Lessons

Lesson Info

Edit Pass #1: Rough Cut

In the next couple lessons, we're actually going to be building our edit. The very first thing that I wanna do is get rid of everything that's in our timeline, things that we've been messing around with. And I also wanna import a couple more ingredients for our story. So here in the media pool, I will right click. And let's go down to import media. And we have a lot of video clips here, but we're also gonna want some of our audio. So we have some voiceover here as well as some music. And I'll select those and open them. And maybe we'll make a bin here in the media pool, and we'll call this audio. And I'll take both of those and drag that into our audio bin. What we're gonna be doing is building an edit that kind of tells a story of a specific person. We interviewed a cook just a little bit about his story about why he likes cooking. So what we wanna do is make an edit from that voiceover that's more visual and just makes the audience have that kind of warm and fuzzy feeling. So let's h...

ave a listen to our voiceover. I'm gonna put on my fancy-pants headphones. (imitates whip cracking) And we'll have a listen to our story here. Well, when I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. When I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. It was more than food. It was a passion. She put her heart and soul into her food. And I just want to pass that on to everyone I meet. She put her heart and soul into her food. All right. So the is our story of this guy that his mom always used to cook a lot when he was a kid and he just loved it. And now he wants to be a cook because of her example. Pretty wholesome, pretty freakin' wholesome. (laughs) And just like with the video clips, we can decide what parts of this story we want to tell, what order they go in, how much of each one, and the timing. So let's start out with the first line. And we'll throw that into our timeline. Well, when I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. When I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. I like that second line a little better, so let's take that and I'll hit I for in, and then go towards the end and hit O for out, and then P to put that down here in the timeline. And again, the audio works just like the video. It just lives down here in the timeline. Let's listen to it back. Make sure everything's okay. When I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. Okay. So it sounds good, but there's one problem. It's only coming out of one ear. Now this is what happens when you have a sound that's a mono sound. That means that it only has one audio channel and you're putting it into a stereo track, which has two audio channels. So the way that we fix that is we just change the track from stereo to mono. Here's how we do that. Down here in our timeline, in this left part where we have kind of the labels for the tracks, if we right-click on this track and we go up to change track type to, we'll select mono. And now if we play this back. When I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. It comes out of both ears. So we have the very first part of our story as far as the audio goes in the timeline. Let's pick the next part. It was more than food. It was a passion. She put her heart- All right, so it was more than food. It was just a passion. I for in in. And then after passion, hit O for out, and then P to put it at the end. Let's go through the next part here. She put her heart and soul into her food. And I just want to pass that on to everyone I meet. She put her heart and soul into her food. All right, I like this take at the end where he says, "She put her heart and soul into her food." I'll hit I for in. She put her heart and soul into her food. And then O for out at the end, and put that towards the end of our edit with P. And then let's grab this second to last line here. And I just want to pass that on to everyone I meet. Good. So I'll hit I for in at the beginning, and O for out at the end, and then P to put that at the last part of our timeline. So now we have these four main lines, and let's listen to our story. When I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. It was more than food. It was a passion. She put her heart and soul into her food. And I just want to pass that on to everyone I meet. All right. So this is looking pretty good. And again, like I said, we're kind of doing this in passes. And so we have the entire story here in audio. But now what we wanna do is go through and get a little bit more detail. We're gonna do this kind of in a big way here in a second, but I wanna make sure that we have our voiceover pretty locked in because this kind of video is something that we really base a lot of what we're building off of the voiceover because we connect with a human voice in a really powerful way. So this is gonna be one of the most powerful things in our edit. So let's go through and see what else we can do to make this a little better. And we're thinking about which parts of the clip we want to keep, which ones we wanna cut out. How do we affect the order? How do we affect the timing? And let's jump in here. When I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. It was more than food. It was a passion. Shh. All right, so right here when he says, "It was more than food, it was a passion," we have this great big gap where he's saying nothing. So what we can do is chop this right here in the middle with our blade, and then I can take out some of that blank space there, select this, and delete it. And now, what we've done is just got rid of that silence. It was more than food. It was a passion. She put her heart and soul into her food. And I just want to pass that on to everyone I meet. All right. So this is pretty good. Let's think about