Lessons

Lesson Info

Refining Your Edit: Making Cuts

We're sitting here trimming, we learned the basic trim tool. We learned how to remove something. There's a lot of different ways that you can trim. Let's go ahead, we'll take a look at that edit. Real pretty stuff. Tell me a a little bit about-- So this is where we start getting in the aesthetics. Where it's like, is the rhythm right? Did I leave too long of a space? And this where you just you see an editor like in a movie or something, like they're playing it over and over again. It's to see and feel the rhythm. It's all about feeling actually with editing. It's kind of like music. I learned percussion, I was a drummer when I was a kid. Well actually I was a little out of beat, so it really didn't help me much. (laughing) But you think of, you're building something, and you want it to ebb and flow. And so is there too much space for me to ask the questions that I didn't feel like I waited too long? So again I might want to trim that, and I want to show you another way. I could go ahe...

ad and just do this by trial and error. But I could also look at my audio waveforms, and I'm gonna just slide this over so I can see where I start talking. And that's a very useful way for me to say, you know something, I want to tighten this up. So I want to trim that. But I'm really tired of doing through all these steps, okay? I did a trim, I had to select the space, I hit delete to close the space. No it doesn't sound that long until you do that 40 times in a row. So like you have a ripple delete and a delete key, you have a ripple trim option which will allow you to trim and close the space at the same time. It also you to extend something longer if it runs into a wall. I want to show you a problem. If I wanted to extend this with the regular trim tool, easy to make it shorter, right? If I try to extent it, it doesn't let me go any further to the left because it hits another clip, okay? So if I want to do that, what am I gonna have to do? I'd have to move everything down. Bring it out, and actually I just did something very bad, because downstream I just pushed this clip onto this other clip and overwrote something. So here's what you want to do. Undo that, zoom in here. Is you want to do what's called a ripple trim, and the trick is if you hold down the command key, or the control key on Windows, you'll notice that this changes from red to yellow. And now this is a ripple trim tool. You can also go over here and if you hover, we have ripple edit tools, okay? So you could hit the B key and have it permanent. So if I'm over here and I hit B, now I'm always in this ripple tool, okay? So it's you know, choices. I'm gonna do a lot of ripple trimming, and I want you to see how it works. So it's yellow, that's the first thing. And then as I pull this, I see where the audio, where I'm starting to talk, and as soon as I let go, it's going to make the trim and close the gap. So now if we go ahead and play this, we'll see how our timing feels. Real pretty stuff. Tell me a little bit-- So that feels a little better. And you know what? We're talking about aesthetics here. So it sounds good, but look at this. Real pretty stuff. Tell me a little-- When you cut, you want to hide the cut. And the trick is you want to cut on action or movement. If you're in a wide shot and then you cut to a closeup and nothing happens? They feel it. But if we did this cut as I'm turning my head, you're focused on the action and you don't feel the edit. An instructor in college gave me some of the best advice I ever had for editing. And that was if your audience anticipates the cut, you're too late, okay? So you should cut just before they anticipate that cut. Because then they won't see it. Otherwise you've been on the shot too long. And the other thing with action, let's say I'm cutting from a wide shot to a closeup. If I'm moving my arm, I can be in the wide shot here and the closeup here, and the brain will fill in that space. You can actually delete some of the movement and it fills the space. Again another great instructor I had in college. He worked with a lot of the great directors who cut all these dance films. You know the Gene Kelly stuff way back in the day. And they said, "Well what's the trick of editing this stuff? "You know it's really hard." "Not really, if somebody's spinning, "you don't have to show the whole spin. "They can start spinning and then they pick it up "later and the spin and our brain "fills in that missing area." So it's very easy to do. So err on the side of tightening and removing some of the action. Where you really get caught is if you repeat action. And that is if the hand's going up, and then on the next shot it's not quite in the same spot. You know you see that repeat action? It's okay if you're blowing up buildings in a Michael Bay movie and you see 17 angles of the same building going, (explosion) but in most of the things we want to do, you want to get that aesthetic feel of fluidity. And that's part of what we're working on in this lesson, is building that fluidity and the tricks that you would use. So this is pretty good, I might tighten it a little more. But I got it on the turn of my head, I could probably do a little bit of the later one. But let's go to the next one, see what the problem is. Let's see how we could do the solution. Like a lot of photographers, I started when I was real young. So here's the deal. I put this is in in the last lesson when he's talking about, you know, he's using this great old Argus camera, which you've got to search on the web, it's a classic. For 30 years it was the defacto 35 millimeter average person camera with all the dials and whatnot. Argus C3. But that's great for telling a story, but I'm pushing his other video, so I want to cut out a big chunk here. So let's see where we want to come back in. Tell me a little bit about that. So here we go. Even gave me a Sekonic light