the audio, and get the story laid out. Take out things that aren’t relevant to the story that the final product will share (you need to find this out in your pre-production planning), and get the first rough cut done. Once that is done, I do it again, and once that is done, I do it again. I do this as many times as it takes to get the video down to a shorter version that still tells the story that needs to be conveyed. Once it’s down to around 10 minutes (usually after about 3 rough cuts for me) I bring the person I’m doing the project for in to view it. I make sure that this is the direction that they envisioned the project going, and if it is than I know I’m on target. The client usually has good ideas for things that they don’t think is important to share, so that helps me cut it down even more. Sometimes the client doesn’t like the video. I had this happen with Jennifer’s Story. I got the video down to about 10 minutes and had a viewing for a couple of pastors at New Covenant Bible Church, and they liked the first half of it, but didn’t like that second half at all, and wanted other things from Jennifer’s story in it. They had some good points that I took very seriously, and walked back into my office, put my headphones on (because when my headphones are on, I don’t get distracted with other noises in the office) and I started editing again.
One thing I do when I edit videos is duplicate my timelines after every rough cut. This is wonderful when you have to go back and redo a portion of a project or redo an entire project. It saves a whole lot of time when you need to go back and grab clips that you’ve omitted. So when I went back after the review, I duplicated my timeline and started working on the new one (DRAFT 4) (btw I always type my sequences in all caps so that I can quickly tell the difference between a clip, effect or timeline in my bins). Once my final rough cut is done, and I think the video tells the story needed, I get the audio transitions perfected. The audio in a video is the absolute most important part of the video and if it doesn’t work, then your video probably won’t work either. Sometimes I even turn off the video part and just work with getting the audio sounding good. Once that is done, I render out a timecode burn for the client to view (sometimes they come over to the edit suite for viewing as well). Once they approve the video I can work on making the video look nice.
I use cutting back and forth between a couple of cameras and b-roll to cover up my edits. On Jennifer’s Story, I pulled some of the clips into Adobe After Effects and did some effects on them. I used a couple of masks and adjustments layers to create blurs on the back of her head on camera 2, and some color correction. I’m really happy with the way those clips turned out, and during the process learned that you can really simulate a big focal distance using this technique, and I’ll definitely be doing that again.
Today was really about the edit process on testimony videos and not technique during editing in general. I’ll say one thing about editing in general and leave the rest for another post, and that is that the most important part of editing is organization. You MUST have your clips and bins organized or you could spend a whole lot of time searching for clips that otherwise you’d just be able to grab quickly. I’ll post more about this later.