[Jacob Kirby]

Thanks for the help,

For the record, we’re not professionals and I wasn’t even on set… If I was I would have definitely said something about it. It was a learning experience for everyone involved and I’m just trying to help them piece it together. I’m not looking for perfect audio here, I’ve got plenty of music from local musicians to cover up the really bad stuff and some of it actually sounds pretty good. There’s one scene in particular where they’re in front of a fun house and some kind of motor is making a constant hum. It’s almost as loud as the dialogue and pretty distracting, I’m just looking to bring that down as much as possible so I can cover it up with a song or something.

I don’t have Izotope on my computer, is it worth looking into? Can I do just as good a job in Soundtrack pro or Soundsoap? We’ve already established that we aren’t doing any ADR. Some of the actors aren’t around anymore and this project is far from perfect anyway. They’re just good friends of mine and I’m trying to help them wrap it up so we can move on to the next one and do a better job there.

[Jacob Kirby]

Hey everyone,

Recently I’ve run into a new problem… The director. He’s very pushy and inexperienced, he show’s very little respect for me even though I’ve agreed to edit his movie for free. I really want to edit the movie, not because it’s really good or anything but I’ve already invested a lot of time into the project. I was on set every day managing data and I also spent a huge chunk of time syncing audio and video. And when it comes down to it, I really need completed projects under my belt. I’ve cut a couple scenes but he thinks this movie should be finished within the next week. He’s been breathing down my neck and I really don’t appreciate it. He thinks a reasonable deadline for a 30 minute movie is 1 month from the day they started to shoot. He says I should have a rough cut by then and I tried to tell him that no one can make a rough cut that fast. Especially when I’m workin on spare parts and spare time. I’ve also got a job, school and other projects I have to tend too. He called me the other day and I got him to move the deadline back 4 weeks. It’s now a reasonable deadline for a ROUGH cut but I still don’t feel right about it. At first he wanted to come over, take the footage and edit it himself. I had to practically beg him not too because I didn’t feel like starting a fight. He doesn’t know how to edit, and this is only his first movie. He’s being a really big deuschbag and I don’t know how to handle the situation because I’m only 21 and he’s in his late 30’s. It’s really hard to tell him anything I’ve talked to the Assistant director and other people on set and we all came to the same conclusion that he has no idea what he’s doing. His screenplay was descent, but if it wasn’t for the DP and Audio guy his footage would have been totally screwed over. He has this illusion of how editing should be done but no real experience to back it up. He keeps trying to tell me he know’s how to edit but he also told me he has Sony Vegas, he asked me how to flip a shot in post and he couldn’t figure out how to play footage from the XD Cam and thought something was wrong with it. I really don’t appreciate his intimidation tactics and lack of respect, and I’m about ready to hand it over and save my dignity. I really need finished projects though. Anybody have some good advice on handling this situation tactfully? He told me that he wants me to be open and honest with him so I think I should send him an email and work a couple of these things out.

[Jacob Kirby]

Thanks for the advice,

I’ll have to check out that DVD. I spend a lot of time organizing my Data before I edit, it’s a form of procrastination. I have everything labled by scene and shot type and sorted all my data into bins according to the scene. I also have all the good takes checked off and extra audio in each folder. This was the first project I’ve worked on where all the audio was sent to a field recorder and I had to sync it up in post. I ended up merging all the clips together and getting them organized, now it’s time to start editing. I’ll probably be posting on here more often because this project is a learning experience for me. I’ve done a lot of editing for my jobs and film school too so I’ve got experience. This is one of the first fiction projects that I’ve really taken seriously soo it’s pretty exciting. Most of the time I end up doing government work or marketing stuff, this is gonna be a welcome change.

[Jacob Kirby]

Thanks for the Advice, I’m gonna spread it across a couple sequences to start out with so I can have more elbow room when I’m trying to cut the scenes. Eventually I’ll end up merging them all into the same timeline. Something weird happened when I was editing today. Normally when I’m going through my timeline frame by frame I can also hear the audio playing frame by frame and watch the levels change. I’ve found this very helpful for finding the write frame to place an edit but it randomly stopped working. I can’t hear any audio when I’m keying through the timeline and the levels stay frozen. It only registers when I press play. Does anyone know how to fix that?