Lessons

Lesson Info

Building a Rough Cut: The Edit

So we have all these elements, and what I want to do is I want to play the interview for you, and then we're gonna talk about how we're gonna cut it in the interface. So I'm gonna hit the Tilda key. So here everything is small in the corner, if I went to step up, this will take me back into the higher level where I can see my folders. If I want, I can can look at them as a list. It was the interviews. We'll look at the master shot, and I just want you to sit back and watch this to see what we're working with. So I wanna bring this full screen again, so I'm gonna hit the Tilda, and we're just gonna play this from the beginning, you'll get to see me do a marker thing, and then we're gonna start working with this footage. Crap in my pockets (laughs). Watch the first five minutes. Alright, we're at speed, so if you wanna give us a nice loud clap. (Man claps) There's our sync clap, for syncing up all of our camera and our aduio. So Mike, welcome! Thank you! I've seen a lot of your w...

ork, real pretty stuff. Tell me a little about your photography, what got you into photography? Like a lot of photographers, I started when I was real young. I think when I was 12 years old, my dad bought me an Argus C3, an old film camera, it was great! It was all manual, they even gave me a Sekonic light meter, and I remember walking around my little town, and had my light meter and my Argus, and it was just fascinating to me, and then getting the film back, it was just such a great learning process. With the old Argus, you had to cock it separately, then advance the film, so I got lots of double exposures, and I remember making that mistake, but I also remember how creative that could be. So when I was real young, I was into photography. As the years progressed, I just continued to enjoy it as a hobby, love photography, and then I resigned from my corporate job a few years back, actually about 12 years ago now and decided to go into photography full time. So I've been a full time photographer since around the year 2004. That's changed a lot now with digital, it's a whole new game. Oh yeah, I started with film and I have slide cabinets full of slides and I've got 'em all databased, and I've got 'em all archived, ready to go, but 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, and I thought oh my gosh, I'm never going back to film, and that was the early days of Photoshop, and digital processing raw photos, what a difference it's made. Was it that Nikon that twisted? I'm tryna think of what that model was. Yeah, what was that one? You'd go through batteries like-- Crazy. Like 16 shots, it's like new batteries. Yes, yeah. So I had one of those, and then my first Nikon DSLR, the day I bought that camera was the last day I shot film. Haven't shot a film picture since then. I know the feeling. I know the feeling. Do you feel that hold skill, that shooting manual needs no light meter, has that helped with working the digital world? Oh yeah, tremendously. There's no excuse for not understanding exposure, and everything around ISO, aperture, shutter speed, all of that still applies. The fast shutter speed to freeze the motion, long shutter speed to get motion blur, all of that still applies and I use it every single day in my business. Well aside from business, you do a lot of travel photography, actually you take people out on tours! Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah so travel photography, I've always loved travel, in fact I remember when I was young, my wife and I made a pact that we would travel internationally every single year of our life, and so we've always tried to do that, but travel photography for me, it is a business. I take people on trips around the world. I just came back from Galapagos a couple weeks ago, and the whole purpose of these trips is taking photographers to these places in the hopes of getting great photographs, and so I'm the photo guide, I'm the photo instructor, but I've set up really great itineraries for photography, so Galapagos, Tanzania, Iceland, and other places around the world. I'll be going to Cuba here in a few months as well. Very exciting. Yeah, Cuba's one of those places that everybody wants to get to before it changes too much. (laughs) I know, it's gonna change fast, and it already is. Now what are some of the unique challenges you've had when you've been on the road with photographers? Well, you've got the personalities. Y'know photographers like to think we know a lot of stuff, and so there's a lot of personality sometimes that comes with traveling with other photographers. But y'know, I deal with that with humor, (laughs) and just a good general disposition. But anymore, I think the biggest challenges now with photographers is there are so many photographers in the world, and a lot of us think that we have priority, or we should have priority access to places, so now I go to places like Iceland, and