Cheating

[Mark Suszko]

Charlie, here we call that a “zero-frame trim” or “single-frame dissolve”.

I will admit only to using it one time as a test, to see if a client was serious about a change that was going to undo several hours of work. All for the placement of an eyeblink in an A-B-roll sequence of some twenty dissolves. Had they said it still looked bad, I would have heaved a big sigh, pushed the buttons for real, and written off another night of dinner with the family. Lucky for everyone, essentially seeing one extra preview was all we needed to see it really wasn’t an issue, avoid the unnecessary change. Sometimes just changing the pre-roll length made a difference in how people perceived a cut. Man, I am SO glad not to be cutting dissolves on linear systems anymore. Though I still have a warm spot for the Grass 141. I use it maybe once a month, mostly for cuts-only news now, so I’m staring to forget the more esoteric functions we never use anymore. My FCP skills are growing to compensate though, and I’m happy for the trade.

I find that after a lot of concentrated viewing of a very tiny piece of the puzzle, you need to periodically go back sometimes and watch everything from the beginning, as one whole, to re-establish what the overall flow and feel was. Kind of a ‘forest for the trees’ kind of thing. That is lost time, sure, but far better than losing your course on the entire edit and getting a bad product that was rushed. You often see the work in a different light on these breaks and find errors or things that need changing to work even better.

[Charley King]

[Mark Suszko] “you need to periodically go back sometimes and watch everything from the beginning, as one whole”

In total agreement on that one.

Charlie

ProductionKing Video Services
Las Vegas, Nevada
Charlie@proking.net

[Bill Morris]

Yup, had the opportunity to “cheat” just this evening.

I’m editing a stage play, with two camera angles to choose from. In angle one, the footage is rock steady, but the actor flubs his line. In angle two, the footage is shaky, and the line delivery is perfect.

There are only three words, “father in law”, and he stutters the “F” on the first angle.

You guessed it: put the good line into the good footage. The actor is far enough from the camera and in motion, so you’d have to look really close to notice that his lips don’t quite match the words.

[Charley King]

Just goes to re-affirm my old saying. I’d rather be lucky than good any day.

It still says it all don’t it?

Charlie

ProductionKing Video Services
Las Vegas, Nevada
Charlie@proking.net

[Mike Cohen]

Interesting responses, thanks for the affirmation.

I used the “hit a bunch of buttons and preview the same edit” routine once or twice.

Another trick was to find a consonant sound from another word to fix a bad read of a different word. On tape to tape editing you had a slim chance of making it work, but when it worked it was a miracle. Today’s NLE systems make this kind of audio edit much easier. There were no waveforms in the linear days, and an insert edit was immediately destructive.

EDL management was so important back in these days. You could in fact extend an edit then ripple the remaining edits. I always tried to build in cut points, even a fade to black, so should I need to re-do a sequence, I would only need to go as far as the nearest cut. Given the poor head switching performance of our MII decks (you read that right) a cut point was a blessing, since match frames tended to be a field off.