Craig Slattery
Forum Replies Created
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[Robbert-Jan van der Does] “I’ve just watched it here in the Netherlands.
Great interview, beautifully shot, lit and edited.
Compliments to all involved.”Many thanks, Robbert-Jan,
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For folks not in the UK you can follow comments on the show on twitter @bbcCultureShow
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I just want to plug my program, tonight on BBC Two, Sam Mendes A License to Thrill. 1/2 hour special on the director of the new Bond Film SkyFall. 10pm. After a great first trial on FCPX for the Culture Show I decided to cut this special in fcp7. Mainly because I was quite ill at the beginning of the edit and I feared I would have to hand the edit over to another editor. Unfortunately we have no other editors on our team that can cut in FCPX. Thankfully I finished the cut this morning (very early). And next week I’m back in FCPX for the magazine program. How cool will my suites look with the new iMacs and hopefully ( an equally thin 2nd screen in the future) running FCPX . Loving this new mac world.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “FCPX is so completely weird, it makes Motion look sane. And no one will hire you by the hour for either of them.”
I just want to be clear, are you saying you don’t like it?
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My people say not until next year.
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[Craig Seeman] “At some point one “brave” editor who may have been honing their chops on X with their copy at home, steps forward and says, “I think I can deliver with this,” and some facility manager/producer begrudgingly allows them to give it a go.”
Check out my post, ‘FCPX in Action’ three day ago.
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[Mark Dobson] “Looks like television to me!”
Cheers. As I mentioned, not all our items are self shot. This one was and they can be a challenge. But this looks ok I think.
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[Mark Dobson] “Just wondering which section of this programme was cut on FCPX. I’ve just found it on iPlayer and am interested in looking at the cut you made.”
The 1st item on the show after the menu.
[Mark Dobson] “Presumably you carried out some primary grading before sending the piece down the line? Or was that all done in Glasgow? “
No, all the grading is done by one professional grader in a grading suite. In London we grade in Color, not sure what they use in Glasgow.
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[Oliver Peters] ” I realize the BBC actually uses a lot of difference NLE brands in its different units (news, sports, docs, dramas, etc.), but I was curious about the implementation of Premiere Pro versus FCP X”
Its not a case of Premiere versus FCPX, I spoke to my producer and said I wanted to try out FCPX on our show, she said, yes go for it, so we asked the village to set up a suite.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “do you want to give an indication to the manner in which you handle the programme segments in ingest, organisation and timeline versus your previous editor? genuinely curious – figure that would probably be pretty broadly interesting read as it were. “
The injest team at the BBC Production Village have 1000s of hours of footage to injest across many programs. They have a naming protocol that frankly only they can understand. Each item on our show would normally be a 2 day edit. In legacy FCP we import two folders, RUSHES and ARCHIVE. The clips within the folders have names that mean nothing to the end user. I never rename clips or create bins, the edits are quick turnaround so I just get stuck right in. Right from the get go FCPX has advantages. Scanning the footage I can see PTC’s, so I select each clip and simply tag it with a keyword PTC that creates a smart folder called PTC, Wow that was easy! So I selected all the shots of Tom walking around, tagged them, ‘Tom Walking’, I could see the clips for the interviews so I tagged them Multicam media. That took all of 2 minutes. We had two interviews both about 30 mins long, creating the multicam clips took like 4 mins each. (that was incredible, for that reason alone I was having a GREAT day).
So the item was this years RIBA Stirling Prize for Architecture, 6 buildings on the short list, Presenter Tom Dyckhoff, two interviews, self shot (All the directors that self shoot on our show have had camera training, but they are not clearly as good as the professionals, so you really have to mine the footage, plus they tend to over shoot. We also have a guy on the production team that shoots most of our second camera)
I began by recording the guide commentary (COM) then we blocked the structure.
I put gap clips on the primary story line to connect the COM, PTC’s I put on the primary story line and also the full length interview multicam clips. So that process was to create the structure, commentary would change and things may get moved around but we had the basis of the story, and it took 15 – 20 mins.At this point I had a story that was about 50 mins long. In legacy FCP having two multiclips 20 mins long on the time line, the system would be shitting itself. X didn’t miss a beat. It was incredible. The hardest part of the edit was finding the story in the main interview. Rem Koolhass may be a ‘starchitect’ but he’s also a typical dry, slightly humorless Dutchman. Ideally we would have liked him to say something brilliant about his two buildings on this years short list but he didn’t. He did however have a grin on his face when he said ‘sublty’ and ‘Iconoclasm’ was a hard sell, especially to clients expecting an icon on the London skyline. So we ran with an argument that all the buildings on this years short list are perhaps not as showy as they have been in the past, and is this reflective of our straightened economic times.
Now that we had the interviews cut down and new com written, we just had to paint the item up. BTW to record the new VO I would alt-w (create gap clip) in the spot required, use the trim tool to expand it out, bit like using the select track tool in FCP 7 only super fast.
At this point our Executive Producer was asking to see the rough cut. This at 3pm on day two, she was out of the building so we had to email her a version. (straight from X nice feature) She came back with comments, she wanted to see more in the second interview and we had to loose one of the PTC’s she didn’t like. So a little more re writing and scanning the second interview. (I had duplicated the project from day one, so we revisited that to find a juicy bit to put back into the cut.)
This is how I painted the item. One building on the list was the 2012 Olympic stadium. We had loads of archive of the stadium. The COM was already recorded and connected to a gap clip. I scanned the footage in the event library made rough selects and edited the clips directly to the primary storyline in front of the gap clip containing COM. I then slid the COM under the selected shots, deleted the gap clip and connected the music track. I then trimmed, slipped, rearranged, lengthened to my hearts content and didn’t give a hoot about what was happening further down the time line. So Ok, the COM moves around when you move clips. On occasions we might have 2 or 3 com clips, they may get out of order as you move the clip it’s connected to. But when you get in the groove its so simple to slide it back or move it forward. Plus it looks cool when the clips bounce out of the way of each other to make room.
So that’s it, just before we finished the edit, we got a call from Scotland and they wanted us to add 40sec to our cut because one of their items had issues, so we did.
Fine trimming is the one downside. But only because its so easy, you just don’t know when to stop!! I must have exported 4 or 5 QT’s because each time I’d play the item back I’d make another little tweak, or I’d rearrange a shot. Because nothing really stops FCPX from playing, you can move shots, extend, delete and it just keeps playing.
As I said before we exported the ProRes 422 QT down the line, used X2Pro for audio and it was completely seamless.
