Lessons

Lesson Info

Edit Setup

Setting up for the edit, all right. So as we kind of set up for the edit we're gonna need to realize here that client profiles are really, really, really different, okay? Editing a client profile is extremely different because when you step into your edit you don't know where you are. You don't know the beginning, you don't know the middle, you don't know the end. So the major, major tip here, major tip here, it's all in the prep. So you've gotta figure out before you step into your editor where you kind of wanna go directionally. Okay, do you wanna start off with an emotional statement? Do you wanna move to what they do? Do you wanna talk about something else, who their customer is? And then do you wanna end on their why, right? Do you see how I did that? Think about generally where you wanna move them, where you wanna move this edit. Don't start thinking of lines or clips or anything yet. Think about funnel, okay. Wide then as we come down we'll get more specific. So generally speaki...

ng from this edit, okay, I want him to start with maybe an emotional statement that then kind of leads into, you know, probably about their history, you know, and at, 'cause I've listened to him talk, right? And I'm just leaning on this conversation. You know, I've had so many conversations over the past few days that I'm like, oh, you know, yeah, they did say this, they did say this, and as you sit and reflect, as you sit and stop, and reflect, and you think about all these things, that's what gonna get you into your editor much, much more easily. This one is huge. You're gonna work on your audio track first. Okay? I know that may sound weird and I know it may be backwards but because we're photographers we wanna get the thing we know least out of the way first. Okay? You got one audio track. How many clips do you got? Five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10? Okay? So the way that I'm trying to get you guys into your editor is because we don't know audio we're gonna hear something in the edit and it's gonna distract us from the edit. So we're gonna wanna do as much of that audio track up front as possible so it doesn't distract you from your edit, okay? This is probably so backwards, okay, for a lot of people, and it's probably not right in some circles, but it's right for us because when we approach editing because we don't know how to do because we've never done it before we've gotta remove all of the distractions. We have to move all those brick walls. We have to remove everything that's gonna make us not wanna edit because we don't think it's good enough. Right? How many times have you guys gotten into the editor and stopped after the first few clips because you haven't thought it was good enough? And then you shut it down and you go back to doing photos. Right? Okay, so we're gonna work on our audio track first and what this is gonna do it's gonna identify, it's gonna allow us to identify and isolate mistakes right away. Okay, you're gonna face those fears right up front. You're gonna face those mistakes right away and here's the thing about mistakes, you know, hey, my mistakes, my audio track wasn't perfect. Camera B didn't record a scratch track. I didn't have all the footage from camera B and then some footage it's not even color managed. Those are my four big mistakes on this shoot. So I knew that right away. Okay, time to go. Don't panic. Okay, don't panic. I had a story. When I was a photographer we were shooting high end weddings in San Diego, okay, and it was an important wedding, a great, big wedding, right, and we had two or three photographers and I was responsible for the one ups, okay. After the ceremony, you know, you do your family shots, you know, one ups, and all kind of stuff, and whether I was tired or distracted or not paying attention I forgot the most important picture after the ceremony, the mom and the bride. Just forgot it, forgot it, just didn't do it. We got back and it was like no, there's nothing of the mom and the bride. There was some stuff at the reception, there was some stuff before, but there was not that one photograph that everyone wants that doesn't, that thinks they don't want, but then after the wedding they're like, oh yeah, we wanted those formals, where are they, right? I didn't have the one of the mom and the bride, so what did I do? I, we had to Photoshop it. We had to take the mom out of a picture, take the bride out of the other picture, and put 'em into a picture and give it to them, right? We didn't panic, we found a solution, all right? That's what I'm trying to tell you guys is that we have to, have to, have to when we make a mistake, you can't go back and reshoot now, okay? You gotta take that photographer mentality, that greediness, right, that punchy type of attitude that we all have when we wanna get something done, and take it into the mistakes we make because unfortunately motion is a hotbed for mistakes, okay? So we've just gotta learn to live with them. All right, so about your audio track. Listen to it a lot, a few times. Really, really pay attention to what you're hearing. Take notes of when you hear something that you like, okay? We're gonna focus on what we like when we hear stuff. I know you're gonna hear pops and crackles and hiss. You'll wanna focus on what you like, 'cause guaranteed, even if you hear a pop or a crackle it may not be, six times out of eight, seven