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What Video to Keep in The Edit?

Were gonna move onto the next section, which is the post production work flow. You know, this is where you roll your sleeves up, and you go down into the mine. And you do that, kind of, you know, intensive labor. To now to take all of those beautiful gems in the raw, and polish them up. So, in order to get started, so, I'm gonna go through a work flow process. But I wanna make it really clear, I mean, this is not a Premiere entry level workshop. At this point, so I have downloaded all the media, I have renamed everything, so it meets my naming convention. And I will say, after years and years of working, I can't stress enough, the importance of organizing your media and naming it consistently. And naming it so it's really searchable, because it may seem like one small project, it doesn't really matter. But when you have 50 small projects, and five years, ten years later, you will hate yourself, if you don't organize well from the beginning. So treat it all as precious media, label it a...

ll clearly, know what camera it came out of. Have it really broken down properly. When you do that, in your file structure, you can bring it all into Premiere, and it matches your file structure. So, I can't express strongly enough, the need to be super, super organized with all of this. It makes it much easier, and the more complicated your films are, the more smoothly they're gonna flow, if you take this seriously, up front. When I imported everything into Premiere, it's already broken down into, here's my media, I'm gonna blow this window up. So, I've already broken down my media, you can see I've labeled it as an A camera, a B camera, the Osmo. And then, I did transcode the Osmo footage, because it was 4K and my computer couldn't handle it, so I couldn't actually watch it play in real time. So I down-res'ed it. So, when it brought it in, as you can see within each of my folders is, the media, all the media clips, this gives you a little window into how many clips came out of each camera. That's out of camera A, as you can see, it's quite a lot of clips, camera B, so you got a lot of media in there, to work with. Which is part of why it's so daunting, when it comes in. The Osmo, three clips, you know, it was one take, basically, the, he obviously had experimented, a tiny bit, before the actual take. Or maybe he started and stopped. So, it's daunting, when you open up Premiere, and you've got all this great footage, and you just don't even know where to begin. So, I always begin with my interview. Because, that is the one thing, that I know, can create a roadmap for the narrative spine of the story. In this instance, we had two cameras running, so I brought in the interview, and then I synced up the two cameras, so I could work in a multicam. So one of the things, in terms of workflow is, you don't want to start cutting something, and then, I decide, "Ooh I cut this, using the wide shot, and now I wanna cut to the tight shot, and where is that tight shot, and how am I gonna match up picture and audio, just for that sound bite?". So I don't know if folks here have worked in multicam, but a multicam, basically all you're doing is, creating a sequence that has both cameras and, allows you to toggle in between the two cameras. So here is a multicam for David's interview. Premiere has a multicam function, so as you can see here, I'm able to toggle between his tight shot, wide shot, so as I go through, it's really easy for me to decide, in the end of the day, when he's on camera, whether I want him tight or wide. I don't waste time going to find that segment, in the footage. So, in terms of my workflow, what I did is, I took the footage in, and I multi-cammed it and again, I'm sure you can learn how to do that, through one of the other, you know, this Premiere boot camp. But I wanna work with the multicam, and then what I did is, in my sequence, I dragged in the entire interview, into one sequence. And what I like to do, before when we were talking about transcribing, typically, this would have been transcribed. I would have read my transcript, and then I would have highlighted, what were the best sound bytes. And then I would have started to figure out, "Well what do I think might be in here?" And I would actually, now pull all of the best sound bytes in Premiere, so I could start working. When I'm under a time crunch, that's not happening. And also, I've been working long enough, personally, and if I'm the only one editing, I didn't need to transcribe, this interview is under half an hour, twenty-five minute interview. So, I like to work, sometimes, directly in Premiere, it saves me time. And I can hear my sound bytes easily enough, because I've been doing this long enough. So, what I did is, I went through David's interview, I played his interview, and then, every time I had sound byte that I liked, I raised it up to the next level in my program. So, here's an instance, where here's the first thing he said that might be usable. "My name is David Goad, and we're in my workshop." You can see my splicing, I elevated that up, maybe usable, this next bit, not using it. So then, my next, "It's in West Seattle,", not gonna use his pause, his ums, his ahs, "My workshop's in West Seattle,". He's said it twice, I don't know yet, which one I might use. So, I went through this whole interview, and I just started pulling what's usable. "And, I've been here for about nine months now. I do violin repairs and restorations, and sales, do some bow work and I have a small rental program." Alright, so right now I'm just weeding, to see what is viable, if it's boring, I didn't bother. "What's the name of your violin shop?" "David Goad Violins." "Okay". Alright, he's just gonna tell me the name of his shop, I'm not gonna use that. So look what happens, this next one, oh my gosh, it went to the second level, that's my, like, double star level. "I do violin repair and restoration." Ooh, that's probably all I need to know, so, that got bumped up to level two, for me now, three for me now. You're gonna see that, as I worked my way down, all of a sudden down here, you start to see, some level fours. "The time you spend learning to work on the instrument, is kind of equivalent to the time you spend, learning how to play the instrument." That was a great sound byte, of things he said. So what I do, I literally, am scrubbing through this, to find what rises to the top. Figuratively, and literally. So, to your question earlier, what about B roll, and you can't really transcribe all of that. I do this for everything. So anything that might create a narrative spine for me, is, you know, I'm listening, and then, I visually map it