Yesterday
wasn't a camera lesson; it was an editing lesson, following up from
last weeks sequence shooting camera lesson. Our ultimate goal was to
piece together the sequence that we had shot earlier this week, and
learn how to edit, as we will be required to edit our thrillers that
we will be creating later on in the year. The program that we used is
called “Premiere Cut Pro”, an Adobe product that is specialised
on editing.
When we
opened up Premiere Pro, we found a bin called “Footage” - “Canon
5D” - “01”, in which we would later find our footage that we
had shot the week before. Before
we went over how to actually look at the footage, we were told a few
basic rules that we have to remember throughout editing, for things
not to go wrong. One thing that were taught was to log our film –
this means to duplicate the footage we are going to use for our
sequence, so that if something goes wrong, we still have the raw that
we can reuse and reduplicate. Another thing that we were taught was
to use the bins to our benefit – as an example, when logging the
footage, especially when working on a larger project with more than
one person, it is easier to navigate if bins are used – say I was
working on a sequence with someone else, and I decided on footage
that I think would work in the sequence, I would put it in a bin
called something along the lines of “Good Footage”, so that when
the other person edits the sequence, they would see the footage that
I picked, and so that they wouldn't have to go through every single
file to see which one works and which one doesn't; this saves time
for me and the other person in the long run. One of the last things
that we learnt, and probably the most important thing when it comes
to editing (or anything, really), is saving. Saving whilst doing your
work is so important, because when something goes wrong and you
haven't saved, it can start to look very, very, very ugly. As an
example, if you accidentally edited something you didn't want to, and
it is difficult to set it back to it's normal state – if you
haven't saved in this situation, you waste time on trying to fix
something that you had just messed up; whereas if you had saved, you
could have quit the program and started it up again, from the point
where you had saved. Another situation that is the most ugly if you
haven't saved, is when the program crashes. If you didn't save your
work from the last time you saved it, or didn't even save it at all
because it was a new edit, things get lost very easily, and a lot of
time would have gone down the drain trying to redo everything after
losing it because you forgot to save. Another important rule that
follows up from the saving rule is the rule to back-up your work in
case the file gets corrupted, or something goes horribly wrong whilst
editing. It is always a good idea to have multiple save files (so
doing “Save As” instead of just “Save”), so you can go back
to older save files in case you have to, because something went wrong
with the file and it can't be opened again, or because something was
edited completely wrong.
After
we went over the rules, it was time for us to review our footage, and
see which clips worked, and which ones didn't. We did this by
clicking on the green button that can be seen in the screenshots,
next to the long file names of the video clips. Because we only had a
selection of video clips, and because we only had to create a short
sequence with those video clips, we didn't log and we didn't sort out
our bins to sort the video clips. We would usually have to do that
before beginning to edit the clips, but this time it wasn't worth
doing the extra measure of organisation and safety.
After
having re-watched our clips, and having determined which ones we will
most likely use in our sequence, it was time to piece them all
together. In Premiere Pro, the way you cut the video is by previewing
the video, and then pressing the space bar to pause it, then pressing
“I” for “intro”, and then pressing the space bar again to
unpause it, going to the place where we want the cut to end, and
press “O” for “outro”. That way we determined our cut
sequence, without actually having cut it. By pressing on the image,
we were then able to pull the cut image onto our timeline and have
the first clip of the finished sequence ready.
After
we had cut and placed our first clip into the timeline, we had to go
ahead and add in more clips for the sequence to become complete.
Because continuity plays such a big part in how a finished sequence,
or movie, looks like, it is very important to pay attention to how
the overall image looks whilst editing it. The audience notices
continuity errors, and if the actions in between clips don't match up
quite right, it will be noticed. As an example, we had a sequence
where someone picked up a briefcase and left the scene. If the actor
(Sam) had picked up the briefcase in one shot, and then walked off
screen, and would be shown picking up the briefcase in the next shot
as well, the clip wouldn't make sense – the audience would think
that Sam had picked up the briefcase twice. Even when cutting the
clip to make it look like Sam is only picking up the briefcase once,
it could become difficult – if the actions match up perfectly, it
doesn't quite make sense. There is always this little tiny fraction
of a second that can make such a large difference to what the
sequence will look like to the audience. That is probably one of the
most difficult things when creating this sequence.
In the
end, our sequence only had two pieces of footage in total, out of 5
shots we had filmed. We only ended up using the wide shot and a
mid-shot of the briefcase as he is picking it up and walking away, as
the close-up of his face, the POV, and the mid-shot of only Sam
didn't quite fit – either it was because of continuity issues (as
an example, the close-up of his face didn't fit in the shot because
that's not what he had done in all of the other shots. It looked a
bit awkward, so we didn't end up using the footage that we thought we
would; but at least our finished product didn't look as awkward as it
would have had if we had left more than the two clips in.
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