Superstitions & Wrong Thinking from a 48 Hour Edit
If I shut down the computer, it will never.
I struggled with this a LOT on the second day of editing even in the face of my workstation becoming obviously "tired". I would hit the spacebar to play a sequence and then subsequently hit stop...
But playback wouldn't stop. I had to keep hands off 'til playback stopped on its own. By the way, this only happens when the workstation gets such intensely sustained use that only shows up during the 48s.
Watching a video file cures it of file corruption. For a FACT if we don't watch the file before uploading, it will be corrupted.
What can I say? My head says false but my heart says absolutely-fricken TRUE.
This isn't so much a superstition as it is a rule of filmmaking that preserves the spatial relationships between actors on set for a viewing audience. For example, if you shoot an interview from one side, Person A is on the left, Person B is on the right. Jump to the opposite side of the imaginary line that runs through both people in the interview and Person A is now on the right, Person B is now on the left.
This isn't necessarily a superstition but I treat it like something that has cooties. I just. stay. away.
Also, this situation hardly ever come up. It's just one of those things they teach you. But I saw it in a coupla shots of the from the morning footage and immediately tagged them as un-usable.
Next day, the director calls for a piece of one of these shots and I tell him it's a Crossing The Line thing.
In that moment, though, I think well... what does it hurt to try???
So I insert that shot into the existing sequence and it works. BAM. Done.
The reason's because we're dealing with a unique close-up without having established the final positioning of two characters. No wide shot of them prior to this shot nor the one before it. So we're definitely getting away with something here.
Seriously though. I thought this was an immediate set in stone no fly zone to never ever EVER cross. the. line.
There are seven scenes in this film. Usually, I edit these films on a single timeline. Now, I know each scene can be be cut on individual sequences on their own timelines, sequestered from each other then strung together on yet one more timeline.
This always reflexively seemed excessive to me. Plus, what if some element overlaps adjacent scenes.
So I just. Stayed away. From nests.
Until this year's 48 when it seemed like I might have to create variations on one of the scenes which made me think about nests again and giving them a shot because this might be a good idea for this film.
The only problem was that I ran color corrections from an adjustment layer in the main assembly, the one with all the scenes lined up back to back.
Seemed a good idea at the time.
Right up until I shortened or lengthened an underlying sequence and now the corrections no longer lined up properly with the shots to be corrected. Like suddenly in a dark scene the lights would suddenly blow out because the leading edge of the correction just got pulled into the middle of that scene.
Which is exactly the moment Iearned that I should've run those adjustment layers inside the individual sequences so they'd always line up.
