[Erik Pontius]

I hope I didn’t set the expectation that if you read all these books, you’ll suddenly become a great editor. It is an art and it does come with experience. But I find that it is important to know the rules BEFORE you break them…only then do you know how much you can get away with and how much you can’t. The film “Stay” is probably a good example…the deliberate use of jump cuts and continuity errors furthers the story along on a subconscious layer for the viewer. But the editors were well aware of why and what they were doing.

The “Behind the Sceen” does spend a good portion of the book discussing what challenges Murch and Minghella had in getting FCP be able to edit a major motion picture. It is perhaps not a book about editing, so much as the their experiences during the editing process. There are parts where they are waiting for a team of programmers to write custom patches for them in order to correct problems and limitations (must be nice to be a big studio) to barely meet milestone markers in their schedule. Murch had been a long time Avid user, so switching to FCP was a challenge for him as well.

Murch does a pretty good commentary on the Cold Mountain DVD. I enjoy watching movies on DVD, often times re-watching with commentary on to get an insight on the film or going back to analyze scenes. What I find especially useful from an editor’s perspective is when deleted scenes have commentary tracks. You then get a good understanding of why a scene was cut. Often it starts with “I loved this scene, but…” and reasons vary from pacing to that it was just fluff that didn’t add to the story. Understanding what wasn’t included in a film is almost as important a understanding what was. Murch, btw, addresses the issue of cutting what you love in his “Blink of an Eye” book.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

You probably don’t have much to worry about with the cropping issue since you’re using PAL (unless you are cropping on purpose). Our bassackwards NTSC format has all kinds of issues including different frame sizes (720×486 for D1 and 720×480 for DV/DVD)….not to mention all those issues with frame rates…

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

You may want to look into trapcode particuliar as well… The swirly lines look alot like the organic lines preset going head on into a camera.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

What are you editing on? There is a company called 3prong (3prong.com) that makes a Avid AVX plugin called “FlickerFix” that does a great job at reducing flicker. You apply the effect to footage, then position 3 boxes representing normal levels of bright, dark and chroma around in the frame…you set these as a reference level values and it levels out the rest of the clip to match.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

You might also check your audio settings you are using for your export against your actual project settings. Most DV projects and others usually are 48khz, and not 44.1. In other words, you’re telling Avid to do extra work to convert and combine your audio from 48khz clips to 44.1khz.

As for your field ordering, in my experience, using Avid 1:1 uncompressed meridian codec during capture, then exporting a reference file (or same as source), then importing that into an app like Procoder or others to transcode, that app will believe that the video is progressive (no fields) and square pixels. I usually have to manually change the source setting in Procoder to lower field first and the proper pixel aspect.
Another gotcha when making DVD’s from 601 frame size material is that some transcoders will incorrectly crop the extra pixels off, usually an odd number like 3 pixels from the top and 3 from the bottom to conform to the frame size used for DVD (in NTSC, itu 601 720×486 gets cropped to 720×480 for DVD compliant MPEG-2)…this then effectively causes the field order to be reversed. A proper encoder will crop an even number (2 from the top, 4 from the bottom in most cases).

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

If you have a lot of color correction, effects, transitions, etc… Avid will render these to then be referenced by the reference file…so it’s not just a wav file that is being created.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Both have a “search inside” feature at Amazon.
“On Film Editing” by Edward Dmytryk is almost a “cliff notes” of editing. It’s a small book packed with great info. He discusses when to cut and why to cut. There is a good discussion of cutting dialogue. Cutting action, such as why in some case you need to overlap frames from one cut to the next in order for the viewer to realize what has happened. Real excellent book.
“The Eye is Quicker” by Richard Pepperman covers similiar concepts (actually referring to and quoting the Dymtryk book) with the added benefit of illustrating the technique (both right and wrong) through real film examples. I especially like the chapter “Conflicts in Interest” in which he talks about knowing the story well enough to edit (even if it requires deviating from what was scripted) with emotion that helps further the story along. All good stuff…

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

It’s been a little while since I did it. I found a high resolution photograph of a coil of rope (actually a weathered rope wrapped around a boat dock pylon). I found one of the rope pieces that was clean and generally straight. I used photoshop to cut out the piece I needed, then saved as a PSD. Imported this into AE, created a comp, created a mask that was the size of the rope piece with a bit of feather and animated it to move from right to left. I modified the “weld” Particuliar preset to get the effect, color and particle bounce (or lack there of) I wanted. I created another comp with just the rope, nested this comp in the first and added shine and modified and animated it to create a glowing “cherry” on the end of the fuse.
Ended up with this:
https://www.burningfromice.com/video/misc/fuse.htm

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Procoder does an excellent job of encoding WMV from my experience.
600k is pretty low for full frame and full frame rate that will result in a good quality smooth motion encode.
Most videos designed for streaming are going to be using a smaller frame size (perhaps half size) and frame rates less than full (15, 12, 24, etc…) allowing the media encoder more more bits to work with each frame. CBR encoding is also used for streaming. Since you are restricted to full frame, full frame rate and broadband bitrates, the quality of your encode will suffer. There are always tradeoffs.
Do you have the option of creating a smaller sized video for streaming and give the user an option of downloading a full frame/full frame rate, high quality bitrate (2k+) version to download for local playback?

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

I list a few books that I’ve found useful for learning the art, history and theory of editing in the “Become an Editor” thread earlier. Many of them mention the physiology and pyschology behind why editors edit like they do…how the viewer percieves movement, how the juxtaposition of two cuts can have an implied meaning, etc…
Many things are trial and error, best practice type things you will learn as you edit more and experience more. Editing is very much a continual learning process….the more you edit and the variety of things you edit, the better you’ll become.

Erik