in this way. And what that does, is already, you can see in this sequence, I already have the beginning of what will be, the finished film. I am pretty confident, that anything that hit this level, is in my film. Then, there's a good chance that, I needed some of the other things that are in levels two and three. So, I'm using the actual tools here, to build a script physically. That I am, literally going to copy in. So, that was phase one, for me. And, you'll train your ear, but everybody knows, in a moment in an interview, when it's like, "Ding" that was it, that was the goal. You know it, you just feel it, you hear it. So, in this first round, I would suggest, anything that has a possibility of being used, is here, sometimes that's just the, and this is level two, so that's like maybe, a lot of the time, that's just like the, like the necessary information. You know, it's stuff that I might need. I will probably never go back to, this layer down here. I can almost discard, you know, half of the interview, at this point. I don't actually discard it, but you know, in terms of this sifting, which is what you're doing. You're sifting out the stuff that, you know, you're able to disregard from here on. So, it's a really helpful way for me to work. I think it's a really, you know, especially for those of us who struggle scripting on paper, 'cos that's the way a lot of people work, is on paper. So, you would have this transcript, you'd highlight, and then you would create a new document. Where you would drag your sound bytes into this, new document, and in column A, you would have your sound bytes, and in column B, you would list your visuals. So, it's another way of working, that's very efficient, but it may be more efficient, or comfortable, for some, than others. I tend to work, you know, I like using my hands and my eyes, you know, and for me, this works really well. So, to get then from point A to point B, now that you've got this, I have literally taken, and this is his complete interview. I have literally highlighted, these are not linked, right now, but I highlighted what's on tracks 2,3,4, I also grabbed all of the audio attached. I'm sorry, these are not linked, but they were brought in unlinked, but you can see, I highlighted everything, and if they had been linked, audio would have come with. It would all highlight. And then, I threw that all into, the next sequence I created, which is called his string out. In his string out, I then, literally, created title cards, and now I'm gonna go back to my window, so you can see. So, I literally created title cards, I'll get out of the multicam, because it doesn't, you don't need to see it that way. So, if I apply this I, literally, now have title cards, "My name is David Goad, and we're in my workshop, it's in West Seattle.". "My workshop's in West Seattle, and I've been here for about, nine months now." "I've had my business here, for about nine months now." "Early on, when I first started, I worked on guitars, as well, I was working for a music shop in Dallas, and I was doing, like, inventory and stocking, and stuff like that and it was pretty boring, and I liked hanging out in the repair shop. And eventually, they had a spot open up, in the apprenticeship program, so I got into it there. And, that's where I got started." "I do violin repairs and restorations," So I've broken this down, as you can see, to just, I came up with categories, and then I started moving sound bytes around too. Because in the end, he might have said something relevant to what happened earlier, so I do title cards, that are themes. So, as you saw, I had a, you know, what he does, I believe I don't have this highlighted, which is why we're not seeing those. So, I came up with the themes that he had addressed. Which is my next level of organization. So, once I've come up with these themes, then I'm also able to now here group together, the same topic thoughts, and I can hear, which was the best version. If he said things multiple times, now I can start the next level of distilling to what is a keeper, and what's to be tossed out. So, if you look at my string out, I've now moved onto this, right, so now you can see that I've, usually what I'll start to do, is bring these together as well, I start to close up my gaps, so that I can listen to it more continuously. And I work my way down. Now you can see that, I've still got stuff that's, kind of, rising higher than other sound bytes. And I really grouped this by what I thought was interesting and what I felt he was addressing. So then, from there, once I'd done that, and I've listened, and I've started to, kind of, hear, "alright, what's the usable stuff?" Now, I'm at this place where, it's like, I'm making a really rich sauce, because I've gotten rid of all the fat and the water and everything else, and I'm trying to get to the essence of the flavor here. So, the next step, for me is to take that string out, and I start to, actually, build my script. So, then I went into my first, lemme pull down, by the way, older sequences we stick in a bin called, Z archive, put the Z on it. So that it's always at the bottom. I never throw a sequence away, in Premiere you can have as many sequences as you want. So just in case you want to go back to version you had yesterday that, you know, maybe you thought you'd moved on from, but you know there was that one great bit that you had put together, but now you ditched it. It lives somewhere. So, I always keep my older sequences, and the next thing I did then, was I started to put together, the radio cut for David. So, I have a feeling, because I was in a rush, I may have condensed time here. So, let's see, lemme go back to his string out, it's possible, okay, so I think I pictured up my radio cuts. So, the next thing I would have done is put together just the radio cut, where I'm actually building the script, that we'll end up, here it is, I believe this is it, that will end up in his finished piece. So I'm, literally, just creating now, the actual audio, no picture, I don't care at this point, if his face is gonna appear on screen, not on screen, wide type, I don't really care. But I am boiling this down, just to a radio cut of his best sound bytes, and I'm putting it in an order. And I can do that in my sequence, and start to mix it up, and move it around. Now what happens is, I will keep my string out intact, so I don't lose anything that I might want. And I will start a radio cut. As opposed to, you know again, throwing things away. It's just the way I prefer to work, I think it also gives me license to make and remake things, and not worry that I can't recreate what I did yesterday. So, kind of, frees me up, because I'm always afraid of losing something.