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.

Jennifer’s Story

The Testimony video I’ve been writing about, was shown at New Covenant Bible Church today! I’m so happy to have planned and worked through this project all the way through and kept the original plan in mind while going through the process. I would love to know what you think about it, so check it out…

Jennifer’s Story from New Covenant Bible Church on Vimeo.

Other Posts about this:

Testimony Video Part 1 – Audio

Testimony Video Part 2 – Directing

Testimony Video Part 3 – Shooting

Testimony Video Part 4 – Editing

Books on iPad

So at NCBC we got an iPad and were working with it a little bit.  I haven’t been impressed by it at all, and have felt that it’s kind of a waste because my iPhone can do everything that it does and I already have one of those! Well I saw this video on someone’s blog today, and my mind is a little more open to the possibilities that it has compared to the iPhone. It actually made me want to use the iPad, and I’m going to get this app today to try it out.  I would read books like this…. (O and I don’t read that often, so that’s saying something)

newcovenantbible.org 2.0

For months and months now, I have been working with Austin Spooner at New Covenant Bible Church to create a new website. We have been hard at work with Voracity Solutions to get it designed and working. Voracity designed the website, and got it all set up with NCBC’s database. I worked on the graphics on the site itself, and the video and podcasting pages. Austin and I worked hard to get it to where it is (Austin doing most of the work, I just did graphics and gave input).

Austin and I had a lunch meeting a couple of months ago, and were talking about how to promote the website, and we came up with the idea to use video. So I wrote some things down on my notepad about a couple of the key features we thought were important enough to show in a video. So I sat down to do some planning, and thought how the heck am I going to produce a video about a website? I came up with three options. One was to set up my camera looking at a computer monitor, and I would just record going through the website. The second option was to do a screen capture, and the third was to start from scratch and do the entire thing by animation. Well I didn’t like option two because I didn’t feel like I could get the resolution I needed, and the first option didn’t give me as much control so I opted for option three, to animate the entire project. So I opened up Photoshop, and began to recreate the website, layer by layer (it was nice that I had done all the graphics, because I had all of the files). Once that was complete I imported the psd file into After Effects and began to go to work. I moved all of the layers in 3D space, and built camera moves in on top of a background that I had created from solid layers and expressions. I really like the way it came out, and today I finally get to show you. I finished this project about a month ago after about 20 hours of work, and have been extremely anxious to show everyone, so here it is!

New Covenant Bible Church’s new website will be launched on April 18th so check it out! But since you’re reading my blog, I’ll give you a little tip, it’s going to be launched a few days early so be looking for it. www.newcovenantbible.org

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