Rough Cut Editing Process

After filming, I began to edit the footage and sync it with the song we had chosen. I used Final Cut on the Apple Macs to do this, and to start with I had to import the footage from the video tapes. After I had imported the clips, it was important to name them so we could tell which sections of footage were which.

The next stage was to import the song into final cut and then lock the audio layer, so that when I began dropping clips into the timeline the music did not split.

The easiest way to apply the footage to the timeline was to go chronologically through the video using our animatic as a guide. I pulled the animatic up alongside our video so that I could tell specific cuts and effect points. At the beginning of our video, we use longer takes and transition effects to reflect the calmer music, instead of the straight cuts we used throughout the rest of the video. you can see from the picture opposite the way we had to drag the fade effect into the space between two clips and then lengthen the fade so that it overlapped both clips it was between. The only other effect other than a fade that we used in the video was an additive dissolve, which gave the transition a glow as two clips overlapped each other.

In order to get the clips into the timeline, I had to play the footage we had taken in the preview box, and then mark in and out points for the few seconds that we wanted to include on our timeline. This allowed me to drag small sections of our original footage into the timeline and sync it easily. Once I had found the clip I wanted, I locked the first layer of video and inserted the clip I had on the above track. This allowed me to get the timings right before dropping it into the track with the rest of the clips.

The hardest part of the process was lip syncing our actor with the song itself. It took a lot of patience in some cases to match the video exactly with the song as sometimes the clips were a fraction of a second out and this was very noticeable on the video.

 After I had the clips on the timeline in the right order, I had to edit the contrast and clolouring of some shots so that they were as light as the other clips. This was particularly difficult to do on Final Cut and the result meant that we would need to re-film some of our shots.