times out of eight, I don't know, it doesn't matter because a lot of the times that pop and hiss and crackle probably won't even be in the time that you're gonna wanna use that audio anyway. Just how we're cutting down footage we're also cutting down audio. So don't get distracted by the mistakes. Get past them, right? Here's what I did. So I had about 40 minutes of audio and as I kind of listened to it I had an Excel spreadsheet open and I type pretty fast, right, so as I'm hearing I'm like, okay, I noted the minutes and the seconds and then I just wrote either a quote or something to have a call back or whatever it was, okay? And that was just listening to the audio track. I didn't care about clips or video at that point. Okay, that's all I did. So it's like oh, history before wrestling, oh, how he got into wrestling, passion for wrestling and stuff. This was a quote, you can't teach passion. Okay, it's not just wrestling. You get a fever, you know? And it needs more cowbell kind of thing, you know? When you first walk into the gym, okay. Do you see how I'm doing this? I'm giving myself cues. I'm giving myself things that I'm hearing inside this audio track that I can then go back to later. Okay, you listen to it, and you listen to it over, and over, and over, and over again. Okay, and you're doing this before you even step into Premiere. You can listen to this on an audio player. You know, if you wanna, if you're concerned about the amount of time just put it onto your iPhone and listen to it in the car, you know? Just don't take notes while you're driving please, you know? When the first moment you walk in, look at here, 10 years ago in Seattle. Can you guys start to see a narrative creep up now? Can you start to see statements that you can start to pick off to go, hey, hey, hey, hey, there's something here. Okay. To have the labels and powering I have to nurse the process and it's a slow process. That's the path and that's the journey. It's slow. There are really, really great statements in his interview and it's now our job to take those statements and to craft a narrative. Because these things are his words. I like people. People wanna come in happy. I want them to leave happy. There's a lot of good stuff, and here's the thing, right? This is the point where I got attached to some statements and even though I got attached to some statements I had to cut them anyway, because I've got 40 minutes of audio here. He's got really good nuggets, and I'll show you where I had to cut something just 'cause it didn't fit and I had to make it shorter and it was heartbreaking 'cause you develop these relationships with these words because words matter, and it's these words that you listen to over and over and over that give you that bond with this client when they're not even in the room. And that's what pushes you forward to deliver something for them that's gonna be so powerful and relevant. So what do you think about this? Makes sense, okay? You got a question? Why would you write them all down instead of just cutting the clips as you go and having those already ready? So that's a great question. Some people do that. For me, right, I'm laser focused when I do something. I'm in the listening mode. I'm in listening mode. What I wanna do is just listen. I want his words to permeate my head. I don't wanna distract myself. I don't wanna get involved in the process of cutting up footage or cutting up statements. I just wanna listen, okay? I wanna hear those words over and over and over again so that I could continually just hear it, okay, so that I know what the next word's gonna be. It's like, you know, when I was a kid, and I loved a song that came out on the radio, I'd find that song, record it on a tape thing, right, dating myself again, record it on the tape, and then play it over and over and over and over and over again until I could know the next word. If you do that, if you just spend the time to listen to what your client says, what you're gonna notice is that you're gonna hear similar words in the beginning and similar words at the end and you're then gonna be able to connect those two statements, okay? If you're focused on cutting up that audio track what's gonna happen is you're gonna be more focused on the individual statements as opposed to the full conversation. The full conversation is what matters because the full conversation will inform what you cut. And again, this is the way that I've taught myself how to do it, coming from my photography background. I did weddings. Weddings are a big process, a big thing, and you look at the wedding in full. I don't, when I was a photographer I never talked to the bride during their consultation and said well, you know, after the ceremony we're gonna do some great photos, and then that's it. No, you talk them through their day. You start off and go well, hey, you know what? I'll probably show up around seven or eight, you know, and if it's okay I'd like to get pictures of you getting ready, and then after you get ready, you know, maybe we could do some, you lay the day out for them and you make the day a conversation. You don't just say, you know what? Your photos are gonna be great, and we're gonna do most of them after the ceremony, which may be true, but there's a conversation. There's a whole story behind it so that you have to be able to, for the client, from their perspective, so they understand where you're going, okay? Same