Home Video Hints: Editing 101: School's in Session (page 3)

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.

This is like brushing your teeth before you go to bed: everyone knows you should do it, but few do. Then one day you have no teeth. It's the same with editing. I have gotten in the habit of manually saving every five minutes or so and saving after I complete a complicated edit. Since project files are fairly small, I also tend to periodically save new versions of my project, so I always have something to go back to if I change my mind later. This way, when the power grid goes down, you don't loose your last two hours of work and you make that looming afternoon deadline.

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