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Once you've shot your movie you're only half done; now you've got to assemble it into a coherent whole. Editing is arguably the cinematically purest aspect of the filmmaking process; no other medium, with the possible exception of radio (where only sound needs to be assembled) involves anything quite like it. The way in which you edit your movie, arguably, can shape the overall result more than any other aspect of the production. It can be a daunting process — even the best-acted and shot movie can be ruined in the editing room, and the worst saved — but it can also be a blast. Without having actors and sound guys and cinematographers to order around, or locations to secure, the filmmaker (with or without an editor) is in total control in this phase. To avoid frustration it's best to do some planning in advance. (Now, if you're making something really short with not many shots, you don't necessarily need to sweat this too hard). Though a certain amount of messing around is part of the fun, it can be really overwhelming to sit down at the editing station (or computer, or whatever) without a clear idea of what shots you want to use and what order you want to put them in. What you should
really do first is to log all of your footage. Watch all of your
tapes and reels and mark down the start and end points of all the
shots (or at least the ones you think you might want to use), and
brief notes about them, like "clean take," or "loud
truck in background." Though this is admittedly a very annoying
and boring thing to do, at least after the first couple of hours,
having these notes on hand is really invaluable and will save you
lots of time. Especially if you're paying to use the editing suite
you don't want to waste your money picking shots; and even if you're
not it's best to have an idea of what you want to use. Now it's editing time! Hurray! From this point on I'm going to assume you're working with video, or film transferred to video, because it'd be kind of impossible to discuss film and video editing simultaneously, and I assume the majority of you working on small budgets will be shooting on DV or Super-8, which is easily transferred. There are two types of video editing systems you'll likely encounter: linear and non-linear (or analog and digital, respectively). Linear editing is generally done on a point-to-point deck, such as you'll find in old university A/V departments. Non-linear editing is generally done on an AVID system or on a home computer with the resources to run Final Cut Pro, Premiere, or AVID Xpress. AVID stations are generally much more expensive than computers but they're super-pro; they won't crash and you can do real-time effects. But these are expensive to work on, and if you have a decent Mac or PC you can probably set up a usable system. Just make sure you have a decent amount of RAM — I could get into the technical specifics, but we'd be here all day. A little internet research will do you good and there's tons of user groups for these programs to answer your questions. Both ways have their pros and cons, and you'll find adherents to both, but, honestly, if you can edit non-linearly, do it. It's about 10,000 times better than working on one of those decks. Linear editing requires that you lay down one shot at a time from your source material to the master tape. There's very little room for error; if you want to move a scene around, for instance, you'll have to re-edit the entire movie from the point of the earliest scene affected onward. Who needs that kind of headache? Not this guy. To be fair, the one real advantage of linear editing is that you'll be working on a dedicated system, on tools designed for editing (as opposed to a computer, designed for a variety of purposes), and you'll never have a major crash and lose all of your work. But if you've ever edited on a linear system non-linear editing will be like a beautiful dream come true. Assuming the system you're working on has enough memory to handle it, you can really do anything; you can assemble a bunch of shots then re-arrange them right away; lay down your music and sound tracks with marvelous ease; basically, you can experiment as much as you want and Undo anything that doesn't strike your fancy. Programs like Premiere and Final Cut are relatively easy to learn, especially if you pick up one of the handbooks (as opposed to the manual). They're worth it, if you can shell out. The Visual QuickPro guide for whatever version of Final Cut you're using is something else. Although it's not intended to replace the manual, it's got pretty much everything there. So you're editing. The simplest thing you can do just to get started is to just lay down shots one scene at a time. Don't worry too much about getting the cuts exactly right — just assemble the scene roughly and see if it works. Tweak it until you've got it right, so the shots have an appropriate flow (handy tip: cutting on motion is usually a pretty good idea — just a rule of thumb, it'll prevent the scene from looking choppy). Don't worry too much about music and sound effects at this stage unless you intend to cut to the rhythm of a particular track. Once you've laid all your scenes down, watch the thing and go through it again, cutting out anything unnecessary — the first assembly will almost always go over time. This may mean removing whole shots or just trimming them down. Several "passes" like this will eventually get your project in progressively better shape. At this point you can start sticking in music and sound effects and a beautiful movie will appear before your eyes. When you're satisfied, stick some titles and credits on (either shoot them yourself or use Photoshop or your editing program's built-in titler) and there you have it, mack. TRANSFERRING YOUR ANALOG TO DIGITAL If you're interested in editing digitally but you've shot your stuff on an analog medium like Super-8 or analog video, don't despair. It's pretty easy to transfer and although you'll lose a generation you might find it's worth it. For analog video the process is quite simple. Just hook your analog video camera (or VCR, if you've shot it on VHS) to a digital video camera or deck using the RCA cables — you know, the red, white and yellow ones. Then hit record on the digital device and play on the analog one. Make sure you've inserted a tape first. Otherwise your results will be negligible. Then you can shoot that stuff right onto your hard drive with a FireWire cable or reasonable facsimile. For Super-8 — well, you can go about it a couple ways. The easiest and most expensive is just to take it to a camera place where they do transfers; they'll have a real nice set-up there and it'll look all pro. But you can just as easily do it on your own if you have a Super-8 projector, a screen, and some patience. Set up your screen and projector and run the film for a few seconds so you can adjust the focus to the appropriate sharpness. Then, set up your video camera on a tripod or flat surface directly in front of the screen. A tripod's the best because you can make little adjustments to height and angle in order to perfectly frame the image, but mine's kind of broken so I just used books and stuff to get it right. It's a little frustrating but it's do-able. The tricky part is that you'll need to use the camera's viewfinder to center the image, and viewfinders don't always show you the entire image that the camera captures. So you might have to go at it a couple of times before you get it right without a black frame around your footage (although the frame is not a bad effect if you can dig it). If you can adjust your camera's exposure, white balance and the like you'll find you can make some neat effects, like making the film look flickery and ol'-timey, or even tinted. And when you're done, you can edit it just like regular old video. Mark Slutsky
is a member of Montreal's Automatic Vaudeville and one of the makers
of upcoming comedy feature Send
Money Now. |