concept here, just applied differently, okay? So let's get back to this. What does this, how does this make you guys feel? What do you guys think about this? Is it, is it something that you think you can do? Yeah? I really challenge you to do it because I did this. I do this. This is what I did to get myself into the edit, and you know what? I did this and I kept doing it. I listened to it three or four times, and then after I did this I maybe looked at it once or twice. What it does for you is while you're typing out someone's words they become your words, right? While you listen and while you type and while you apply those words down they become your words. That's the major important thing, writing things down. You know, it's so, so powerful, and we forget that because we're always texting, we forget that, because we're always on email, we forget that, that if you actually listen and type as someone, or write, as someone is speaking those words become powerful. Okay? So, here it is, room tone. Okay, room tone, just remember where you put it. Don't lose that file, okay? It is a very important file. It's magic. It is seriously magic. It won't fix everything, guys. Okay, it's not gonna fix everything, but it's gonna really, really knock down that constant sound pollution, okay? So, we're gonna turn up the volume a little bit and if you guys are watching on the web either grab some headphones or turn up so you guys can hear what this room tone's gonna sound like, okay? Hear the overall? It's not silent, is it? That's like a fan. Okay? A show of hands, how many times have you guys heard that fan type of sound in your, right, and have you just pored over how you can get rid of that, right? And what have you guys done? You've done EQ, you've done all this thing where you kind of lift the floor a little bit and compress it and you try to do all these things. You just don't know how to get rid of it, right? Okay. You have the headache, we have the medicine, okay? We've got the medicine, it's coming, it's coming. All right. So, the last thing here is before we get room tone, after we get room tone, just get ready to be disappointed. Okay? You gotta remember we're photographers. We're not audio technicians. We're not sound technicians. So when you get those headphones on and you actually listen to your audio track you're gonna be disappointed, all right? Just be prepared. No matter how good we think we can be at capturing sound we are not sound technicians, right? Because if you were gonna be a sound technician then you wouldn't be a photographer doing video. You gotta get good enough sound to get you to your end point, right? Just make sure it's the best sound you can possibly get, okay? All right. So, about disappointment, don't panic. See the theme here, guys? Don't panic. Don't panic. We got this. You got this. Everyone in this room can do this, right? There's always a way, and it all, and if all else fails, just cut it. If you hear something in it, just consider it a blurry image. How many times have you gotten an image that you love so much but it's blurry? What do you do? Delete. Delete, because you know what? It didn't happen. I'm a better photographer than that, delete. You gotta treat your footage, you gotta treat your audio the exact same way. So when you say that your audio you're worried about this and that and the other thing it's okay. Use the parts you want, delete the rest. It didn't happen. Okay? Do you see how the concepts kind of apply and they're still the same? In photography we deal with thousands of images. In photography we deal with a lot of disappointment. In photography we deal with a lot of mistakes. And the reason we are not shaken out of our boots because of them is because we have the knowledge and we have the practice and we've done all of the things to get ourselves out of those, you know, ditches, okay? You've got a question. Well, I just wanna give a shout out to Tanya in the chat room who was with us yesterday from the UK, and is commenting that your process for audio is close to what she uses to edit for radio documentaries. Shape it up before you jump to editing, and she says, you can easily drop the poor stuff without spending hours trimming the edit, and I think what I'm getting from you Victor and these statements is that we can let go. Yeah. And I know, again, as photographers, sometimes that's really hard, but if we just let go in this scenario as well then that overcomes-- Absolutely. That fear that everything has to be perfect. So, thank you for that. For sure, let go guys, absolutely, let go. You know what? The minute you start letting go of footage it feels great. 