Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Thanks for your kind words, Bill.
It’s good to be provoked into re-examining the way we do things and the reasons why we choose the methods that we do, and it was in large part because of your “provocation” (and I mean that in a good way!) that I thought I’d try and write down my approach in detail, as much for my own benefit as to share it with others.
I’m sure you will agree that writing about your thinking can actually help clarify what your thinking actually is, and in this case I found it really useful to articulate aspects of this method that I perhaps hadn’t fully explained even to myself hitherto.
I think we all believe that “our method is the best method”. It would be very odd if we persisted with a sub-standard method if we believed there was a better method out there. That said, it’s always worth taking stock and re-evaluating our choices in the light of changing technology and exposure to other people’s thinking. Ultimately though, what makes sense to you might never make sense to me and vice versa. What matters most is whether something “feels right” to us. Although that too may be continuously evolving.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
Yes, you’re quite right – it was Shotlister!
(Scary to find oneself forgetting the names of things one used to use every day.)
It was a really great tool.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Oliver Peters] “The process goes back to film, of course, which is why we still refer to string outs as KEM rolls. But, in my experience, it wasn’t followed as much in linear editing, since we were worried about generation loss and often had multiple source machines. Edited master tapes were often only the second generation from the camera image.”
Interestingly, my experience was quite different in respect of what happened with tape.
We almost always operated on an offline/online principle, in which we built the edit with U-matic tapes with BITC and sometimes (if we were lucky) VITC as well. Once the creative edit was complete we would take an EDL into the online suite. (Oh, floppy disks, whatever happened to you?)
With VITC we were usually able to run the offline master through a VITC reader and extract a workable EDL, although we typically needed to manually edit the EDL (using an excellent EDL editor whose name I can no longer recall) in order to sort out how the audio edits were meant to work, and of course clean up any errors.
When all we had was BITC, we would manually log the edits and enter them into our EDL editor, which was not a lot of fun, but pretty good for sharpening up your numerical entry skills.
The reason I’m mentioning all this ancient history here is that we would usually create a U-matic sub-master from our source U-matics that was conceptually the same as a string-out or KEM roll. Obviously the point of this was to avoid having to load each individual source tape and shuttle down to find the next shot that we wanted. The sub-master string-out saved a huge amount of time and meant that we could keep some sort of creative momentum. (Often we would create a further sub-master from the sub-master to refine the selection – not easy when you had to worry about generation loss, but still well worthwhile in terms of the time saved.) Loading tapes was seriously disruptive to the creative process and I still think of excessive reliance on Bins/Browsers or what-have-you in the same way. Not unreasonably, I think.
For me, the notion of working with string-outs originated here in this tape-based method, and of course with what you call KEM rolls, but which in Europe we didn’t refer to as such.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Bill Davis] “What part of this implies ANY luddite or dinosaur thinking whatsoever? “
Sometimes, although you write brilliantly (and I really admire you for that), it’s very hard indeed to understand what point you are trying to make.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Bill Davis] “For any editor who’s spent decades constantly, daily, conditioned to equate “build your timeline” as where successful editing happens – I wonder if it’s every bit as difficult to conceive editing without calling up and addressing some type of timeline thing – as it is for me to do laps without Joe’s voice being summoned?”
So we’re back to Luddites and dinosaurs?
What a shame.
Can we not agree to disagree on this? It’s all just personal preference at the end of the day. It’s fun to argue, but none of us is “right” and none of us is “wrong”.
Surely?
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Oliver Peters] “This transition also overlapped with the rise of FCP 1-7, which enabled certain changes in style not really available to Media Composer, EMC2, Lightworks, and others. So how I might have cut with early versions of Avid is different than how I cut today. “
While I think you’re probably right here about how this style has become more popular since the turn of the century, I was starting to gravitate towards it while working in Media Composer, probably around 1995.
I’d certainly agree that Media Composer doesn’t lend itself naturally to working this way, but for all that I still found it faster and more productive to do so and many of the editors I trained and worked with back then felt the same. We would watch other editors “doing it the right way”, diligently organising their material using MC’s many excellent organisational tools, and we couldn’t honestly say that they were working faster or more productively.
Over the years, as first FCP came along, then FCP X, and finally (I was a late adopter) Premiere, I’ve looked at going back to conventional “pre-organisation” to see if I was missing out on its benefits, but I remain unconvinced in terms of my own experience. I simply don’t find that it helps to make me work faster or more productively.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been working the way I (and my colleagues) do for so long that it simply feels more natural to us and that’s why it’s so much faster. Perhaps it’s simply because it fits with the way I like to think about editing: in other words, to be fully productive you need to be immersed in the strategy that most suits the way your editing brain works.
