16 January 2009
Working on other editor’s projects
Posted by admin under: Editing; Final Cut Pro .
In the last few months, I’ve cut two shorts and a TV Doc for a major cable channel. In all these instances, I wasn’t the original editor for the projects. Coming on board on another editor’s project is a task onto it’s self. Here’s somethings I learn to make the transition / work better and faster.
I usually start by creating a New Project name with the current date, this does two things. It keeps all the old editor’s cuts and media intact. It also frees me up to try new things with the cuts themselves, without worrying if I lost something.
Every editor has a different way of working, that’s a given. When you come to a new gig, you have to be able to get to the stuff / edits, shots, media, transitions fast for your client’s and producer, otherwise you will not be call back the next day.
So what I do is I spend a little time getting familar with the previous editor’s work flow. This includes where they have their footage, audio, effects and so on. If a previous editor isn’t too organize, I then go ahead and put all the stuff, in their own bins.
For Shorts and Feature films, what works best for me is the following:
I’ll create a new bin for each scene, so scene 1 bin will include all the takes from that scene. If there ins’t a lot of coverage I’ll combine a few of the scenes together in one bin. For example, Scene 1-5, has all the takes for scene one to scene five. This way, if a director / producer says, I don’t like this shot can you use another one that we shot. I can go in less then an minute and find the other take for that scene. You don’t know how many times this has saved my ass. It’s also a great way to cover you butt, when the client claims there are aditional takes of a scene they thought they shot. You can bring up the bin and show them all the stuff they shot, because people’s memory vary.
The above method works great for features and shorts but not so great on reality shows / news shows On these type of shows, they have interviews, documents, reports, images, audio files, graphs that span 5-10 different terabytes of drives or raids, systems. On these types of projects, your best bet is to use bins to store like minded stuff and follow this up with keywords and label, label, label oh did I mention label the ass of everrything you bring in to your editing app. Because on big projects like this, the Apple + F keys will become your best friend. I recently worked on this news show where we had 5 x 2 terabytes of stuff. Every day or so, the producer who had worked on this project for 5 years straight and was familiar with everything they shot in the past, would ask for another shot of a scene on the current timeline. Because the piece was shot over a five year period, the footage was everywhere on the drives and on different bins in FCP, with names like june2005adf, I’m sure this ment something to the first editor but at this point I was the 7 or 8 editor on the new news project. So, every time I had to go over a piece of footage, I would make sure each video had some keywords or it was labeled with the appropriate info.
This helps me provided a better service and get to the footage the producer / clients are looking for at a quicker pace. I hope you find this info helpful and if you have a way of working with media let me know.