The world of film includes a wide range of specialists and teams to make a shoot seem as realistic as possible. I have spent two years learning and grasping the standards of the film and TV industry. I have learnt the essential and advanced skills in editing and i continue to do so everyday now. The fun carries on after the cameras are put away. Editing. the editing process is one of the fun bits in my opinion; it is a chance for you to redeem yourself if a shoot has gone wrong or complicated in the hope the rushes can be worked with to make it look seamless. I feel that i have taken to film editing and it has become a passion of mine. I have enjoyed being able to bring the final product to an end and see the structure strengthen as the process continues.
The editing process can allow you to recreate, change and adapt a story into a new one.
Editing came later in the film industry history, being that we used to use a whole film reel up with no editing or cutting involved, we just kept shooting the whole time in one take and then that was it. The first form of editing involved cutting the film with scissors and then glueing them back together removing the unwanted frames, and to have a coloured image, each frame had to be painted separately, bearing in mind there are 25 frames per second to go through. Whereas now we have computer software such as Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere that has all the basics built in. Final Cut Pro has been a friend to the industry for quiet a while battling against Adobe Premiere, and for the length of my time i have used Final Cut Pro, however the industry is moving and more have turned to Adobe products due to Apples unreliable software power.
Both editing softwares can allow us to adjust the colour and change the colours, we can add in images that weren't already there using Adobe After Effects, creating moving graphics and animated sequences to enhance and even change the mood or genre of a working video.
When i edit i will always hope for space before and after the shot to allow me cutting time, rather than an immediate action shot with no editing space, it will just allow the editor more freedom, especially if cutting to music and the clip is just a few frames out then it can make all the difference. Also, a range of shots to cut to will always allow me options, editing with more options is easier than editing with none. I also always need a brief or at least told what is required of the edit to understand what the client wants and how the story needs to be told otherwise there is no point starting the edit, in the case that they could turn round and say its wrong and its a waste of time and money.
The skills i have learnt however will always come in handy whether i get into editing or not, either way it will always look good on my CV and portfolio, which will also require editing skills to make, and to just succeed and impress clients and employers so much more! The industry and companies are always looking for editors more than anything else as surprisingly they are more uncommon than a camera man; looking at how many people have photographic cameras and the detailing of camera phones now means that anybody can potentially call themselves a cameraman, it doesn't require that much skill to operate one. Editing is one job i would like to do in the future, I'm heading that way closer and closer everyday. Editing is also a forever changing and adapting part of the industry just like everything else, so being a quick learner is essential, which is brilliant when things go wrong or mess up, as you can learn from your mistakes, and also learn how to correct and prevent happening again in future circumstances.
When i edit i will always have a clear image in my mind of what i want the end product to look like. However it's always nicer to have a storyboard or structured plan so that my edit doesn't change at the end from what i originally planned it to be. I will usually add the music to the time line first with the selected shots and scenes i want to use before starting the edit. Unless I'm not cutting to music then that should fit the edit rather than the other way round. Its a lot easier to edit if you have an in house band or musician to create tracks that fit the edit! Editing the footage to sound is easier said than done, preferably easier if a clapper board has been used so you just have to link the sound with the raw sound from the footage file! However in proper films it is necessary to have the extra details as to which scene and which take etc it is so that the audio doesn't get mixed up and the correct audio is matched to the correct footage otherwise it will never be in sync which happens a lot, especially when I worked on Stalingrad, I found others had tried to edit with the wrong sound which messed the final product up. Which is another problem, never work with an editor you cannot trust or works in a completely different way at the same time otherwise the final product will clash and the files will become messed up.
Now file naming is essential for a successful file management system! To name each file gives us the advantage of content creators, allowing us to utilise the search function in FCP and on our computers to search what we need quick and easy, if not then we risk the agonising three hour search through folder after folder. It also makes the files user friendly for others who need to search files if you're not there.
It always helps an editor if the original RAW files from the camera have been transcoded into the correct codec in order to allow the footage to be edited correctly and seamlessly without any hiccups. In the case of using FCP the files need to be transcoded to Apple Pro Res 422 which will mean there will be no problems with file editing.
During the transcoding process we must always make sure that every asset of the file is the same as the sequence in order to prevent confusion. So we tend to adjust the files to 100% quality, de-interlaced and checking that it is transcoded to 25 fps and each frame/clip must be in the frame size of 1920x1080, custom, which is the industry standard television size.
Storytelling is an art of both interpretation and improvisation. You tell a story in your own language for the listeners who are immediately in front of you. You can tell the same story to 500 adults in a theatre, 35 seven year olds in a classroom or to a friend down the telephone... In each case the story is the same, but, automatically the language, tempo and energies involved will be different. A storyteller is simultaneously the interpreter, adapter, author, performer, director and critic. We must know the story before even attempting to start and edit, to know where we are leading to and what we impact we are trying to create for the audience. And editing is the main hub for creating that! It will allow you to enhance and decrease certain features and elements of a project or footage to make it either creepy, happy, vibrant, sad etc all in the way it is colour corrected or you can edit clips to look like the are moving almost to a rhythm for a music video! Or you can even add thousands of effects to, well make just about any atmosphere or mood you want to. One thing I remember learning in drama was the art of silence! a terrific way to enhance tension or even create it. Silence can be a key element to any horror film or even to build to a climax, often used in trailers to impacting theatrical music.
Now the Rough Cut Phase is the first part of a 3 step process called Offline Editing. The rough cut is where the film begins to resemble its final product, it still has many changes to undergo before the release of the film but it can give the director a starting position, it can help give other ideas of how to edit certain scenes or maybe even help decide if another scene needs adding or taking away to enhance the story. In general it is the spine of the edit once its done then work can begin on the sound, titles, graphics, final trimming etc. it looks generally unpleasant but for the creators its the beginning of a long process.
After moving the footage into the correct places the Final Cut begins and the final sequence of clips and sound are selected and put in the correct order. Now that the Final Cut has been put together the sound and picture quality is brought to their optimum levels known as Online Editing.
My favourite part is the finishing process when it all comes together, this involves colour correction. Now this process used to be done in a room called a colour suite using lights to chemically change the colours but instead today we can do it much cheaper and easier with software downloads, Adobe and Final Cut are the best colour correctors, giving a production team a wide range of tools to enhance and change motion images.
Once the finishing process is complete we have a finished product available for consumption. Now the video can be exported to which ever file type the client desires, whether it be H.264 (MP4)Youtube Sharing, 2K etc. Currently films are exported to 2K but there has been developments of changing to 4K which will mean that images will be of an even higher resolution but at the same time not enough monitors can handle the size of the data being processed and there isn't big enough storage to hold and deal with this footage.
To conclude! I personally believe that editing is a fundamental stage in the industry because you can have amazing footage but if you have a terrible edit, the illusion of film disappears and you will lose your audience in a second. At the same time you could have an amazing editor but rubbish footage, even though the edit can turn that around! There are a number of tools to use to redeem, to an extent, of the footage to make a professional standard finished product.
