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Edit Pass #2: Smooth It Out

So we've been putting our edit together in passes, and we're just finished with the first pass, which is just roughing out the story. So far, we have kind of the big, basic building blocks of our story. Now it's time to go through it again from beginning to end and figure out, does this actually feel the way that we want? Are there any kind of weird, obvious problems? Could we make this better in any way? 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 wanted to pass that on to everyone I meet. All right, so it's pretty good, but one thing that we're definitely going to need here is some music. So in our audio folder, I can double click on our music to load it up here in the source viewer. And I'll just grab this and drag it down to our second audio track down here. I'm also gonna make a little bit a of room here by clicking on this little divider and dragging it up. That'll just give us ...

a little bit more room for our audio. I can also drag this little black line down so we can see the audio wave form a little better. I'm also gonna give us a little more room up here by clicking on our media pool button up top, and that'll just give us the full width of our screen. I'll hit Shift + Z to zoom out and we can see everything in our music. And a couple things that you generally wanna do when you import music. Usually, music comes in way too loud. What they do when they finish a song is turn the volume way, way up. And it's almost always gonna be way too loud for our video, especially with our VO that we haven't adjusted at all. So I'm gonna select our music, and there are a few different ways we can turn the volume down. Probably the easiest way is to have our music selected and go over to the inspector in the upper right-hand corner, and open up that panel. And here in the upper right under volume, we can take this slider and turn it down. And as we turn it down, we see this wave form squishing down. And usually, what I try and do is start at like negative 18 or so. That's a pretty good level for music that's going to be under somebody talking, 'cause we don't want it to be too loud or we're never gonna be able to hear the person talking. So let's just play this back and see if it sounds right. (upbeat music) Okay, and let's trim the beginning here just so that we have that kind of louder part of the music starting, and I'll just trim the end like this so that we can hear our music under our dialogue and let's see what this sounds 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. All right, so that is working a lot better. It's great to have some music in there, but we want the music to start and end a certain way. We don't want it to just all of a sudden start and all of a sudden end because that makes our audience feel weird. Like, you never really like something that sounds like that. So what I like to do, is I'll just move our music over a little bit. And let's just grab the beginning of our music, zoom out, and right here where it starts to get loud, I think we can probably use this part right here. (upbeat music) Okay, if we don't like that, we can try a different part. (upbeat music) I think I like it actually here where it gets a little bit more intense. And so let's start it right here, and I'm gonna grab my blade, blade that right there, and just get rid of this first part, I'll just hit delete. And now as this starts, we can cut right when the beat starts to make it seem like a much more natural beat, like right there. So we'll just cut that in. There we go. So I'll bring this all the way to the beginning of our edit, and maybe I'll take our video and our audio and we'll move it down a little bit just so we can hear a little bit of music before everything starts. So let's see what that sounds like. (upbeat music) When I was a boy, my mom-- Yeah, now there's a nice little intro there. Now we want this to end nicely. So I'm gonna, first of all, just probably chop this towards the end of our video tracks here. And let's drag this end out to where we have this kind of fading out naturally. (upbeat music) And we're gonna do kind of the same trick where we start this right on a beat. So I'll zoom in here. And we can kind of tell where the beats are by where this little wave form is a little bit fatter. (upbeat music) You can also kind of listen to it and just pause it, like, that's right where the beat's gonna be. And so I'll grab my blade and blade it right there at the blade head. And I can select this first clip and hit delete on the keyboard. Shift + Z to zoom out and I can drag this over. So this is gonna be our little ending bit. And all we have to do is put this right where there's a beat, so I'll zoom this out. So I'll move. So I'll trim this edge out here. (upbeat music) So right there is a great beginning beat, and so I'll pause it. And so I'll cut it right there, and put these together and we should have a pretty good edit. All right Pass that on to everyone I meet. (upbeat music) So now we have a decent little edit there to where