'Cause then you, 'cause then you're no longer married to what it looks like and you're just like, okay, no, that's not good, cut it, good, and you start to develop this cut mentality and honestly it'll make you better photographers. It'll make you better photographers 'cause it will teach you what's important. Teach you what's important to look for and how to look at your images, all right? So, let's learn about Adobe Audition. Anyone know about Audition? Raise, show of hands? Okay, cool. So, Audition, what is it for us? It's an audio enhancement tool that's like Photoshop, kind of, but for audio, right? It's got a ton of stuff but we are gonna use it for three things, okay, FFT, noise reduction, healing. That's it. Okay, we're gonna use it for three things. If you use it for those three things and you learn to master those three things it will take care of 90% of your audio woes. Can you tell us again what FTT is? Well, it's-- Sorry, FFT. FFT, it's a noise rack effect inside of Audition that I'll show you. It's just an abbreviation for one of their effects that's right there, okay? All right. Now here, we're already spending a lot of time listening to the audio, and taking notes. What you're gonna wanna listen to here are for mistakes in the capturing of it, okay. At this point, you're gonna scrub through, you're gonna look at the form, you're gonna look at the screen, and you're gonna try to identify where your trouble spots are, okay, and we're gonna teach you how to look for little things that are gonna be really, really easily fixed for us. Okay? So how are we doing, guys? You all right? Got a question? It's a narrative question, really. So how often is it that you find when you're actually, so you talked about going through and trying to lay out your story, and then working through and listening to all the audio. How is it, how often is it that you find the story you wanted to tell is not informed by the audio that you actually have and you kind of have to go back and revisit? How often do you actually go through that loop and how many times do you generally go through that loop before you land on something that you like? Oh, I tell you, that happened here. That happened here, right? So, I had to listen, I had to listen to the audio at least four, five, six times before I got to the point of oh, I wanna open up into an emotional statement, then I wanna go to this, then I wanna go to this, then I wanna go to this, right? I thought it was gonna be a completely different piece. I thought it was gonna be more about you know just, just, just something that it, I didn't get the audio for, you know? I thought it was more gonna be about you know his, his passion for teaching and his passion for, for instruction and his passion for, but it ended up being about people getting their own passion by doing it, by developing that repetition, by realizing they could be a part of something bigger, right? The film ended up being about, their why ended up being about community. You, you should come to our gym, because you'll be a part of something bigger. I thought the movie was gonna be you should come to our gym because we are passionate, you know? Because we love this. This is our life, right? And I didn't get any of that. So for three hours I just sat and listened and listened and listened and listened and listened until I got hey, they want a community. If you want to, you could come to us because we're a family, we're a community, we have history, okay? That's their why. If you wanna be part of a community, we do this because we love each other. We do this because we have a community. We do this because, you know, X, Y, and Z, right? Going back to your recording your audio track, your main audio track, continuous, and then you created that spreadsheet with your timeline. So, you listened to the whole thing, got kind of a mental overview of what he says and when he says it and blah blah blah. So, at some point you're gonna have to synchronize the audio with the video. So are you just, but your video is not continuous is it? It's not in some places, but you're gonna see that in a second. You're gonna see how, you're gonna see, exactly. That's a great question. You're gonna see exactly what we're gonna do. All right, all right. Okay? Cool, all right, so for this next part I'm gonna come and stand behind here and I want anyone listening on the web to put on some headphones because that's gonna be really, really beneficial for you as you get into listening to some sound, okay? So, before we do this, and while the web's getting the headphones on, I kind of wanna just show you a couple things, like how I organize footage, all right? So as I talk about organizing my footage guys, all right, so here's what I mean. I have my camera test. I've got my interview. I have camera one files. Got my camera two files. I got my audio files, right? So if I ever need to go to something in the interview I know all of the assets are just in that interview folder. Okay? Practical, I'm not doing anything crazy. I'm not even labeling my files, guys. One, because I had so little time, and there was a cut off point for me in asset management and I hate doing it. I wanna get into the edit, right? So I'm gonna do enough so that when I need to get something I know where to find it, okay? You got a question back there? Can you spend a couple of seconds talking about backing up your assets? Yeah, sure. Okay, so, remember what I said about not deleting my cards? Remember I said that? Okay, so that's the cool thing. High capacity cards, have a lot of them, okay? That ninja hard drive is a terabyte. That entire shoot from camera B is on that drive. My cards, boom, still got the footage on them. So until I'm done with this edit I'm mobile right now. I'm remote. I can't get back to a place where I can dump stuff to my Drobo and dump stuff to other places, right? Cards are my safety net. Those cards are my lifeline, okay? So I don't, if you're gonna do a job and you're gonna do the stuff remote keep the cards live. Do not worry about those cards live, okay? And then don't delete them, and then what you're gonna do is dump to the hard drive, so then you've got two places. Okay? There's