photographers are everywhere, just everywhere, and so that's an issue with the local law enforcement, it's an issue with just trying to find unique shots, it's harder to find a unique shot today then it was 10, 15, 20 years ago. So it just means we have to work harder creatively. Now I know you do a lot of large scale images. Now I'm gonna stop it at this point because there's a whole nother chunk of the interview, but my goal here was for me, listen for key things that I wanna tell the story and also see well what's superfluous? And for you all to have a better understanding of what we're working with. So what you would do is if you're working with an interview, you could write notes and say, "Oh well I really like this sound bite." And I wanna show you a couple things in the interface. On the lower left hand corner is basically where you are in the clip. For most cameras that you are working with, it'll probably start at zero, and go through whatever the duration of the clip is, and you'll see it as four digits, hours, seconds, minutes, frames of video. So you'll see that there's four numbers down there, and so you could do a paper edit, and write down, "Oh I like this sound bite." As a matter of fact you don't even need to be in some editing programs, sometimes just watching these, you can find the duration in Quicktime or whatever you're watching it with. So that's something to keep in mind, so you can write notes. You can also start marking it. And on the right side, pan over to the right side, there we go, is another set of numbers, that's the total duration of the clip, okay? Keep that in mind, because this will be useful because once you start selecting parts of a clip, or you mark an in and an out point, that number will change as that's how much time is between the beginning and the end of the section that you want, so there's two very valuable numbers for you to reference. Now the computer remembers all this, so you don't necessarily always have to, but this is something that will be very useful as you go down the line. So let's go ahead, I wanna start laying down and creating the interview. So I have the four cuts and I wanna basically work with these four images, so I'm gonna step into that folder, I'm gonna step into the bin. You'll see them referred to as bins inside the video applications. This is kind of a standard, it comes from the old film days when literally strips of film would hang over big canvas bins, and if they needed a shot, they'd pull it down. Well we still use the term bins and so I'm gonna step inside. If you double click, and I don't want you to double click, if you double click, the end result is you get this ugly floating box that just blocks your interface. So you wanna step into it, so if you hold down the command key on Mac, control key on Windows, and I click, it lets me step into this without cluttering my interface, so you don't have these things, so that's a very useful tool, holding down the command key. There is another option, you can also, I'm gonna step back up, if I hold down the option or the alt key, when I do that I want you to see what happens here, I'm gonna bring this full screen. So I have all of these tabs, but if I hold down the option key and I double click, it opens this up as it's own discreet tab. Very useful tool for organizing, I'm moving that tab over to the left so now I have a tab here, with just my interview clips, and I'm gonna look at that in an icon view, make it bigger, and I have a tab here that has the list of all my footage. So I can very easily jump back and forth if I wanna be able to dig and find something without having to like hunt and dial up and dial down. Very easy to do, let's go ahead and decide what we want. First thing we need to do, we need to make a sequence, we need to make basically the template to drop all of our stuff into. It will do that automatically if you drag a clip into it. If I drag any clip into this, it will automatically create a sequence, name the sequence after the clip, and have all of the perimeters match that clip. That's great if all of your footage is the same size, same source, but sometimes you might shoot something at a lower resolution. Like 1280, 720p would be called, or sometimes it's 1080p, all these different terms that we talked about in the first day. Sometimes it might be ultra high definition, you don't want a big ultra high definition 4,000 pixel image when everything else is gonna be smaller, so you wanna generate, for most of the time, you're a new sequence from scratch. I'm gonna undo this, command Z, control Z, same undo functions that you would use in almost every program, and under file, I'm gonna go new and I'm gonna say new sequence. And gracefully try to do that, here we go new sequence. And by the way, if you make a new document in say Word, what's the keyboard shortcut? Command N, control N. Same thing if you wanna do it quickly. A lot of these are very intuitive keyboard