Editing Essay
Editing is defined as âchoosing material for (a film or radio or television programme) and arrange it to form a coherent wholeâ. That means taking footage you may have filmed, audio that you may have recorded, backing music, titles you may have created and archive footage you may have obtained and edit through final cut, avid, premiere pro or even movie maker and creating a video for the purpose that it is needed for and it makes sense.  When we first started I had done a tiny bit of editing before. Mostly it had been in movie maker and one project in premiere pro so when I joined the course I knew a tiny bit but over time and through many project I have learnt the craft of editing something together that in turn, tells a story to itâs audience and do the work efficiently by keeping my file management tidy allowing me to access to clips I need quickly. At first I used to just leave the clips unnamed and have to try to just remember which one it was likely to be when I was looking for a clip whereas on the last project I did (clare priory) I make bins to hold the interviews in, another for the inside cutaways and another for the outside cutaways with each named as to what happens in that clips and what take it was if there were multiple. By doing this it has allowed the process of editing to become so much easier and quicker.  Back when film was first beginning though transcoding wasnât something that was ever a thought in the editorâs mind. That was because he knew he had to go through hours of reels of film and edit it by literally cutting the sections of film that he wanted. Playing it through and going back to find the right frame to quite literally âcutâ on. Also in early editing it was thought to be weird to cut together different shots from the same scene in different angles and positions. They thought it would confuse the audience as they were seeing the same thing from a different perspective. They did soon realise that actually cutting to different shots kept the audiences attention and helped to make the film a lot more tense and allow the stories being told to be a lot more complex.  This is a run through of the basic steps from the start to the end of editing. I first create a folder that is name related to the project I am editing for. I then make a folder called RAW and another called Transcoded. I then get the footage I have recorded and using a SD slot copy it into the RAW folder. Then using MPEG streamclip I batch list all the video files I just copied and select the destination of them to be the folder I made called Transcoded. I make sure that the compression is Apple ProRes 422 and the resolution is 1920x1280. Normally when filming in the UK you film in 25fps because that is what TV and cinemaâs play at so I set it at that and click Deinterlace. This is the process of making a deinterlaced shot from one that is interlaced. The camera actually records 50 pictures or fields a second because it takes two and deinterlacing is the process of correctly merging them so that the two fields donât overlap. Once it has transcoded I then create a final cut project with the same settings as I just converted the clips to be and import all the transcoded footage into the project. If I have any music I have to make sure that it is a WAV file. If it isnât I then open it in Adobe Audition and export it out as a WAV file.  I tend to find that most of the takes I shoot the final take of the shot is the best because I decide that it is the best and move onto the next shot, this makes naming the clips a bit easier. Then it is all down to the edit. I go through the clips and start to use the treatment and storyboard I created before filming to cut together clips to create the different scenes of the project. I find it a lot easier to sync up the external audio before I start to cut the clips apart because then the entire clip is synced up and I wonât have to do it afterwards for each individual clip. When using music I try to place the music onto the timeline early on too as this allows be something to cut to and create some sort of pace to the film. The music that you use is key to the video; you have to choose something that matches up with the video you are making. For example if it for a nightclub it needs to have a fast beat and be very obvious that it is playing but if it for a church for example then it has to be slower and less obvious that it is playing in the background as the key focus of the video is the interview audio.  While editing you have to make sure that all the clips fit together without any empty frames, to easily achieve this I use the snapping tool in final cut (shortcut n). This snaps the start to the end of clips together when you move them close to each other. Sometimes it can be a bit too sensitive and snap clips together that you donât want to so I just turn it off move the clip where I want it then turn it back on. When cutting the clips apart I sometimes use the preview window to prepare the clip before putting it into the actual timeline or sometimes I place the clip into the timeline and then cut it using the cutting tool (shortcut b) to get start it with the right frame and finish it with the right one too. Once Iâve started to place together the clips the edit starts to come to life. Sometimes I do find I walk away from the edit and come back and watch through something I just edited and find actually I donât like the way Iâve cut it or the clipâs Iâve used and so I change it again.  When I first started to do editing at the college I kind of just edited quite randomly, there was never really a reason other than that the shot I was using had finished it purpose so I went onto another. Over time I realised that actually there is a lot more behind the reason to cut a clip to another and how the next clip canât be utterly random it has to fit into the previous shot so the cut flows through. Also I've found now that I find it actually hard to not edit to a beat now. It gives you a rhythm to flow with and helps to give the edit youâre doing a pace to it keeping the audience intrigued.  After I have gone through and edited the video together with the sections of interview I want to use to explain my storyline I basically have my rough cut done. This means I can now go through and use the cutaways I filmed to cover up any cuts throughout the interview I have done to jump to different points or even when I have cut out a long pause by the interviewee.  An example of when things havenât quite gone to plan editing wise for me is when I was editing my trailer. I wasnât overly happy with some of the footage that I shot and I wasnât able to re-shoot anything due to time constraints and the fact that one of the main actressâ lived in Maidstone and so whenever I needed her for a shoot one day I'd have to pay for her expenses to get to the shoot. This meant that I didnât have a great mindset coming into the edit and kept putting it off because I knew I wouldnât be happy with it. I soon started to work on it in small chunks, slowly going through the story I was telling working out what shots I could use. Since the beginning of the project I had been listening out for music I could use as background music. I knew that it had to be calming at the start and eventually found what I wanted and started to cut around the beat of the music and piece together edit bit by bit.  I then came to a major part of the storyline which is when one of the main characterâs is in a chase scene and then run over. I knew I had to change the music so found something with more of a upbeat nature to it to add even more tension to the scene. When I put it into the edit though I found there were too many beats for me to fill over, this meant the chase scene would have just dragged on too much and so I had to take my wav file into Adobe Audition and cut it down to the minimum amount of beats I could without the jumping around the song sounding too weird.  Even though I had the storyboard to work from I found whilst editing that sometimes the clips I thought would work together just donât and so this means that I kind of have to play around with clips and see what fit together. Once I had done that with my trailer edit I ran through it to check it all worked well and was reasonably happy with it all and so I got onto the last stage which is colour correction.  Personally I find colour correction quite hard. I find it hard to find the imperfections in the colour, I see problems with the exposure and can easily deal with that but its adjusting the colours I find harder to do. In a scene in my trailer I had the chase scene filmed partly at night and so some clips were quite dark and others quite light from when the actorâs got too close to the light, at the end of the scene the actor gets run over by a car and due to time constraints this bit had to be filmed at day time and so I had to try to colour correct it together. This I thought wouldnât be too hard to deal with but when I came to colour correct the whole scene I came across quite a few problems. I tried to colour correct a shot and then relay this onto another shot but found that each shot reacted to differently to it and meant it became overexposed mostly, this meant I had to shot by shot colour correct which took a lot of time. Then trying to make the daytime shot look like night time meant I had to bring down the exposure a bit and add blueâs into it but then trying to match it up to shot which were actually from the night time and so mostly black and I had to add some orange in to give my character's some colour to their faces. After I had finished I was completely happy with the progress I had made but I knew that with the time I had before the edit had to be done I had to just hand it in.  I think all this experience I've had from having not done basically any editing at all to where I have got to now I am very impressed by and pleased with. I definitely know I have a lot more to learn and I am looking forward to it.












