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Lesson Info

Building a Rough Cut: Edit Points

So as you can see, it goes right to the end of the last clip. So you can just slug those in. You can just keep marking ins and outs, bringing things in, building the rhythm, building the story. And then you can start manipulating it. Now I'd mentioned something earlier. I said there's an insert edit and an overwrite edit, and I wanna clarify what that is. Let's say I was doing this and I wanted to be able to squeeze in a soundbite between my question and maybe another answer. Maybe something from later on. So I wanna literally insert it into that space. Well, I'm gonna zoom out of my timeline a little bit here. Make sure that pane is selected. And I could go ahead and move that down, put the clip in and then close the space. Time consuming but it works. What would be easier is to be able to let the computer automatically let the software automatically do that. So maybe I'll go to a wide shot and for our purposes now we'll go to that over-the-shoulder shot. I'll just pick something arbi...

trary. ...it's full of slides and I've got them all databased and I've got them all archived ready to go, but once digital came, I remember- Once digital came. I'm gonna leave it a little bit (mumble). We're gonna trim it later. ...once digital came I remember the day I got a Nikon. It was a Nikon digital camera and I started taking my photos with that camera I thought, oh my gosh, I'm never going back to film. Nice little sound bite. So just marked an in and an out point. We can, did I actually hit the out point in my enthusiasm? (Mumble) and digital processing I thought, oh my gosh, I'm never going back to film. And that- So there's my output. So what I wanna do is I want to put it in between these clips. So I'm gonna use that up and down arrow. Finds right to the edit point. So to do that I do an insert edit. We've been doing overwrite edits. And an insert edit is next to the period. It's the comma key. And think of it this way: I'm wedging in between two clips. That comma's like a wedge. Okay, there's a button if you don't remember. It's up here in our transport controls. But I'm a big fan of that so as soon as I hit that, you'll notice it's put the clip in and it pushed this clip further down the timeline. So now I was able to get it in all with one step and instead of having to move things around and close the space. Same effect but one step. Once digital came I remember the day- So I asked him a question, Your photography, what got you into photography? And then he goes well once digital came I never looked at analog again. And I left it a little heavy. I left a little (mumble) because that's what we're gonna fine tune in the next lesson. So that's an insert edit. Now the thing you need to be careful about with an insert edit, if I had my play head parked in the middle of a clip and I did an insert and I'm just gonna insert the same clip again. If I hit that comma key or if I hit the button it just cut my clip in half. That can be good or that can be bad. Maybe you have somebody talking about something and you wanna cut to another shot that they're talking about and you just wanna put it in there. That's good. Just be careful. Know where your play head is before you do an insert. And also know if you have an end point mark 'cause if you have an end point marked, even if I parked the play head in the right spot, remember we learned that just a few minutes ago, so I'm gonna mark an endpoint. But even if my play head is between these two clips when I do that insert, I'm gonna use the comma key again, it goes exactly where the end point is, not where my play head is. So that's an insert edit. Now we've been doing overwrite edits and it really doesn't matter because there's been nothing on the timeline. So an overwrite edit is exactly what it sounds like. It writes over what's on that track and replaces it. So let's say I didn't want any of this answer here. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and hit a couple of undos. So instead of inserting it, I don't want this anymore, I'm gonna do an overwrite edit, that's the period key. It's the same thing as if I dragged it down onto the timeline on top of the clip and let go. It just obliterated everything underneath it for the duration of my in and out point. Okay, I'm gonna hit undo. I could do the same thing again with the period key. So it doesn't move it down. It just replaces it. Now remember, I said this is non-destructive. Okay, our original media is okay. If for some reason I go, oh my gosh, I didn't mean to do that you can always undo. Matter of fact you can hit 20 undos. You have a history. It's okay. But let's say I don't notice that till later. I'm gonna delete and remove this. I could just grab it and stretch it back out and bring it back. Or find it again and put it in. But I do want you to realize that if you do an overwrite it does replace whatever the track that is targeted. And we're gonna talk about track targeting on the next lesson if you wanna say, put B roll on the second track. Which leads me to B roll, which was a question we had at the beginning of the lesson. What it is. So a lot of times instead of obliterating what's below to put a cutaway in, I could put it above because it's blocked. Again I use the example of you're in a tall building. You're looking down. First floor, full frame. Second floor, maybe it's a picture in picture so think of it as a smaller room that you can see part of the atrium of the hotel but now you have the room and then maybe there's a sign on top and that's like maybe your lower third. So you stack things on and whatever's transparent you see the floor below. And whatever's solid, it stacks above. Just like Photo Shop for those folk who work with layers in Photo Shop. So let me go ahead, bring in a piece of B roll as an example. I'm gonna go ahead back here to my first row because remember I have all these slides here. And I'm gonna pick an arbitrary picture. Beautiful picture here. And if I want to I can just grab that and drag it onto this second track. Instead of dragging it here to obliterate I'm gonna put it here to cover up this edit. One of the reasons we might use B roll is to either emphasize part of the story or to hide the fact that maybe we chopped up a sound bite