Home Video Hints: Editing 101: School's in Session

Morgan Paar
March 2004

How do you carve an elephant out of marble? Easy, get a block of marble and chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. How do you edit three hours of raw footage into a digestible three-minute finished piece? No problem, take out all the bad stuff. Here's a short list of techniques and "bad stuff" to look for as you sit in the edit bay.

All right, this is more of a shooting technique than an editing tip, but chances are you are shooting as well, so I included it (and if you are not, make sure your cameraperson covers this). Heads and tails, or what some editing environments call handles, are amounts of tape recorded before the action starts and after the action stops. I usually record at least five seconds on either side. You really want these, especially if you are going to use a fade or dissolve before or after your clip. For example, if your subject starts talking as soon as you hit record, you won't have ample footage to fade in from black. When shooting, I hit the record button on the camera and announce "Tape rolling" and then watch the time code on the LCD monitor advance five seconds before yelling "Action!" After the subject has finished speaking I wait an extra five seconds before declaring "Cut."

Organization is extremely important, much more important than you might think. With today's huge hard drives and your own ambitious creativity, you can easily be working with hundreds of media files (video, audio and stills), even on a short project. As I go through my source footage, I organize all my clips into bins with keywords (for searching) and I use the color codes and the "good" check box option that Final Cut Pro has put in its Browser window. All advanced editing programs come with some sort of organizing tools and you would do well to check them out. When you want to find that great quote buried in 30 hours of raw footage, you'll be happy you took the time to use them.

This is an expensive fix to a serious problem, but it should be on top of your equipment wish list. You need to see your video as it will be viewed and the picture on your computer monitor is not what it looks like on a television. Every professional edit bay has a video monitors for a reason. In our editing, we'll use a video monitor to examine the color, watch for interlacing problems and to check the masking. The best solution is to get a professional production monitor, but if you don't have $700 or so, a simple NTSC color television is certainly better than nothing.

Finding a desired rhythm was the best lesson I learned from three years and $60,000 worth of graduate film school. I was editing my first short on a Media 100 system when the director of the program noticed my creative struggle. He pulled up a chair and without explanation he tapped the space bar, starting the play head on the timeline. He then simultaneously tapped his foot, his finger on the desk and his head for eight beats and tapped the space bar again. He said, " That is where you cut." Rhythm has as many different definitions and techniques as there are editors. Observe the rhythm in other works and find the rhythm that works for your creative style and for the piece you are working on.

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