shortcuts. It's gonna give you this crazy confusing dialogue box, and I'm sure if you've ever opened this up and looking this you (mumbles). These are all these different flavors, their broadcast stuff, no idea, don't worry about it. You're probably gonna use, most of the time, digital SLR 1080p, that's standard high definition, okay? That's a 1920 by 1080 pixels, 30 frames a second as your default. Sometimes you might record things, films are 24, people say the film look, the film look is a lot more than shooting at a 24 frames a second, but general video that we've been seeing for years is 30 images every second in an aspect ratio of widescreen in 1920 by 1080. If you choose that, odds are that everything's gonna work very smoothly for you. That's what you're gonna wanna use initially until you can get some unique client that says , "Oh it has to be square.' Or something, not gonna go into that, we're gonna create a new sequence, and all the key thing is naming it, otherwise you have all of your sequences named sequence. Let me zoom out a little bit, so all I did was I selected digital SLR, as a matter of fact, the next time I created a sequence, it's gonna remember that was my last one, it'll always go back to that, and then I'm gonna give it a name, name's gonna be Interview. MH for Mike Hagan. And not worries about anything else, go with the defaults, it gets put inside the project file, it's not sorted in another part of your computer, it's actually in the project. It sits good here, and now I have this timeline and now when I go ahead if I bring a clip in, and let's go ahead and start the interview, and we're gonna actually mark some things and look at the interface, so all I did is I wanted to bring this first clip in. To bring a clip in from down here, I'll make this a little smaller so you can see. See this is I can do, again many things. I can double click, loads it into the Source Viewer. I can can drag it, loads it into the Source Viewer, you can even right click and there's the option to open in Source Monitor, okay? All ways to get it in. So I can see the clips, I wanna start with my master shot, then double click on it, and now we're gonna work on picking the part of the shot we want and bringing it into our show, and so I talked about transport controls earlier in the lesson. So these are the little buttons here. Instead of making this big, I'm gonna zoom in because that way the buttons will be easier to see. If I wanted to, I could hit play, and as I'm playing, you see this play hasn't moved. This is basically if this was a VCR or something where the tape had hit the tape, okay? That's the frame of that, or the frame of film I'm looking at, okay? The one image. So I can scrub through it by dragging it very quick. Space bar is play. Like 16 shots. And so what I wanna do is I wanna be able to go through this quickly. Now you can hit play, you can hit these little fast forward buttons down here, but I'm gonna have you use some basic keyboard shortcuts to start with, so if it was playing, there I could go forward a frame, I could fast forward. What I want you to do is... (mumbles) Right hand, energies the left hand, (mumbles) the left hand. Everybody argues about that. Okay, on the keyboard there are three keys, J, K, and L. J if I press it will play backwards, K will pause, L will play forwards. And my thumb is also a nice thing for the space bar. So if I hit the J key it plays backwards. If I hit the L key it plays forwards. K will stop it. Now that's nice, but let's leverage the power of this. If I wanna fast forward I could tap the L key a couple of times. So I'm hearing it at kinda a high speed, if I tap it again it's even faster, up to I think 32 or 64 times normal speed. So that's L, just multiple taps. If I do J, it does the same thing in reverse. Very quick way, and by the way these controls work whether you're looking at it in the source monitor, whether you're looking a media in the media browser, in the project panel, or even in your timeline, J, K, L, you've used it all time. It also allowed you to do some very precise skimming of your media. So if I hold down the K key, and tap L, okay? That would be forward, but I move forward one frame at a time. Very precise, if you notice in the bottom left hand corner of the screen, you can see that 26, 27, 28, 29, zero, okay? That's 30 frames a second. I can do the same thing in reverse, K and J. Going backwards. I can also scrub in slow motion by just holding down the K in combination with either the J or the L, so K and L? Slow motion, one fourth speed. Okay, gives you some very precise. So this is important, this is navigation you will constantly use and you can go through this. I also wanna point out we can hear the audio. We can see the video, but we can't see the audio. Sometimes it's nice to cut if you can see what's in audio wave form, and you can easily switch between seeing the video and seeing audio by these little icons, one