to pull out some ahhhs and ummmms and we need to block it. So I put it on the second layer. I'm gonna go ahead and hit play. Your photography, what got you into photography? Like a lot of photographers- So I still hear the audio. Like a lot of photographers, I started when I was really young. I think- Okay so that's what B roll is. And you can start creating a storyline on that second track of maybe a lot of photographs that are shot or maybe some video, that underwater footage. So that's what B roll is. And sometimes if you're doing effects and transitions you may have things even on layers above. As a matter of fact, if something to the effect of, there's over 50 tracks. There was a number but it was something I just didn't need to remember. If you're using more than 50 layers in a video you're probably not doing things right. You're stacking too high. So that's an important thing to note. The audio is not affected but you can have multiple layers of audio also work with that. So that's B roll. And if I wanted to say add another photo. This nice photo here, I could again bring that in. And now we go from this photo to that photo. And we'll learn how to put transitions in so I could start building this cutaway track very easily and we'll also learn how to finesse or refine that. As a matter of fact, if I go to my B roll again, we're gonna go here to hard to see. This is when Texlit gets real small. You can't see what you're seeing here. There we go. We have our interview clips. What did I do with my B roll? Did I not import this? Well guess what? We'll jump back over here to our media browser, we'll step up, we'll find a B roll, lost it there, too. Oh wait, that is my rough cut. There's my media browser. There's my B roll. Go ahead bring this in. Import. Did I put it into my sound effects folder? Yes I did. So I wanna put this in. It's video. I'm gonna pick a nice little clip again, JKL. Manta ray, mark an end point. Mark an out point. I can drag it there. We have our video. An Argus C3, an old film camera. It's great. Of course he's not shooting this with an Argus C3. Maybe a Nikonos for those people who used to use underwater diving stuff. But as you see you can put stills or video very easily. I dragged it. If I wanted to use the keyboard shortcut I would need to tell it what track to go on. So I would click here and I would say the video source should go to this destination, okay? Target, destination. We'll be exploring that some more. Now if I go ahead and I hit a button. Let me delete this. My play head there. I do the overwrite. It goes onto the second track. So that's how you can control. If you're just doing a bunch of B roll and you wanna use keyboard shortcuts just say I'm targeting the second track. If I didn't do that, if I targeted the first track, it goes to the first track. So that's they key. This is gonna be where you're sending it to. The right side is once it's inside. And we'll look into that track controls later. So that's adding B roll very useful, again you can as long as you have media make things longer or shorter. We'll look at that. And what I wanna close out with is give you a little more control doing something called a three-point edit which we'll be using a lot. And this is a situation, we've actually been doing three-point edits. You just didn't know it. Because we've been marking one and two points here, and the third point has either been the play head or the in that we marked. So if you wanted to be very precise and I'm gonna go ahead and just select all these and delete them. And I'm gonna say you know what? I want this edit to start at that point and end at that point. Okay? It has to be this duration. I don't care how long this is. Well, I marked an in and out. I only need three points. I only need it in here. If I have an out it's gonna give me a dialogue box and say what do you really wanna do? So let me do it without it first. So we learned we can I and O, in and out, option I, option O removes the out point. What did I do wrong? I had the wrong window selected. Sure. I could look at it all day long, but unless I move my mouse there it's not gonna do the right thing. Option O, no out point. So now if I do an overwrite edit, the duration of this whole, which I can see right here into my out point, will fit there. I'm gonna hit that button. What'd I do? Wrong track. I love undo. Especially when teaching. Try that one more time. Hit the period button. Boom. So the duration was defined by here and it just figured out the math. So that's a three-point edit. 'Cause there's a lot of times it's like what's important is the duration of the timeline. Have to fill a certain sound bite versus the duration here and I don't wanna tweak it. And just to finalize that, sometimes I don't mark an end point, I mark an out point because I want the scene to end so I'm gonna go back here and I'm gonna find a spot here where we have the end. I care about the end of the shot so I'm gonna mark an out point. Don't really care about the end point. So let me go option I and I want this to end when he's talking. So I'm gonna hit an O point in my timeline. Don't want the I. Option I, make sure there's no end point, okay. No end point. Now when I do that period key or this button it back times it to where the end point is and of course what did I do? I marked an out point here. I forgot an out point there. Forgot to mark any endpoints. So it defaulted to use the end point at the very beginning of my timeline. Let me do that correctly. So now I'm gonna go ahead. Boom. I've back timed it so the shot ends when we're on the closeup of the bird. So what I did is I, you can choose. You choose three of the four, it figures out the math. If you choose all four and we'll end with this, if I choose four points, I'm gonna hit undo, so I'm gonna do an end point here, an in and out here. If I go ahead and do that it's gonna say wait a second. Are you sure? What do you really wanna do and it says what point do I wanna ignore? Ignore the end point in my source clip or the out point? Ignore the end point in my timeline, or the out point. Or, and we'll look at this in a whole 'nother lesson, do I wanna speed up or slow down the clip to fill that space? Okay, so you'll get this box if you ever hit four points. You haven't done anything wrong. It just causes you to do an extra step.