Editing

For our film since I am an editor I've faced a lot of difficulties going through this process. Before college I had only edited one short ski video that I made with a crappy JVC camcorder I had gotten for my birthday. It had an amazing zoom so that was the sole reason I bought it. That movie was cut on     I-movie and I thought I was the best in the world. Little did I know what I had in store when I came to Ithaca college. I started editing on Avid Media Composer last year in Intro to Field Production. I picked up very quickly but I am still learning a lot tricks of the trade and workflow technique.

This semester I started to use Final Cut Pro for an ICTV show "Life and Death" and Adobe Premiere CC for Fiction Field Production. Last year in Intro we always recorded audio right onto the camera so there was no worries about syncing up audio. This year for Falling High syncing audio up was somewhat of a challenge sometimes the camera audio was turned off and I had to go off of the way the actors mouth was moving and other times we had no slate. In the editing software, I learned to use the wave lengths to sync the audio up and this seemed to speed the process up. The labeling process of clips was also a very frustrating thing when the shot didn't start with the slate or there was no slate at all however I learned to work around these obstacles eventually.

This is my editing set up in premiere. For the most part I used the arrow tool and drag the clips to their desired lengths and used the blade to cut off the access fat. In the top corner you can see my project tab and numerous sequences. Every time I opened and started to edit again I would create a new sequence so that if a mistake was made I could go back to a clean slate without any trouble. This was a useful technique to use and it took a load off of my back stress wise. I hope to start learning more shortcuts on the keyboard so that the editing process happens with a bit more ease. 

There are still hundreds of things I need to learn in the realm of editing but this project really helped me hone in on some skills that will help me in the future. I hope to use Avid more next semester for my Non-Fiction project since Avid is the media standard for now I will continue to use the easy program of Premiere.

A Mistake I Will Never Make Again

For the past month I have been capturing footage for a demo that I have been making for my future employer, Forever Wild Outdoors. This company is an outdoor production company with a focus on hunting and fishing. There are currently 4 outdoor related networks on television today and for me to combine my passion and my career in one is a dream. Each network has a different price that it requires each show to pay in order to get on the air. For the top two channels, Versus (which is changing to the NBC Sports Network on January 2, 2012) and The Outdoor Channel, the fee is in upwards of $200,000. These are the top two channels and they have both converted to HD format this past year. The other two channels, The Sportsman's Channel and the Pursuit Channel, have significantly less expensive fees which range from $35,000 to $75,000 depending on the quarter your show airs.

I am creating this demo to send out to sponsors in order to obtain support from different companies, so that these upfront massive fees do not have to come straight out of pocket. Unfortunately I ran into a problem during capturing footage that I hope to never do again.

Everyone knows that when you are going to capture footage from MiniDV that you have to reset your scratch disks to the proper folder you are saving your final cut project file too. Unfortunately because I was in a hurry to get going yesterday I remembered this "day 1" fact half way through my capturing process. I then figured if I just grab the folders that Final Cut puts in each scratch disk folder from the place where it began saving and put it on my hard drive that this would allow the files to be online. However when I tried working on my home computer, they became offline.

I don't know if anyone has run into this problem, but I figured I would share what to do to fix this and save you some valuable time instead of recapturing everything. The main issue with the files being offline is that Final Cut was looking for the scratch disk folder was on the Park computers desktop that the first half of my files were saved too. Of course I didn't have this folder on my hard drive, only the folders inside of it. The first step you need to do is find the clips that were captured within the folders, and they are split up in the capture scratch folder and the audio capture folder. Once you find these files, the next step is to reconnect them. In your project bin, highlight the files that are offline and right click and select reconnect media. In the window that pops us select search and a window will pop up that allows you to find the spot where your files are.

Once in the folder where your video files are select the first one and press connect. This should reconnect the video portion of your files, but they will still appear offline inside of your project bin. This only means that the audio is offline. When you drag the video portion into the timeline the video will be fine to render and work with but not the audio. In order to get the audio online you do the same process as before only when you search for your files again you will find them in the audio capture scratch folder. Select the first one again and select reconnect and this should reconnect each clip you previously rendered fully.

This was a very confusing process, but the way Final Cut handles the saving of each project, I have now realized how beneficial it is. My advice for myself and anyone with this same problem, is to first off always reset your scratch disks, and secondly if you make this mistake to always know where each clip your are capturing is located in each scratch disk folder that way if anything like what happened to me ever happens, the process of reconnecting your files can be easier than recapturing everything all over again.