Home Video Hints: Shooting to Edit - 5 Tips for Success

Mark Bosko
Special Issue 2000

Just as with any art form, mastery of the basics propels the artist to move forward. The artist is driven to advance to the next level of the craft. A watercolor painter looks to oils and canvas. Web designers start noodling with flash pages. Short-story authors think of novels. Heck, even Karaoke singers begin the search for back-up bands. You may start by editing the bad shots out of your home videos, but soon you'll begin to shoot with the edit in mind. Learn to shoot video with the mind of an editor and editing will be faster, easier and more fun.
What does shooting have to do with editing, you ask? Let me explain. Sure, you can continue to shoot in exactly the same manner in which you are accustomed. That is, if you don't mind taking up residence in the nearest loony bin. Suffering endless hours of hair-pulling frustration in the editing room can get to anyone. You see, editable raw footage possesses different demands than random raw footage. And, to make life simpler, you'll want to shoot to prepare for the process. It's not like you'll have to alter your methods drastically. Just some minor readjusting (as the following tips point out) will get you shooting edit-friendly video in no time.

1) If you are only going to glean one tip from this article, please, make it this one. You may think you are doing yourself a favor by keeping shots tight and quick. Your argument: there will be less footage to wade through when it comes time to cut the whole thing together. That makes sense. The problem with this logic, however, is that you'll need some room to make edits. At the least, run an extra five seconds at the beginning and end of every shot. Ten seconds is even better. Why?
Suppose a sequence in your video starts with a man in his apartment, cuts to him leaving the building, then shows him entering a parking garage with a final shot of his car driving away. When the camera moves from inside the apartment in the first shot to outside the apartment in the second shot, you'll want some time to make the edit "feel" right. This careful matching or overlapping of action means the editor needs some extra tape to play with the edit points. It is amazing what a second added or removed from the beginning or end of an edit can do to the look of a cut. With shots containing conversation or synched audio, this becomes even more important. Cutting immediately after the words fall out of a person's mouth is very awkward. By recording only the action of the shot, you eliminate options. Not a good thing when it comes to editing.

2) Give yourself a safety net in the editing room by having more than one choice. Whether you're working on an instructional, corporate, educational or other long-form, structured production, or making a fake commercial for fun, you'll want to shoot several takes of the same shot while you can. Nothing is worse than discovering during the edit process that a much-needed shot is ruined by a glitch in the tape, an unnoticed noise in the background, lighting problem or other, non-correctable gaffe. In that situation you have two options. Use the bad shot or set everything back up (which is an embarrassing, and sometimes expensive, task) to record the shot a second time. One-take wonders are just that - a wonder.
Obviously, shooting multiple takes isn't always possible. Try talking a bride into walking down the aisle a second time. Or getting birthday partiers to yell "surprise" again. Even in controlled shooting situations, such as during the production of a training tape, time and patience often run short. The suggestion of a second go-round may not fly. Which leads us to the next shoot-to-edit tip.

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