that looks like a piece of film, one looks like an audio wave form, and so if I go over here, I can now see my audio wave forms. Shutter speed to get motion. So you can see exactly where a person speaks, so that's a little idea of how you navigate through this. How many people think that's pretty hard to see exactly where the person's changing their word? Exactly it is, it's very hard to see. That's because we're looking at everything, we're looking out of the whole 10 minutes. So if I wanna zoom in, I can use the plus and the minus keys on my keyboard, the plus is the equals key, some people give me a hard time about that, but the equals key and the minus key (mumbles) let's me zoom in down to the sample level, literally, and I can see this in great detail. So minus brings me back, plus brings me in, and if I zoom in and move something over here, and I jump back to video, it matches. So that's how you start navigating through the clip and picking the section you want. Now the thing is while doing a rough cut, you don't have to be super precise. You can leave things a little bit fat, okay? It has some handles on it because when you go in and do your fine cut, that's where you can trim out that extra breath or that extra word. You have the same control once it's in your sequence, and you just wanna kinda get the feel of this, the flow of this, and develop a rhythm. So what we need to do is we need to mark in and out points. So I'm gonna go back here, and I'm gonna just eyeball this, I slapped my hands together to sync my cameras if we wanna do that later, we'll look at that. So I go Mike. So I'm gonna start this here, I'm using the J and the K together, and now I'm gonna mark an endpoint. There are buttons to mark your in and out points, okay? Where I want this clip to start. It's a little left and right bracket. Don't use those, you can, but don't, because your fingers are already on J, K, and L, right? Well luckily 115 years ago, when they invented the QWERTY keyboard for a typewriter, they put the I and the O key, which stands for in and out, right above J, K, and L, and so without even moving my hand, I can find the spot, I'm gonna hit the I key, which is jut above J and K, and you see I have now marked the in point of where I want this clip to start, and it's gonna run all the way to the end unless I mark an out point. So I take a note, there's the time on the show, this is the duration of the clip, that's gonna change as soon as I find an outpoint. So Mike, welcome. Thank you. I've seen a lot of your work, real pretty stuff. I've seen a lot of your work, real pretty stuff is what I just said. We're gonna mark an outpoint, watch what happens, boom. This is five seconds, that's a good length for a shot. We'll talk a little bit later on about rhythm and whatnot. So there it is, there's my in to my outpoint, ready to bring this into my timeline. So I mark my in and outpoint an you can use keyboard shortcuts, but we're gonna drag initially, and I'm gonna just drag this clip down to my timeline and just drop it right at the left ditch. Be careful, if you go here, it will land there, and the first couple minutes of your show will be nothing. If you do that, you can always grab it and move it to the left to the wall, now that's kinda hard to see, I don't see a lot of detail, I'm pretty zoomed out on my timeline. We use the plus and minus before to zoom in to our audio wave form, same keyboard shortcuts, let me zoom in to my timeline. Now I'm zooming in, the problem is it's at the very beginning, so I'd have to scroll to see what it is. But there you can see I zoom in, and there's my clip, and if I wanted to play it, I select the timeline and hit the spacebar. Welcome. Thank you. I've seen a lot of your work, real pretty stuff. Okay, I've seen a lot of your work, real pretty stuff. We have the first clip in my timeline. Timeline is gonna be the order, I talked a little bit about this, I wanna zoom in just so you have an understanding of the tracks. You looked at this earlier. So we bring things in, there's our video, there's our audio. Depending on how it was recorded, and we'll look at this in audio, it could be a single mic, it could be both mics, if you have like a stereo camera mic on the camera, all fits into that one track of audio, that's that sound that goes with that video. If I want, if I was gonna put a title on, I might put it on the track above with a transparency channel. Okay, name, graphic, whatever, and we start building things up. If I wanted to do a cutaway of his photos, I could put it above because you don't see what's below. So we'll look at that, that compositing, we'll actually do a whole chunk on that when we look motion and animation and graphics, yes? So to get just that clip into the timeline, you dragged it from the source window into the timeline, not from the bin into the timeline? Not from the bin. So the question was I dragged from the source into the timeline, remember