Andrew Rendell
Forum Replies Created
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[Richard Herd] “You need to take classes like drama (in the English department) and acting (in the theatre department).
That means you really need to know how to tell a story. What is a dramatic beat? What is story structure?”
Although story structure, dramatic beats, etc, are very much the kind of thing that I go on about, and I’m convinced that to be a decent editor you have to understand what everyone else does in the team, I disagree that an editor has to do classes in all those things. My point being that if you have to learn everything (and this also applies to learning every piece of software) before you start, you’ll never be in a position to actually start because there are new ideas (and new software) coming along all the time.
I’d say you have to learn by combining doing editing yourself, discussing editing with experienced editors and watching how experienced editors actually do it, plus studying films and tv shows to work out how it’s done (from every point of view). Doing that in a formal learning environment (i.e., doing a course) is great, but I don’t think it’s a necessity – I learnt “on the job” so to speak and when I read In The Blink Of An Eye, I’d been editing for about 5 years and was highly impressed with how Walter Murch had managed to explain what we do in regular language, without all the jargon that we use.
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Think about what a crowd sound actually contains; lots of voices that are singing the same words but with variations in pitch and timing.
There are some reverbs in Logic Pro which can get quite close to the kind of roar you get in a sports stadium if you’ve got voices for it to work on, but you can’t unmix a mixed music track.
(N.B. I had a show a few years ago where a bunch of guys started singing “We Will Rock You” at one point, a capella, no music being played, and we still had to clear the song).
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I guess I’ll have to get a reel someday, I still haven’t got round to it yet – been too busy over the last few years 😉
I totally agree that if you learn one NLE thoroughly you can transfer your editing skills to any other NLE very quickly and in the long run it’s your editing skills that are important rather than what NLE you use (but it’s also true that not everyone sees it that way).
But it’s also important that you can get stuff done according to the brief, get it done quickly and be a “good” guy to work with and that can be something of a Catch 22 when you’re starting out. Sadly most people don’t hire hands-on assistants much these days, but if you can find a position even for a short time assisting an experienced editor it’ll be well worth while.
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I use PPMulator (via Audio Hijack Pro) for checking sound levels in FCP and that has a M/S mode (the S not moving at all = your output is mono, S higher than M = you’ve got a phase problem somewhere. I find that’s usually enough to get me by and it’s a lot cheaper than a full outboard phase meter).
I’m slightly mystified over the sensors on the sides of your head not letting you know which is stereo and which is mono.
The first thing I’d check with respect to the timeline is whether you’ve got the music clips inadvertently set to pan = 0.
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Copyright issue; ripping a DVD and putting it on the internet without the copyright holders permission (in writing, please) is against the law, however using clips for the purpose of criticism is allowed under Fair Use (that’s how people can use material without getting permission).
[I am not a lawyer and I’m unqualified to offer legal advice, please look up fair use yourself.]
In doing review shows for tv, we usually get a clip reel from the distributor (that’s for anything current) but I am aware of clips being ripped from a DVD.
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In addition to what Shane says, what is your storage and where are your projects?
The reason I ask is this: I did a job a couple of months ago where two FCPs were using an XSAN storage for shared media and the picture stuttering/ frequent crashing rings big bells. What we found was that the system was struggling when we had our projects on the XSan, but was much better when we moved to having the projects local and using a folder on the XSan to pass projects between the suites.
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Well, used footage is your cut’s running time, shot footage is the duration of all your rushes, so you could just loop them all and drop them onto a new timeline and read the duration (actually it’s probably better to loop groups of rushes and drop them onto a new timeline, then when you get to a couple of hours, start another new timeline… then add up the lengths of the timelines).
In theory you could probably work it out by doing an export in current settings and comparing the size of that with the amount of storage used for the source media, but I think that in practice it would be too fiddly to work out the actual size of just the source material without getting other stuff included and messing up your calculation.
TBH your used footage could be longer than the running time if you’ve got lots of layered effects, but most of the time it wouldn’t be enough to make much difference to the shooting ratio.
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Something that says “I’ve got bugs” to the world is going to be hard to shift, however good the product is. Perhaps a good approach might be: Has your dog picked up a flea from another dog? Zap it with our wonderful new product before it becomes a problem, and by the way, it also works with other types of bugs… (does it work for dog fleas?)
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For me the quietest time was the first half of 2010 and there has been a gradual creep back of work since around june/july 2010. Still a bit uneven but in the last 3 or 4 months I’ve actually had to turn a couple of jobs down because I’m busy and can’t fit them in.
Most of my stuff has been with people I already have a professional relationship with, but I have had a handful of new contacts and if anything people are more fussy about experience/track record than ever.
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It’s possible to have multiple timecode displays, with each window displaying the timecode of a different track, using the timecode burn-in effect.
There are a couple of ways of displaying the timecodes while you’re actually editing, but it’s only really practical to have a couple of tracks displayed at a time, but as you rarely need to look at them when cutting I don’t find that a problem, so edit what you need to (switching the timecode display as necessary) then do the burn in of all the tracks you need to display when you’ve done editing.
Subclips are fine.
I’m not sure what your editor means with “only one audio channel can maintain TC through an edit”. It’s a bit too vague without the context.
Why do you need to conform from timecode? I usually pass the audio to a dubbing mixer as an omfi or an aaf with embedded media, as it’s much quicker to load up that way.