it actually sounds like it's supposed to end. We have the start of our music sounding really natural and the end of our music sounding really natural as well. The other thing that we can do to make this a little bit nicer with the ending here is we can fade this down at the end. An easy way to do that is to grab this little white handle and drag it to the left. And we can see it's kind of darker above here, kind of makes a slope. And this is to show you that it's gonna kind of fade the volume out along this slope. Now fades it out over time, and the ending really feels like it's natural. So I'm gonna hold Shift and mouse over our tracks and roll up and down on my scroll wheel to kind of resize our tracks here. And I'll just squish those down 'cause I'm kind of done working with audio for now. Now, let's switch back to the video. So now we have a couple of more problems, right? We have the beginning, which is black. When I was a boy, my mom would cook every... And we have the ending. Everyone I meet Which is black. So we gotta figure out what we wanna do there. A lot of the time, when you have an intro to something, you wanna make it really exciting, you want it to kind of grab somebody's attention. So let's do something fancy for our intro here. First of all, let's open up our media pool. We're gonna use a new shot. Maybe we'll use this shot right here of him dropping that dough onto this board because it's nice slow motion. It's really visual, really exciting. We have a flower going everywhere. And so we're gonna hit our in before it falls and our out after it falls like that. And we can drag that into our timeline. So I'll close our media pool, and now we really have this kind of gap here that we want to fill. I'll turn off our audio just for now by clicking this little speaker button, that's going to mute our preview of the audio. And what we really want is the most exciting part to happen here kind of right before we see our guy. So we have a few different options here. One thing that we could do is just use this part of the video, where it fall down and kind of splashes into the flower like this. And that would probably work just fine, let's listen to that (upbeat music) When I was a boy... That's cool. When I was a boy, my mom... And that feels pretty nice. So a couple other things on the second pass where we're just really wanting this to start to feel the way that we want it to feel. A couple things stuck out to me, this second to last shot feels really long. Feels like there should be something else, it's just not as exciting as it could be. We just stay on it too long. So let's find another shot to go there, something else that is visual and nice. So maybe him working on his pizza. It can be really anything that shows care, that shows this same kind of emotion that we're trying to achieve in this video. So him putting down those herbs, sure, that works. Let's take that and put that on the second track here. The reason I wanna put it on the second track is because I'm not sure if I want to overwrite this clip or not. I'm not really sure where it's supposed to go, and it's just easier to kind of put it in the layer over it. So maybe we'll try it like this. She put her heart and soul into her food. And I just want to pass that on to everyone I meet. All right, so let's take that. That's still a little bit too long, so we'll just trim that. She put her heart and soul into her food. And I just want to pass that on to everyone I meet. Great, so that feels a lot better. The other thing I wanna do is connect with this guy a little bit more. Remember we were talking about how wide shots show you what's going on, but they don't really show you, like, they don't really convey emotion as much. And this is a little bit more of an emotional video. So what we can do is take this wide shot and we can kind of fake a close up by zooming in in post. So a way to do that is to grab our clip here in the timeline, and I'll grab our blade tool. And I think I'm just gonna cut this in half, and let's say we wanna zoom in on the first half of this shot. I can select this shot in the timeline and then go up to our inspector, the same place where we adjusted the volume for our music. And I can adjust the zoom. All I have to do is have it selected and be looking at it here in the viewer. And I can click and drag here where it says 1.0, drag it to the right, and that will zoom it in. I can also adjust the position, the X and the Y, the Y being the up and down access. And I can move that around like that. And now we can kind of zoom in and position our guy here. So now, we start. (upbeat music) And I just want-- Zoomed in. To pass that on to everyone I meet. That feels a lot better. Okay, so now this is definitely feeling a lot more how we want it to feel. So now let's take a look at our edit. (upbeat music) When I was a boy, my mom would cook every night. It was more than food, it was 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 that I think is a very good second pass. And on the third pass, we're gonna get a lot more detailed and a lot more picky.