that horrible thing I said earlier, that there is five ways to do everything? I could have dragged it from the bin. I could also use a keyboard shortcut, and that's why it's a great question, because depending on your workflow and what you're doing, you might be able to do things in the bin, as a matter of fact, the next one I'm gonna try and drag in from the bin, and I'm gonna show you the benefits and the downsides of that. And then eventually, I started using keyboard shortcuts 'cause it's faster 'cause my hands are already on the keys, and guess what? My putting it on the keyboard shortcut is right below that J, K, L. I mean your hand is gonna get tired from just not moving. So we laid that in, I can zoom in, If I wanna play in the timeline, J, K, L, space bar, all works the same, and what you see here now in this right window is you see the visual of what the viewer sees and this is the graphical representation down the timeline, audio wave form which by the way, you can make bigger or smaller. If you can't see this well, if you hold down command and plus, or control and plus on Windows, you can it bigger and now see a little icon of that, and then if you hold down option or alt, you can make your audio bigger, so your wave forms. Very useful, very useful ways to navigate. You can also just drag. Put your mouse in there, you can use a scroll wheel, I can make this manually bigger if I want. And we'll look at some more timeline navigation throughout the course, but now let's just get some more clips into play. So we have our first clip, I wanna see the whole clip, so I could hit the minus key. Now I see my space, and if I wanted to cut to me, now I can in here, double click, I'm gonna pick up where I start talking again, cut to a close up of me. He even gave me a Sekonic light meter. Using J, K, L. So Mike, welcome. Thank you. I've seen a lot of your work, real pretty stuff, tell me a little bit about your photography, what got you into photography? (sped up gibberish) Real pretty stuff. Make an in point with the I key, found the in point, I'm gonna hit play again. Tell me a little bit about your photography, what got you into photography? In and out, you see it's down there. If I need to zoom in on this a little bit, I'm using the same plus and minus keys, it's not zooming my image, it's just letting me look tighter on the timeline instead of having to see it like this, I'm just looking at that small chunk, easier to navigate, easier for you to see. Plus or minus it's easy, just remember that. And so I'm gonna now mark an outpoint, the O key, right above. Now I have that clip, so I marked it here, because I marked it here, it should also be marked in my bins, so I could grab it in, and you notice if I just drag it across, so you could go through it and mark a lot of it in outpoints, and bring it in. Remember, if I let go here, it lands there. I want it next to it so I don't have a flash frame. By default it will snap like magnets to the previous clip. If that doesn't happen, you've turned off something called snapping. Guess what the keyboard shortcut for snapping is? S, so I just hit the S key, and it turned off snapping and now, I can, it doesn't lock in and I could accidentally ride it over. There are times when you, I hit the S key to turn it back on again by the way, and just so you can see visually. Remember I said it's like a magnet? On, off, mkay? So if you see that it's not snapping, you can turn it on. Sometimes when you're working with audio, you don't want it to snap to the wall, so you'll turn it off, but most of the time for video you want it to snap to you have those spaces, yes. So I"ve noticed now you've basically pulled two clips, two in and out points that are totally adjacent to one another in your original video, why would you do that? Well in this case, I'm switching cameras. So I want this for visual variety, so a lot of times we just wanna change things up. Now the whole point of editing is A to keep your audience interested, and for them not to see the edit. Ideally you don't want them to feel the editing, you want them to enjoy your show. So it's just visual variety, if I was talking to the crowd, to the whole audience, I would go like hello! But then if you asked a question, I would look at you, I would be now a close up, and you would be a close up to me. So we're trying to recreate that and that's why we would cut there, and y'know the wide shots, not as interesting. We wanna see, introduce, the two of us to establish the shot, now introduce the person doing the interview, and then we're gonna cut to Mike. Now I may eventually trim out part of my question, and I also will probably trim out part of his answer, I'm not gonna use the whole interview, I'm gonna use selected chunks to tell a specific story. Actually I'm very interested in his travel adventures, and I have footage for that, so I'll probably cut a whole chunk about his early camera time, and then I didn't even