the timing here. So... When I was a boy. (voiceover warbles) So this is kind of a, this is kind of feeling like a really kind of a wholesome, kind of heartfelt sort of thing, and there's a certain timing for that. It's not like you have a heart-to-heart conversation that's just like, hey, man, I'm just gonna tell you everything about my heart really quick. (laughs) It's always kinda like a little bit more slow, a little bit more just kind of drawn out. So we wanna adjust that just with our edit here. So let's see how we can do that. When I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. It was more than food. Okay, the first thing we can do is grab these and just drag them down a little bit so that we have a little bit more space. When I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. It was more than food. It was a passion. All right. So we're gonna let that breathe a little bit. Than food. It was a passion. She put- And we'll let this breathe a little bit more. She put her heart and soul into her food. And I just want- Like that. So this might be a better way to present this. When I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. It was more than food. It was a passion. She put her heart and soul into her food. And I just want to pass that on to everyone I meet. Yeah, so I think that's feeling a lot better. You see kind of the difference between just having things happen in a certain order and then being able to kind of control that timing. Just with that one adjustment, we've created a little bit more mood. So now the question is, now that we have our voiceover, is how do we show this visually with the ingredients that we have with these video clips? One way to do this is just to listen and think about what types of shots might be good, ideally, for this. And then we can just see if we have a shot that's kinda like that. When I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. Okay, so this very first thing where he's saying, "When I was a boy," this is kind of the intro to this person. We don't even know who it is. And so it would be great to have a shot of whoever is talking, okay? So what I think would be good is to maybe start with a wide shot of our chef here. So let's do that. He can be really... I don't know if it matters too much what he's doing. We're mostly wanting a shot of our chef. So let's have him cutting radishes. That's probably fine. I'll hit I for in. And I'm just gonna grab a little bit of him actually doing something, so cutting those radishes. And we'll hit O for out. And then I'm just gonna drag this in over that clip. And I'm not gonna be too worried if it's exactly right. I'm just gonna kinda put it roughly over that clip. When I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. Yeah. So that works pretty well, actually. It's like, "When I was a boy." When who was a boy? Oh, this guy. When this guy was a boy. Okay. And our audience is already connecting, right? So let's see. What's next? It was more than food. It was a passion. "It was more than food. It was a passion." Okay, so we need, I think for "more than food," I'm not really sure yet, but when he says, "It was a passion," how about something of him like really caring for food. When you're cooking and it's a passion, you really want some kind of shot of you caring for it, like being really detailed. So I'm thinking maybe some kind of... I'm thinking some kinda shot like this where he's really being careful and really being detailed with how he's cutting this onion. I think that's a great, great place to start. So I hit I for in and O for out, and we'll drag this over here where he says passionate, and I'll just roughly trim that. Food. It was a passion. Good. She put her. She put her heart and soul into her food. "She put her heart and soul into her food." This could probably be another shot kinda like that. I really like this kind of slow-motion shot of pushing those peppers into the water. So maybe let's do this. Let's grab... We already have the in and out set, so we'll just drag that in there like that. And then... And I just want to pass that on to everyone I meet. All right. And now he's talking about himself again, so why don't we cut back to another shot of him? Maybe him salting that water. There we go. It'd be nice if we had a shot of him smiling in some way, you know? Having a good time. This guy's... There, he's a little bit happier. Maybe we can use just a different part of this clip. Yeah. Okay. And I'll grab this and drag that down. Now we have one more little piece of the puzzle. It was more than food. "It was more than food." So maybe something that's exciting, right? So, ha, fire. Perfect. So, "It was more than food." That just feels like, yeah, this is more than food. This is fire. This is like an exciting thing. Let's go. So I can get excited. If I'm not into food, I'm excited about gravity. I'm excited about things on fire. Let's go with that. So I'll drag that in. And again, I'll just roughly trim this to work in our edit. Make sure there's no gaps. And now we have a really rough cut. Let's take a look at what this is like. When I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. It was more than food. It was a passion. She put her heart and soul into her food. And I just want to pass that on to everyone I meet. Awesome. So you see how quick that is? All we did was just put in our voiceover and then just find a shot that is pretty decent for whatever he was talking about, and we have a story that feels cohesive. It feels like it kinda belongs together. It's not perfect, but honestly, if we needed to put this out, it would function as a story. So that's really what we're after with this first pass is, does it work? Does it convey at least... Does it at least start to convey what we want to convey with our edit?