kind of a reason for my insanity sometimes, right? So that's why, all right? So, B roll. So I get into my B roll and you know what? Marked mark four my DJI. Why did I mark it like this? I knew what I shot on my mark four and I knew what I shot in my DJI. So I just put the folder files into those folders and if you look at it they're not organized into sub folders. I could have done that, you know? I probably should have done that but again speed was where I needed to go. So I couldn't, I couldn't waste time. I just needed to throw stuff into a folder, get it all there, and then move into my edit, because getting to the edit was the most important thing 'cause I needed to be ready for you guys, right? So can you see how here I have to cut corners in places when I have to deliver on something much more important? Could I go back and should I go back? Yeah, I probably should. Will I go back? I don't know, unless I have to make another piece from this edit. Okay? Now, the other thing here is project files. So in building this class I have a ton of project files as I was saving through to kind of build out the content but you could see here I put the project files in where all of my footage is. I just label it into a folder and I toss it in there. That way any time Adobe makes any kind of auto thing it saves it to that project folder, which means if I move that folder anywhere else all of the files and all of the assets are gonna go with it and I won't have lost links or broken links, okay? Get in the habit of doing that because then you're gonna get an opportunity to really just when you're done with the project, move it, and then go back to it later and have it still be there and not have to reconnect everything, okay? And then, you know, as I do something different, and the reason, and this is just something I always did, you can see here I always put a zero one camera zero two and it's usually in order of what my work flow is. Otherwise, it would alphabetize it and I'd lose it. Okay, so zero one I go camera test, and zero two, B roll, sorry, the interview, then B roll, then hey, I'm in the edit now, so here's the project files, and then as I went through my edit, oh hey, soundtrack. Then, oh I got ready for color calibration because I was going into DaVinci. You see, kind of see my logic? So if I number, if you toss a two digit number in front of your files it will organize your stuff for you in work flow order. Because I think all of us as photographers are so work flow dependent and if we don't think about our work flow and where things are gonna fit then we kind of get lost, right? I'm trying to give you guys as much information and as much practical knowledge as possible so that when you actually do this for yourself you then can be like, oh, okay I get it. And you know why we did this? You know why I did this? When I was a photographer, zero one was RAW files, zero two was JPEGs, okay, zero three was prints, okay. So JPEGs also were proofs, okay? So that's how I developed that because first you get the RAW files, you do the edit down, then you output it to JPEGs for proofs, right? And then from that you did prints. So I always had three folders in every client file and I could always look and here's the beautiful thing. If you do it this way no matter what else is in the folder these will always show up top. You'll be organized by alphabet. Okay? That's huge. Because then you're not even going to, I even do it, I even did it in the, in the project files folder, guys. I did it here, okay? Zero one, zero two, zero three, zero four, it organized everything so that I knew what project file I needed to pull out for what segment. Okay? It's always organized in that way. That's the single most important thing that if you take anything from me that's the single most important thing that I want you to do, because it's going to help you so much in just not panicking and looking for stuff, okay? Got a question? Let's say you were gonna record some customer testimonials and you had five customers that were all gonna be interviewed. Would you create one Premiere project and then you're gonna final output separate, you know, interviews? So-- So would you do them all in one project and then just slice and dice 'em up there or would you have separate project, Premiere project files for each testimonial? That's a good question. It depends. If I'm gonna make each testimonial its own video then I do it as a separate project. If I'm gonna make each testimonial part and parcel to a larger project, then I do it in one timeline. I still however would look at all audio clips individually and work on each audio clip first individually, because I don't know, I'm not sure if I'm answering your question, but I think that if I work on all the audio files individually regardless of the fact if I wanna do it individual or as a group project I'd still have that file to work down properly. Just my brain thinks in terms of sequences and why couldn't you have bins with sequence Bob, sequence Suzie, and all in the same project? You could do that. The way I think about it is if I'm gonna go ahead and have five audio clips from five different people and if it's gonna be part and parcel to a larger project I'm gonna drag all of them down into one, into one continuous audio track on my sequence and then chop it up and then bring it together and then sync everything else to that once I've chunked it all down.