play it for you when we talked about panorama because I wanna tell a specific story, and when I was watching the video, I was saying okay, this is a really good little sound bite and I have video to cover it, this is a good sound bite, have video cover it, it's like he repeats himself here, so I know I wanna remove it, and that's what we're trying to do with this initial rough cut, just bring things in and start to tell that story. These are called, they can be called either insert or overwrite edits, at this point I'm just dragging it in, it's placing it next to each other. But I'm gonna go ahead and show you just a couple of other ways that you can bring this in. Again, I'm throwing a lot of keyboard shortcuts at you. You don't have to memorize them all, there will be a shortcut sheet and we're gonna show you where you can even find it from Adobe, but remember that plus and minus? Well if I use shift plus and minus, it actually lets me toggle shift plus, I get to see everything bigger, shift minus smaller. This is just a nice, quick shortcut set, I wanna see more detail, I wanna see less detail. Works for all the lines, so I just brought that down so you could see it better, we're gonna get a mic talking, again to load it in, double click, and we're gonna do this quickly because we'll clean it up later. Your photography, what got you into photography? Like a a lot of photographers I started when I was real young, I think I was 12 years old, my dad bought me an Argus C3, old film camera, it was great, it's all manual, even gave me a Sekonic light meter. I remember walking around my little town, and have a light meter. So that's kinda nice, had my light meter, I wanna bring this in and I wanna start using really controlling this without always having to drag it down. If I have the play head part, and I hit one of these buttons here, insert or override. We're gonna use the override button now, and so it doesn't matter because there's no other video there. The keyboard shortcuts for those are comma and period. Okay, overwrite the period kids, it's right below J, K, L. So if I hit the period key right now, it looks like we lost what we did, we just need to zoom out on our timeline. Minus key would do that. If you wanna quickly zoom out on your timeline, the backslash key. If you hit the backslash key, it shows you your whole timeline all at once. If you hit it again, it goes back to the same view you had before. So those of you who use backslash, I use a lot. Okay it's right underneath the delete key, above the return key. Okay, so I see this whole thing, it put the clip where that play head was parked. It had to know where do I wanna put it, since I didn't drag it, it put it where my play head was parked. So I'm gonna hit undo and this is an important concept to get, if I hit undo and I move the play head now to the beginning or the end of the clip, and I can do that very easily. I could drag it, but unless you turn on a preference that says snap the play head to the end of the clip, it won't snap to it. I'll show you how to do that in the next lesson. For now, the up and down arrow key jumps you between edit points. Very, very useful, so if I hit the up key, I go backwards to my edit points, down key I go forwards. So now I know exactly where I wanna be. Now if I go ahead and I hit that period key, puts the clip exactly where I want. Okay, so the play head is the default of where your clip's gonna go in. Now that I've made that rule, it's time to break that rule. Because we've learned marking in and out points, I'm gonna hit undo. So if I mark, if I move my play head here and I mark an endpoint, the endpoint play cards, I was gonna call it spades, but it's bridge, you have a trump card, right? It beats everything. So that takes the place of where the play head is, so I've marked an endpoint, we can see it's right there. I don't care where this is, as soon as I hit that button to overwrite the period key or this, it puts it where the endpoint is. So an endpoint supersedes the play head. So just something to remember. So a lot of times the play head usually jumps to the end of the clip as you put it in, so if I'm editing quickly, it works very nicely. I hit undo, I'm gonna bring this in. Gonna remove my endpoint. I and O is in and out, there's an optional way to remove it. Take a guess what the optional way to remove an in and outpoint is, an optional way to remove the in and outpoint. Maybe it's an alternate way if you're on Windows. Option I option O removes the in and the out, so if I wanna do that, option I, in point's gone, so now I don't have to worry about it, move my play head to the beginning, clip is selected, bring it in, you'll notice the play head now comes to the very end. Ready for the next one to come in so I don't have to keep worrying about it. So if I don't wanna go in and mark ins, and ins, and ins, I'm just slugging a bunch of clips in for an interview, that is a great way to do it.