Home Video Hints: Editing 101: School's in Session (page 2)

I know your software has over 600 dissolves. I have been to many student film festivals and I have seen them all. Have they helped advance the story? Have they enhanced the work? 99% of the time they have not. Most projects primarily use cuts and occasionally dissolves and fades to black. Start paying attention to how many times films that you pay to see or get aired on television have star dissolves or checkerboard wipes. It doesn't happen often. Yes, there were funky wipes in Star Wars and organic transitions in the campy Batman television show. Use these effects only when your work calls for it, not because they are there.

This may win hands down as the biggest area of error for beginning post production people (as well as the production crew). Nowhere near enough time is spent on tweaking, improving, constructing and creating good - no, strike that - great audio. Audio is hugely underrated in the filmmaking process. Audio includes production sound, sound effects, music, voiceover, Foley (audio produced in post while watching the moving image such as drinking sounds or footsteps) and every other sound that does or does not exist in the finished product. I have heard people say that good audio enhances the visuals, but I can think of many films and documentaries where the audio made the scene or even the whole movie. Plan as much time for your audio edit as you would for the visual edit. If you are not an audio expert, find someone who is, take a few classes or buy a few books on this art form. Audio engineering can be intimidating at first, as it was for me for too many years, but the sooner you start experimenting, the sooner your videos will show the professionalism.

Video in the USA is made up of 30 still photos a second which, when played one after the other, give the viewer the illusion of a moving image. Today's software is frame accurate, something that was very difficult when I was editing on linear machines in the mid-eighties. That means you could cut a clip in thirty different places within a second. Now imagine you are shooting a talking head and after the interview you turn the camera off. The next time you rolled, you took a close-up of a speeding train passing by. Now you are editing feverishly at your desk and when you watch your rough cut you have a sense that something strange happens at the end of your interview. You can't quite make it out but there is a subliminal blip at the end of the interview and before the next scene. One possible problem is that you left a single frame of the video from the train scene after the interview on your timeline. The second situation is that you somehow left a blank frame of black or no video between the cut.

When you are zoomed out of the timeline, you can't see this error, but if you zoom all the way into the cut you will notice a single frame of something you didn't intend. I see it all the time with student projects in the edit bays. Worse yet, I see it in finished products at the festivals. Editing is an exact science. Someone can make a fair work in an afternoon but to make the same video perfect could take weeks.

A bit dramatic I know, but this was the favorite saying of a group of high school film students I taught in Northern California and it served them well. When you shoot, direct or produce a certain scene you could become attached to it for reasons other than it being a good scene. Then in the editing bay, your emotions fog your objective judgment to hit the delete button. There could easily be dozens of these "babies" in your piece making what should be a tight and enjoyable five minute finished work into a grueling forty-minute endurance test for your family and friends. If you are unable to objectively kill your babies, ask a few people whose judgment you trust to watch and criticize.