[Kylee Pena]

What is your sequence setting, and the codec of your QT movie?

[Kylee Pena]

If she was told to burn it to an authored (playable DVD) at uni, they probably mean a regular DVD. These are standard definition.

If she has to have it HD, blu-ray if you want it playable on a TV (authored/playable DVD).

However, it seems she just has to hand in the file so it can be played back on a computer. In this case, she can drag the file onto a DVD (or CD, if it’s small enough). The catch is that if you play it off this DVD or CD, it will always be jerky because it can’t read fast enough to play it back. You always copy a file from a disk like this to a desktop before playback. There’s no way around it.

[Kylee Pena]

If you’re on Twitter, come on at 9PM ET and search for the hashtag #postchat (or use tweetchat.com). It’s a weekly hour long discussion among editors. From there, you can find a bunch of editors to follow. Many of the editors who lead the discussions have extensive Twitter lists with tons of editors, and you can just follow the whole list to get started.

Besides forums, this is a nice, real-time discussion among editors.

[Kylee Pena]

If you lower the bitrate, your file size should be decreasing.

Post a screenshot of the settings window you’re adjusting.

[Kylee Pena]

Right, our assignment was to shoot an emotive interview in a real world setting but with only one camera, no b-roll allowed, no other direction. So I went with the only thing that made sense. It really didn’t make much sense to me because I felt like it was an assignment in trying to get us into a situation we’ll commonly be in and do our best to get a lot of coverage, but apparently it wasn’t. I tried to argue with him that when my interviewee is having an emotional moment and crying in front of the camera, I am most certainly not going to say hey hang on with those tears for a second while I move the camera over here. I understand that snap zooming can be jarring and is basically a form of jump cut, but I do it a lot these days because I’m a one-woman show 😀 I’ve only been in the real world for about 3 years but I feel like these methods are more accepted and less jarring to people as time goes on and crappy reality shows continue to saturate our media, almost to a point for me personally where a multicam formal interview seems cheesy.

A lot of my profs in college were pretty out of touch with real world media creation. But I’ve been out nearly 3 years now and the bitterness is beginning to fade 🙂

[Kylee Pena]

Oh yea, forgot the itty bitty dissolves or wipes bit.

I wanted to second the snap-zoom. Go find your videographer and smack em. They should be paying attention. They should be paying attention during the interview. When I shoot interviews myself, I also try to go in closer during intimate questions, wider during establishing questions – you can figure out when those might occur if you get with the interviewer beforehand.

Fun fact: I did this for an interview project in college and my prof gave me a B because he said I should physically move the camera for each shot change, not just zoom. He said I should halt the interview, move the camera, and resume.

[Kylee Pena]

A pause isn’t always a bad thing.

But if you have to cut it, the best way would be to cover the edit by cutting away to “b-roll”, related video to support what they’re talking about.

If you don’t have that, you may be able to resize/reposition the interviewee’s video so it looks more like a cut to a different camera.

[Kylee Pena]

I’ve found that when I go from a ProRes to another format like h264 with resizing or frame rate changes, I’ve been able to speed up the process a lot with job chaining. Basically, I set up the file to convert to another ProRes file first, with all the resizing and framerate changes done – no compression happening here, just a change in frame size. Then that file gets sent to the h264 preset where the heavy crunching happens. You don’t HAVE to do this with job chaining but it makes it nice and automated if you can set up a Compressor batch as a chain, drop in your ProRes, and let it go. This of course produces a duplicate ProRes file of another frame size that you’ll have to remember to delete – I just have it go to a folder I call TEMP so I know it’s all junk. Job chaining can be handy sometimes and for a while I didn’t know about it, so it’s good to know anyway.

This has worked really great for me because I commonly produce ProRes masters and have to create reduced framerate and various frame sizes and bit rates for the web versions. I haven’t noticed any quality issues or anything, but I should warn you that while I do this almost daily, I am not an encoding mega-expert when it comes to the science of it. Basically, the big slow down in Compressor seemed to be changing frame size or rate while also changing from ProRes to H.264. Once it didn’t have the compressing to do at the same time, it was much more efficient. I think the last 6 minute video I did took less than 15 minutes.

I wrote a blog about this, though I need to revise it to be clearer, maybe it’ll help a bit. Your mileage may vary, as always.

https://kyleesportfolio.com/blog/?p=160

[Kylee Pena]

Find Name Mangler and use that instead. 🙂

[Kylee Pena]

You can use markers to sort of skip around like this. If you place a marker, you can edit the marker name as well and they’re searchable in the browser.

Maybe a better way for you to keep organized if you have a long project – make multiple sequences and split up your project. For example, act 1, act 2, act 3. Keep things in logical segments and edit them in their own timelines just for sanity’s sake. Then when you’re all finished, copy and paste them all into a brand new timeline and do a little refinement to make sure they go together. This is my preferred method for dealing with long sequences usually. You just have to be organized and name things carefully so you know what order to assemble them but you should be organized already anyway, right? 🙂