editing a music video, best approach?

[Bouke Vahl]

For music videos you probably are going to use a lot of different angles/ shots and probably you

[Cam Trejo]

I know what you are going through – and I tend to lean towards Ben’s method as well. It can seem a bit overwhelming but it gives you the best options when taking into consideration “ALL” the footage. We recently shot a music video on Super 16mm (all shot MOS)that literally had 10-12 different angles/locations/views. When I sat down to edit I first synched all the footage (the super tedious part), then started creating sequences that I could then through down on one timeline and then start peeling away from each track to determine which shot worked the best. Once I got into the flow of things it started to roll smoothly. BEst part is if you leave all those tracks on one timeline it is very easy to make changes – pull a little footage here, clip a little there, when the director or talent wants changes.

I’ve also used the multiclip feature and prefer even though it is nice I still prefer to “stack” my footage and chissle away until I get what I want.

Here is what we came up with on my latest project – directed by Dagen Merrill – featuring Kalai.

http://www.camerontrejofilms.com/kalai/kalai.mov

[Graham Trott]

I’ve just edited a music promo, stacking about 17 song run-through clips in FCP. Drum takes at the bottom (v1 etc) working my way up through bass, guitars and putting vocals on the top tracks. Once each track was synched with the audio track, it was just a case of chopping down through to whatever I wanted to see at a given point in the song. As mentioned already, the narrative stuff and bits and pieces can be dropped on wherever required.

This worked very well until it was time to grade. Adding magic bullet mojo to everything just made the whole thing grind to a halt and the project would not export to Compressor for outputting. In the end, I went along the timeline deleting any track portion that was not visible, then re-rendered. This has eased things up and the film is currently outputting.

I like the idea of keeping a master copy of all complete tracks on the timeline – something I have not done, but will on the next one. I haven’t tried ‘multiclip’, but plan to look at it now. The stacking method does seem to work though, and like someone said, you can cheat a bit and pull some shots out of synch where you don’t see what is being played – I’ve done that with the odd guitarist shot for a better expression.

Good luck!

Graham