what is editing speed ?

[Michael Gissing]

Ergonomics for me is the key. A comfortable work space to get into the zone and a physical setup that means I can get through a lot without it hurting. Simple things like monitor placement make a huge difference to eye scan and fatigue.

Redundant key strokes or excessive mouse movement are a pet peeve when it comes to software but often that changes with dedicated control hardware. I am far more likely to edit with Resolve than Pr now as I have the Tangent Wave controller.

A jog wheel! rotary pots! You just can’t work as fast and accurately with keyboard and mouse. Mostly the editing for me is purely in regards to grade & finishing but the small jobs I do need to edit my proficiency with a regularly used piece of software makes me much faster than remembering keystrokes on a keyboard although a lot of software allows for key mapping. Even so it can be as simple as screen layouts and icon like symbols or knowing where things are in menus.

[Herb Sevush]

[Michael Gissing] “Ergonomics for me is the key”

The best money I ever spent on my editing system was for my chair.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Scott Witthaus]

[Herb Sevush] “The best money I ever spent on my editing system was for my chair.”

My neck, shoulders, elbows and wrist agrees with you 100%.

When I ran a post house here in town, I had an occupational therapist come in and evaluate each of my editor/artists desks, chairs and setups. Some of the best money we ever spent.

sw

Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter

[Aindreas Gallagher]

I think FCPX is constricted. I think there are less rooms. I think there aren’t enough places to slot enough different constructs of footage to hand, given the monolithic single process brick interface workflow.

I have lots of problems with X, but I mostly reject the lack of available constructed mental squirrel holes. You need string out tabs to scan, sometimes you need scattered floating bins at the edge, and pancake timelines – while oversold, can be serious business sometimes. Each case is very real, they all have worth, and none are available to you in X. They all represent messy opportunities for critical lateral decisions, which is a speed of its own at the business end when you’re scrabbling.

In a way I wonder what we’re talking about here with this notion of speed. Is it a mechanistic predetermined edit assembly flow? Is that the X magic sauce? Are X editors juiced by slavishly following the apple editing heuristic flow bible? Are they simply secondary storyline conditioned automatons bred to produce content?

I feel terrible saying it. Is that what this is? That seems such an awful irresponsible thing to have said. Well now I feel bad.

https://ogallchoir.prosite.com/
producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Bill Davis]

Yes it’s a Rabbit hole to define.

But for me the change in productivity is clear and quite simple.

For 10 years I edited one way – basically the same way as everyone I come up with during that era approached the type of general business editing that became the hub of my practice. It’s what made FCP Legend a legend. Import footage. Build and increment and manage your capture scratch. Build your timelines layer by layer. (For most of that time, make changes and wait for renders to complete) and eventually plop out a finished project after some rounds of revisions. Eventually archive the whole thing.

Seems to me that the percentage of how my time was divided was always spread out about the same for all of that working decade. Yes, get to know your assets and pay attention during log and capture – BUT The pressure was to BUILD A TIMELINE. On the tight deadlines, even if everything wasn’t in place – the sooner you started building timelines – the better off you were. They needed to be built, rendered, watched and then tweeked as little as necessary to avoid the re-render penalty. Yes, typically, even render time was OK because it was thinking time as Herb notes. Time to think is good time.

Then X came along for me and things changed in my fundamental thinking. Over that first year or learning, I slowly realized that I didn’t FEEL the same about getting a timeline going. In the initial stages of editing – a timeline was not the focus. Working with the assets was different. Any idea that came up didn’t NEED a timeline. I could use a keyword to tag footage into groups – and as I did that, I was saving editing INTENTIONS that I could recall later.

Tagging 5 scenes with one custom keyword was EXACTLY the same as doing a 5 scene stringent on a workspace timeline had once been. Except that instead of a fixed arrangement, it was a fluid pool or ideas – triggered by the collection itself. A group of tagged clips called “for the close” – got stuff I’d seen that I thought would be useful in the close. Unarranged, dynamic, but pre-trimmed and SAVED.

And suddenly cutting the program close went from something that took 20 minutes to something that often took TWO minutes. I’d thought about the assets for the close. Marked them. Percolated about them mentally. If anywhere along the way I saw something that might ADD value to the close – or another group of assets that make make a better version 2 of the close – It got THAT tag. And when it was time to actually CUT the close – the focus and ALL the trigger ideas were perfectly organized for me. I’d had CLOSE thinking over and over and over again as I worked – all instantly saved as keyworded range assets. And those collections, thoughts, and the ability to magnetically attach and refine just the CLOSE grouping using the CLOSE 1 OR CLOSE 2 IDEAS – or a mixture of each as needed – was super fast.

My brain = after 10 years of cutting things one way – had what felt to ME like a much better way. Less disjointed. Less scattered. Less rigid. For the first time – playing in the footage WAS editing. Making choices and judging narrative elements and SAVING those decisions – on the fly – before a timeline even existed.

Thats the fun of X for me. When I get to the storyline stage – there are not just bins of clips – there are all my snippets of assets and ideas marked and annotated and typically even pre-edited – so that a HUGE part of the assembly is already coded into the structure of my prep.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Typical for me after I got pretty fluid with X was that I was often days LATE getting my Timeline STARTED compared to my prior non-X decades of editing – but usually way MORE days EARLY getting the jobs done and delivered.

That’s why this whole obsession on how FAST is editing in X compared to editing in Premiere Pro or AVID is so screwy. It seems to be of interest of people who want to compare how fast you can build a timeline.

But in X, when you start to build a timeline – you might EASILY already be 50% done with your actual edit work. So what’s to compare?

Done properly keyboarding in X IS editing. But if you’re doing traditional timeline editing, thats not what most think of as Editing. It’s Prep. But the way X works, Range based work isn’t Prep if you do it the way X is designed. It IS editing. But you’ve got to know enough and recognize enough of the potential to work that way.

If you just operate X (or just THINK of how X works exclusively in terms of how a traditional NLE works – then you just focus on laying down and cutting scenes in order – then SURE you’re not going to believe X is faster than any other NLE. Because it isn’t. X is only faster if it’s driven like X is designed to operated. And if you just drive X even remotely like you drove your prior NLE – (which is quite possible and I see it all that time from X newbies) – you likely won’t be THAT much faster. It would be like buying a nice sharp electric hedge trimmer – and swinging it at the hedge as if it were a machete.

X is only fast if you let it be X.

THAT I know.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Herb Sevush]

[Bill Davis] “That’s why this whole obsession on how FAST is editing in X compared to editing in Premiere Pro or AVID is so screwy. It seems to be of interest of people who want to compare how fast you can build a timeline.”

That was the point of this thread. Editing begins when the editor starts evaluating assets (which sometimes happens on set before you even physically receive the assets) and ends when you ship your deliverables. Any tool that helps get the best product out in whatever time was allotted is valuable and the entire notion of “speed”, other than as a subjective feeling that encourages the editor, is pretty hazy.

If X helps you organize your assets in a way that is efficient and productive for you then it seems like a good fit.

I like watching my material in a timeline because I get a constant visual reference of length and pacing that is lacking when marking in a bin. My multiple timelines are someone else’s multiple bins or keyword collections. So while it might look like I’m hurrying to work on a timeline, I’m going thru the same review and conceptualization process that you describe in your work. The flow of editing remains the same even if the paths to getting there seem so different.

My analogy is baseball (not cars) – different hitters often have wildly different stances when they stand in the batters box, but as the pitcher release the ball and the hitter starts his swing, all good hitters come to the same starting point before launching forward – different initial approaches leading to the same eventual swing mechanics.

In editing there are a near infinite number of ways to approach cutting a show but in the end you have to evaluate, organize, assemble, review, manipulate and repeat over and over again no matter what your work habits look like. As Goddard said “a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Joe Marler]

[Herb Sevush] “A third aspect of speed has to do with how the program helps in organizing the project, what tools does it give you for sorting, labeling and finding clips and information, how flexible to ingest and get to work, how easy to export and finish.”

The importance and benefit of this varies hugely based on project size. E.g, in the previously-mentioned Audi commercial by Thomas Grove Carter, he keyworded and marked favorite and rejected ranges before starting the timeline phase of editing. However he could have probably just used bins without a huge penalty — it was a little project.

By contrast when Ken Burns edited The Civil War, he said “it took more than two years of absolutely solid work, with ten or twelve of us working six days a week, ten hours a day”.

https://archive.org/stream/Documentary_Filmmakers_Speak/Documentary_Filmmakers_Speak_djvu.txt

It was edited on a flatbed Steenbeck editing platform. It was 50,000 ft of 16mm film, which at 24 fps and 36 feet per min equates to 23 hours of material. Obviously part of that time was expended due to film-based linear editing, but part was not having an integrated DAM.

When it was restored they “re-edited” it using Avid but the content was essentially locked, it was mainly a clean-up and restoration job.

https://www.digitalcinemareport.com/article/restoring-ken-burns%E2%80%99-civil-war#.Vl7wn_nntaQ

Had the technology been available in 1988, the editing phase of The Civil War could likely have happened faster than two years. We know this because recent movies with high shooting ratios such as Gone Girl (200:1 ratio, 500 hrs of base material) were edited in much shorter periods — about 10 months in this case. I don’t know what DAM they used on Gone Girl but you can be certain it wasn’t looking through clip bins.

Although described as “DAM Lite”, at least FCP X has significant organizational capability. On larger projects where this is properly leveraged, the overall editing task can proceed much faster. On small projects it makes less difference. Whatever the degree of this contribution on a given project, it is part of “editing speed” since the product has been delivered to the editing team until they are finished.

[Mark Smith]

I agree with Bill. Once I got my X organizational skills sorted out, I realized that i was doing a ton of productive editing pre -pro while screening and organizting my material. Then when it comes to assembling a time line I feel like i KNOW my assets and with the way X works I can assemble and play around with my material freely.

I have some fights with X from time to time over features that I wish it had, but for the most part now that I have my working method sort out a bit, I mostly find X gets out of my way and lets me compose with my assets in a way that is much less restrictive than Legacy.

[Herb Sevush]

[Joe Marler] “Had the technology been available in 1988, the editing phase of The Civil War could likely have happened faster than two years. We know this because recent movies with high shooting ratios such as Gone Girl (200:1 ratio, 500 hrs of base material) were edited in much shorter periods — about 10 months in this case.”

It is fruitless to compare the length of time cutting a scripted 2 hr feature with that of an 11 hr documentary mini-series, and I don’t care what the shooting ratios were.

My guess is that much of the editorial time for the Civil War came in looking for and evaluating archival stock footage, a slow and laborious task that is not helped that much by automation of any kind. I’m guessing that Burns was using some sort database to reference all his material. I don’t know how much faster he would have gone using modern technology and how much of that speed increase would have come from the speed of non-linear editing vs the speed of digital asset management I couldn’t hazard a guess.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Mark Suszko]

I thought Herb’s first post was perfect and said everything that needed to be said. Until Bill’s excellent follow-up. Between them, they really nailed it.