meter. Well aside from business, you do a lot of travel-- So I want to come in on you do a lot of travel photography, and I want to just cut everything else out. So there's a couple ways I can do that. If it's a big chunk I could just go through and do all these little clips. But what if I had like four or five or six clips that I wanted to do all at once and close the space? There's something called a lift edit and an extract edit. And I just want to tell you, not to confuse you but, these are all tools you have. And here's the deal, you may not remember them all today. You may not remember them tomorrow. You don't have to. At one point you're gonna say, "I need to do something, "and I vaguely remember Abba telling me "there was a way to do it." Look back at the video, search the web, you know somewhere in your brain there is the word lift and extract edit, and it might solve your problem. And that's true of everything that we're gonna cover. So it's a little bit of a fire hose, but I want you to at least have the skillset. So, where do I want to go out? Real pretty stuff. Tell me a little bit about-- Real pretty stuff, probably. Real pretty stuff. So I'm gonna mark an endpoint after real pretty stuff. Gave me a Sekonic light meter. Well aside from business. Gonna mark an outpoint. So I marked this on my timeline. You do a lot of travel photography-- So I really just want to just remove this whole chunk, and there are little buttons here. So we were using the little buttons here before, right? That affects the clip in the source. The little buttons here affect everything on the timeline. Okay? There's your play, there's marking in, marking out. Going backwards and forwards. We're doing that with keyboard shortcuts, right? J K and L. But there's also two buttons here. Those are my lift and my extract buttons. Let me zoom in so you can see those a little better. So we have lift, that's the semicolon. And then we have the extract, and that's the colon. Now guess what? You don't have a keyboard in front of you. But if you look right next to J K and L, colon, semicolon. You still haven't moved your hand. J K and L, I O, comma period, semicolon colon. Pretty pretty logical. So we have the lift and we have the extract. I'll do the lift first. So this works not by selecting the clip, but by marking an in and out point in your timeline. So once I have the in and out point marked, if I go ahead and hit the semicolon, it removes everything between the endpoint and the outpoint. I want you to file something away, because we're not gonna get this deep in the course. It will affect any track that you see a blue selection. So if I had an image, and we'll probably get to it much later, on two, it would remove two, but if this was turned off, it would only extract from that one line. You have a lot of granular control if you need it. Most likely everything is gonna be turned on in most of your cases. Just wanted you to be aware if for some reason you're trying to do an extract of a lift and it's like, why is it working on one but not on two? Because you accidentally turned off something on this track. So for instance, undo, I'm turning off track one. A lot of easier when I show you what I'm actually talking about than just talking about it. So that controls what it affects. So generally you want these all on. But by turning it off it says, ignore that track. Ignore what I'm doing there, I don't want to mess it up. So that's a lift, makes sense. So what do you think an extract is gonna do? Yes, exactly. It's gonna close the gap. It's gonna do that same ripple thing. So the extract, it's the second button. Or if you move your pinkie a little bit over from the semicolon to the colon. Go ahead and make sure there and we're gonna hit colon. Did I just change my in and out point? I bet I did, yeah I did. Boom. I use boom a lot. Cut out that whole chunk, removed it, closed the gap. So let's say you want a whole chunk of the show, lift and extract. Now let's take a look and see how this plays out. 'Cause in my mind it's perfect. Let's see what happens in reality. Real pretty stuff. You do a lot of travel photography. So I look at this, and I'm working with this for the first time. I didn't want to have all this pre-baked stuff for you guys that works perfect. That's the worst thing, 'cause it works perfectly for me, and then you go and you try this home and it's like, it was easy for him, it's like, I'm gonna make you know challenging edits here. And that is a challenging edit, because it says verbally what I want it to say. So Mike, welcome. Thank you. I've seen a lot of your work, real pretty stuff. You do a lot of travel photography-- The audio fits, but the cut feels like a cut, doesn't it? It's a non-sequitur. So I could do a couple things. I could cover this with B roll, maybe some travel, which my gut says I'm gonna need to do. 'Cause I don't know if I can trim this to work. Or I can try to pick another spot to make that edit that may or maybe it's a factor of taking out some of my question. Thank you. I've seen a lot of your work. So let's say my head's about there, and on this one... The problem is I have this movement, and then my hands are you know, all this stuff. So here we have movement, so let's just see what I'm saying. You know what, I want to see what it's going to be like if I take this off. This is where the fire hose comes in, right? I can do a trim, I can do a ripple trim, I can do an extract, I can do a lift. I ain't done yet showing you different ways to confuse you. I want to just trim off everything afterwards. I don't want to have to worry about changing anything or grabbing this. I know that's my cut point. So we're leaving J K and L for a little bit, we're going to the left side of your keyboard. Q and W, okay? Again this is probably one worth remembering. Q and W will trim anything either to the left of where the playhead is parked or to the right of where the playhead is parked. So this is great when cutting down interviews, because you've got this extra stuff. Not only will it trim it, it will then close the gap. So you think if this is the playhead, okay we have Q and W, Q W on your keyboard. Anything with Q is gonna trim anything to the left of the playhead, W anything to the right of the playhead. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit the W key. Just slices that off, close the gap. Let's see what my motion looks like. You do a lot of travel. Thank you. You do a lot of-- So you know. What we're gonna do is I'm gonna come back to this, because I'm gonna tighten it up and actually do what's called a J cut in a moment, but I want to show you some other editing techniques. And the J cut, another term for it is called the split edit, where we're gonna leak some of his audio underneath my head turn, and that's gonna make that go smoothly. But let's take a look at some other techniques that we can use later on. Gonna go ahead and hit the backspace key, can see the whole sequence. You do a lot of travel photography, actually take people out on tours. Tell me a little bit about that. Zooming in with the plus key. People out on tours. Tell me a little bit about that. So I again want to cut to me so I can cut to-- So here's the situation. I'm looking aesthetically how I can make this work. And I'm going from a two shot, and so I want to be able to go from a two shot to this closeup, okay? So I want to cut back to me for part of it. So I inserted this shot, I just slugged it in, I just slugged in you know the two shot, the closeup of me, I repeat the question, so I need to trim that. And then I can get to the closeup. So that's my thinking behind this. Is I want to kind of just get the flow of it, and now I need to tighten it up to where it actually doesn't feel like a lot of edits. Tell me a little bit about that. People out on tours. So we're gonna make this a little bit louder, it's hard for me to hear this really well in the studio. A little bit about that. And I'm gonna use my audio, "Tell me a little bit about that." We're gonna cut off the end, that's the W. Little bit about that. People out on tours. Tell me a little bit about that. And now I want to cut off everything from the head. Okay, Q key, I'm gonna zoom out a little bit so you can see. Tell me a little bit about that. The flow is right, but what's wrong there? We cut to me as I'm doing nothing, okay? So got the audio rhythm, but the cut's in the wrong place. This is where that roll edit comes into play. And you can roll edit with audio if it all matches, because we had two cameras. Or if you just want to change where an edit is occurring between two clips without changing anything else in the show. So what a roll edit is is you have two clips. Maybe they're both five seconds long, and you have a cut right in the middle. And you decide, you know something, I want this clip to be three seconds and I want this one to be seven. So I still want 10 seconds, I still need 10 seconds to cover that space, but I put the edit in the wrong spot. It could be between two photographs, because you want to time it to music. It could be that you know you put something in and then you realize that you move the camera you know out of the shot and you know need to move that one section so you don't have that like bad piece of video work shown to the world. So you just want to roll the edit. So all we're really doing is we're just kinda rolling where that edit point is, and I'm gonna make sure by the way, there's a tendency sometimes when you target track, not that I need to bring anything in, I just wanted to move it back down here. Remember we moved it up to the B roll in the last class? So if you see things suddenly appear in the wrong tracks, make sure your track targeting is good. And as a matter of fact let's say you're really confused and go, my track targeting is all messed up, I don't even know what I did. Oh, I remember, somebody said right click, default source assignments, boom. I don't know really if that did it, but it does do it. Okay, so what we want to do is we want to do a roll edit, and there's a couple ways you can do this. You can switch to the roll edit tool. And the keyboard shortcut is N. Good buddy of mine Jeff Greenburgh has come out with a great way to memorize this. He had to take home ec in high school. Nobody takes home ec anymore, which is why the Millennials can't cook. I apologize to any Millennial out there, but they're probably at a restaurant eating right now. No, but but you have to take sewing, very useful skill. I didn't take it, so when I lose a button, I lose a shirt. But he said that looked like a stitch, so to him that's the way he remembered it. The two clips are stitched together, and he's just trying to move that stitching point. Okay so that's the roll edit point, if you switch to the roll edit. Now when I place my cursor over here, I have to click switching to the roll edit. Okay, boom. When I click on the edit point, it selects both sides of the edit. Okay? And now I can simply drag it, and I'm gonna zoom out a little bit so you can see the net result, okay? So I'm gonna drag this, and two things happen. One you see physically where the edit point is moving in the timeline. And in the upper right hand corner in the program monitor, you see the last frame of the outgoing clip, and the new in-point of the incoming clip. So what I can do here is I can say, okay, I want to get to me, well that's way too long, looking at the screen. But if I go over here, have some good hand motion. People may not notice the cut, and then when I let go, it has moved the edit point. And you noticed the duration between these two shots has not changed. All I've done is tweaked where the cut's gonna happen. And let's go ahead and play that. People out on tours. Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah so-- So it did what I wanted it to do. I'm on there long enough but not too long. Did it using the roll edit tool. So you can get to that by switching to the roll tool. If you do that, remember to switch back to the V key for selecting. And so now you see that we're back to our traditional options there. I wanna go into preferences at this point, because there are some preferences that I personally like to change. I could hold down the command key or the control key, and remember is switches over to the ripple tool, ripple trim? And I could do the same thing if I hold it down and hover over an edit point, I can go right to the roll tool. But I use the roll tool and trim edits way more than I use the trimming tool. To me that should be the default. And there is a preference that you can change, and I find this very valuable, and it's the first time we're really stepping into modifying our preferences, that you can do that. So you can go to your preferences, it's underneath Premiere on a Mac, it's underneath file at the bottom of the list on a Windows machine. And I'm gonna go in and you can step into general if you want, or you can just jump straight to trim. But I'm gonna go to general just so you can see what the interface looks like when you first open it. And there's a lot of controls that you can change, but I'm gonna go down to the trim. So preferences, trim. And there's a thing here that says allow the selection tool to choose ripple and roll without the modifier key. So now by default you're gonna get the yellow, and you're gonna get the roll tool when you hover over the middle. And then you hit the command or the control key to get the old trim tool. So I'm gonna hit that button. I do like that, I find it saves me a lot of time. Hit okay. So now if I go down here, no modifiers. I can do my ripple trims real easily, I can do my rolls real easily. And if I needed to, I can just press down, in this case, the command key on the Mac, and I can switch to the traditional trim tool. Much much easier. Now that I have switched to this tool, there was a problem that I showed you earlier where remember I couldn't trim any further to the left because I hit the next clip? When you're in the ripple trim tool, you no longer have that issue. And I want to just zoom completely out so you can see my whole sequence. If I go ahead and I trim here, it's kind of a long thing. To the right we understand the snapping, but I can also, I'm gonna hit undo. I can move to the left, if I actually grab the edge. There we go. So I'm actually adding a bunch to the head of the clip. Maybe the previous statement. And it adds it, and it what it does instead of overwriting what's in front of it, it pushes everything down, okay? I'm gonna actually do something here a little bit tricky just so you can see better, because it's pretty zoomed in, even though I want all this. So before with the red tool, can go to the right, but not to the left. With the yellow tool, still go to the right, closes the gap. But if I go to the left, I can just add more stuff, okay? It's a great way to say put something in and you cut off the first word of a sentence. And instead of having to go and move it down and trim it over, you can just pull it with that ripple edit tool and open it up and then you can refine it again. So again you're never like stuck in a place where you like have to redo everything. There's usually a tool that will fix the problem. Let's see what trouble I got myself in by doing this without listening. Take people out on tours. Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah so travel photography. I've always loved to travel. In fact I remember when-- So you know he's talking about always when he was young with his wife. I'm gonna go ahead and stretch this out, just to give me more to work with. Just show you how I quickly cut this. Take people out on tours. Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah so travel photography. I've always loved to 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. Here we go, after but. I think I'm lucky here, actually, 'cause I didn't want that. So let's just go. But um. But um, don't want that, right there. So I want to cut everything off to the left. Anybody want to shout out what the keyboard shortcut might be? It's a Q or it's a W, you have a 50% chance! Q, yes. Everybody was holding up their fingers going Q, W. No no they weren't. So now I can start literally with-- Travel photography for me, it is a business. Travel photography for me is a business. Great starting, I got rid of the but and the um. And let's go back, because I was playing with this, to my question. Tell me a little bit about that. I'm using the up and down arrow keys just to jump back a couple edits. 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-- So this is his old statement, it was too long. A little bit about that. Going ahead, hit the W key. Now we have this. Tell me a little bit about that. Travel photography for me-- Wouldn't even know that I took out a good minute of our conversation. And now we're getting to the meat, and that's really what your objective is. You have the power to take something that's five minutes and bring it down to one really useful minute. So don't make your viewers sit through all of this stuff. They want it quick, especially because we're so used to getting that 15 second, 30 second, give me the information, that we don't have the patience to let things breathe. Now I don't want to say that's a bad thing, because sometimes it's really nice to let things breathe. And it's nice to watch a movie that things aren't going by at 100 miles an hour, okay? It all depends on your audience and your objective, and where it's being viewed. If you're competing with other 15 second sound bytes on Snapchat, you'd better do a 15 second or 10 second Snapchat to grab your viewer to get them to your website or whatever you're doing. So always keep that in mind. So this cut works for me.