Everyone is different. I find that fascinating. How dull if we were all the same.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Bill Davis] “I sorta do wish you’d chosen to use the terms “Sculpting” and Bricklaying” in your original post to clearly make it about technique – not people. “
My French father-in-law, who died just six months ago after a cruel struggle with lung cancer, was a parqueteur all his working life – and what is a layer of parquet other than a bricklayer who works with wood?
Il portait ses bleus avec fierté, secure in the belief that he was “worth” just as much as anyone else in French society.
When you next go to Versailles you will be walking on floors that he painstakingly restored. That’s something I would be very proud to be remembered for but for him pride was about doing an honest day’s work and providing for his family. It was a privilege to have known him.
All his life he voted staunchly for the partie communiste and in a week like this when, barely a mile from where I live, scores, if not hundreds of lives have been lost in an inferno because poor people matter less than rich people, I can see his point.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Jeremy Garchow] “With FCPX, I may keyword or mark the clips of a mini edit, put those clips in the Project and sequence them to my liking. Sometimes, if that mini edit isn’t working, I will snapshot the sequence and keep working, or more often, I will put those clips in a secondary storyline or compound, and disable them, and keep them attached to that place in the edit while I work on a new mini edit for that section. That way, it is nearly always in front of me. “
I think it could be said that what you are doing here is constructing editorial units on the timeline that don’t yet have a definitive home on the timeline.
Would that be a fair description?
In which case what you are doing in this instance is the same thing that I am doing, with the difference that you approach this as just one part of your overall editing strategy, whereas for me and others it’s the entire editing strategy.
You are sometimes editing “in context” but more often not, whereas we are editing in context all the time. I won’t belabour what I mean by this here because I covered it in a lot of specific detail in the article.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Walter Soyka] “I’m a so-called digital native, but I learned to edit on a Sony RM-400 or 450 or the like, controlling a pair of U-Matic decks. Maybe I’m carrying some old-school linear baggage with me, but for me, editing has always been about what I choose to put in, not what I choose to take out. “
It’s interesting you mention this because “my method” (it really isn’t my method – many, many editors use it in one form or another across every genre) originated in working with tape (and film).
Cutting on tape, you could either laboriously go to your box of tapes and stuff a new one in your deck and shuttle up or down until you found the next shot you needed. Eject the tape, find the next tape, shuttle up or down, find the next shot. And so on. A lot of fun if your idea of fun was stuffing tapes and waiting while they shuttled to the right place.
Or you could create a single selects reel from your source tapes and edit from there with an absolute minimum of stuffing and shuttling. Of course, generation loss made this less than ideal and you would usually have to rebuild the final edit from the original tapes, but the time saved in the actual creative part of the edit made this an overwhelmingly preferable route.
Which is why when NLEs came along …
I think you can probably see how this feeds into the current discussion.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Jeremy Garchow] “To me and this probably points to the way I create, it is much easier to keep track of elements and reduce the amount of duplication and clutter. “
I completely get what you’re saying here, even though it’s not the way my editing mind works. For me working with sequences rather than conventional organisational methods is about dramatically cutting down on the number of “entities” that I am juggling – fewer bins, fewer keywords, fewer notes, fewer markers, fewer distractions, and most of all less time spent organising and more time spent cutting, cutting, cutting.
For you “unnecessary” sequences are a distraction and simply not helpful. Organisational tools are your gateway to shaping your thinking about the edit.
For me a relatively small number of sequences become repositories for an immense wealth of organisational data and even more importantly creative decision-making. And because I have been editing from so early on, I feel I am getting way ahead of the game. That to me is important too – I want to get a feeling for how it’s all going to come together at the earliest possible stage. I just don’t get that sort of early feedback from working with the Bin/Browser type method.
But I cannot stress enough that this is a personal choice. To me it makes perfect sense. To you it makes no sense at all. And that’s all good.
However, one of the most important things for me about the method that I use is that from the earliest stage of the entire process I am building what I have called “editorial chunks”. (I guess you could say these are my version of “bricks”!)
On my timeline, as I work through the material, I am constructing mini units that are going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting for me later on. This is a non-trivial point. It is extremely important to me to be able to construct these elements on the fly and have them readily to hand at any time. I don’t want to have to think about “storing” them anywhere except on my evolving timeline and I want to be able to juggle them instantly without having to go looking for them.
A unit might consist of Clip A13 + Clip B2 + Clip C12 + Clip A6, where A-Z represents the stop/start of the entire clip and 1-1000 represents selections from a clip.
I will want to experiment with putting Unit AAA before or after Unit JJJ, or maybe try it next to Unit MMM, and I will want to be doing this long before I have committed to any sort of final shape for my timeline.
That to me is very different from selecting a single range out of a clip in a browser type situation or even playing through from one browser selection to another. These are non-volatile units that persist and persist usefully because they are already edited.
How might you go about doing something similar with your method?
Or maybe this is something you just don’t find useful or important?
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki