[Andrew Rendell]

Late to the party on this (having an unusually busy start to the year) but I have a couple of composer friends who I use when I can but more often than not I use library stuff. (I’m a musician myself but my stuff is rarely the right thing for my editing work).

I don’t think in terms of “best” (that’s far too subjective) I think of what is right for the project. It’s fairly regular for me to need something orchestral and I tend to use Audio Network for that because there’s never time to get it arranged and recorded (and synthesised/sampled classical instruments rarely succeed IMO) and I’m reasonably familiar with ANW’s stuff. Then there’s the stuff that needs a very modern feel, so I might get asked for, say, dubstep (and it has to be dubstep) so that’s usually a trawl through libraries.

I think it’s fair to say that there is no part of the programme making process where the phase “you get what you pay for” is more apt than music.

[Andrew Rendell]

IANAL but gut feeling is that bookshelves where you can see there are lots of books but none are featured or easy to identify would be fine but anything that is clearly identified would need to be cleared with the publisher(s).

[Andrew Rendell]

The end of the fine cutting is known as picture lock, at that point graphics may be rough versions, supers won’t be lined up to the appropriate safe area, commentary will be a rough recording for timing (your own or an EPs voice).

Once you get to picture lock, you can split sound and pictures. Recording master voice and doing the sound mix can be done in a day as long as there isn’t any more sound design / track laying to be done. The same for pictures, grading can be done inside a day if you’re just going for even-ness and level correction and aren’t ambitious for anything creative, designing scoreboards is a day in itself but dropping them into the online can be done pretty quickly once they’re prepared, maybe an hour but it depends how many there are. Then recombining audio with pictures ought to be very quick as well.

QC and exports for broadcast is more complex than it used to be, that’s a day in itself for 6 versions in my opinion.

If you’ve taken on 4 days work on a 2 day schedule you’ll have to be really focussed on where you need to spend time to do things properly and where you can get away with as less ideal result, maybe using clippers to keep levels “safe”, etc.

[Andrew Rendell]

The first thing is to find out what is required. If you are being approached to create a commercial-style video supporting a cause, then the project is not one where you have a free hand to create whatever you want. Nor would I expect it to be essentially button pushing, being told exactly what to do.

The question is how they want to use your film making skills to promote their agenda.

I have no particular interest in the “pro life” arguments, but googling it brings up all kind of scare tactics and propaganda techniques. If they want you to employ your expertise in selling, creating associations in the minds of the viewers, etc, to go beyond a dispassionate view how would you feel about that? If they want to use ad hominen, straw man arguments, black-and-white fallacy (false dilemma), appeal to authority, appeal to prejudice, pensée unique, oversimplification, loaded language and so on, is that ok?

You say you don’t want to misrepresent the theme but what happens if you come to think that there is a hidden agenda, for example, one of social control or discrimination, separating people into in-group and out-group, the expression of power in a hierarchy. You would be going against the brief to mention it…

I sometimes find it hard to be dispassionate about a subject, often I think I’m dispassionate when I start a gig but come to realise that I’m sucked in. My best technique is to simplify the language and just show what happened, don’t editorialise. Right now I have a lot of footage of children who are being killed and terribly injured by barrel bombs and it’s very tempting to make comments, but stepping back I believe that it would be a mistake to do that. Keep it simple, just show the footage of those kids being carried into makeshift hospitals and being treated, this is the routine in that particular place at this point in time, the expressions on the faces of family members and medics say far more than any words I could write, have confidence that the audience will get it.

I’m going off on wild speculation to some extent, you need to know a bit more about the project (whether you want to share it here is your choice) but I would say that when considering projects that are difficult or controversial there’s no shame in saying “I don’t think I’m the right person for this job” or “I have some concerns…” and discuss them before accepting or backing out.

[Andrew Rendell]

If I were you I’d give him a copy of the footage.

Think about what Wayne has written, on the shoot you were essentially managing a team of creative people, which is like the proverbial herding of cats. We don’t know what happened on the day but all sorts of scenarios come to mind (there’s no need for you to elaborate unless you wish to).

It’s good that you’re going to meet to talk about it. Leave your ego at the door and clear up any misunderstandings and you’ll probably both learn something.

[Andrew Rendell]

Reading this thread I feel so boring, no degree, no multiple careers, no wide range of different skills. I started cutting around 1989 and still make my living from it. The big Z is right that when you get good at something it does get boring in some ways (NLEs are indeed seriously boring, but you can do some interesting things with them) and I moved from sports to music to factual TV to find an area where solving creative challenges keeps it interesting for me. I’ve also done plenty of boring cutting jobs for the pay check.

If I’ve any advice it’s this: don’t let what you do to make a living take over you, you need to have a life outside work. I paint pictures, make experimental music and go to the theatre as often as I can afford to, but it doesn’t matter what things you do as long as you have something that means when you’re having a bad time at work (and we all do from time to time) you don’t interpret it as an attack on yourself personally, which you can do if you identify yourself too strongly with what you do for a living. And that wider experience of life will make you a better filmmaker as well. So what are you going to do next weekend, sit in front of a computer learning some intricacies of a software package or go to a ball game? Go watch the he game, man 😉

[Andrew Rendell]

IMO tiff and png work best. If I have one jpg I usually just put it in the timeline and render it but if I have a lot it’s better to convert them to png or tiff because FCP can get a bit glitchy and slow with lots of jpgs.

[Andrew Rendell]

Sorry I haven’t checked in for a few days, there’s an article here on the Cow about the problem with FCP
https://library.creativecow.net/lyon_matt/fixing-fcp-assets/1

[Andrew Rendell]

I would like to confess to sitting in the booth with the presenter, using a C391B – MTrack USB – laptop for yesterdays voice record.

[Andrew Rendell]

Actually, I have seen an NLE get confused by applying a frame rate to an audio track and therefore trying to speed it up to match the frame rate of the video. FCP, if I remember correctly. But that was because of the default frame rate in the setup for the software not matching the camera/sequence rate, not a setting in the audio file, and was easily fixed once it was spotted, so that might be worth checking. Other than that as long as it’s 48kHz it should sync for clips up to a few minutes long (for very long recordings the audio recorder has to be locked to the same sync source as the camera(s) to be sure).