 Back from a German twinning weekend. The local Fasching
carnival was great fun. I've shot over an hour on Hi8. Marjorie has about
an hour on DV. No chance to plan anything, so all shot as it happened. Editing
will be a challenge.
Marjorie's material has been dumped to SVHS so I can play it in my FS200.
Quality from DV source is very good despite the extra generation. Now I'm
ready to start editing. Mustn't dawdle - the twinning group meets for lunch
on Wednesday.
 Just installed a huge (40GB), hard disk in the computer.
Half the price of the much smaller disks I bought with the computer only
just over a year ago - that's technological progress for you. Still need
to keep several old projects. Can now start new movies without clearing the
computer. Great!
Review Marjorie's SVHS tape. Lots of good material, but don't need everything.
Set up a batch capture list to load all the shots I might possibly need into
the computer using the computer to control the capture process. That way
I can come back later and do it all again (differently if I wish) without
having to keep the footage on the computer in the meantime.
Review my Hi8 footage from a VHS copy with burned in timecode. Select all
the bits I might want. Let computer capture these shots automatically while
I take a break. Now I've got over 18 Gigabytes (18,000,000,000) of the video
on disk for the project (over 1½ hours of raw material to work with). |
 pictures of the old town. But it would take 10 minutes
to do them justice and the movie can't take that much diversion. So hit on
the idea of doing quick cuts to music behind the opening titles. Steal some
suitable marching
 music from unused footage of the carnival and quickly lay
down markers on the beat. Put music on first, and then add clips and adjust
to fit between the markers so it cuts on the beat. Very quick and easy. Hope
Marjorie likes it.
Start a new project to hold all the sections together. Start with a countdown
clock from my on-disk library. Add an overlay title to tell projectionists
the required audio settings.
Bring in each section in order. Tidy up the change from section to section.
Add titles page to explain what each section covers. Time for a slight indulgence
- 'open doors' to go from title to new section. Extend sound back across
the titles so the viewer is led in gently to the changes of scene.
Play through the whole thing. Much too long! Time to be really brutal. Eliminate
clips which are not essential and tighten up the rest. That's removed about
5 minutes, but I'd still like to get below 25 minutes for the whole thing.
Turn to speeches. Re-edit in several places to focus on the meat of the message,
which also makes the movie less boring for those who weren't there.
Timing looks good now. Play right through. The titles could be better placed.
Make the adjustments interactively over a frame from the sequence and review
again. That's better! Add logos for the two twinning towns from |
| Play through. Fine tune in and out points. Review again. Look for cutaways
and additional material. Add extra shots from the captured material. Looking
better now, but the sound isn't right. Go through each change of shot one
by one. Review the sound. Throw away rubbish. Extend good audio across adjacent
clips to feather the scene changes. Bless (again!) the decision to go fully
computerised for editing - can't do this very easily with old technology!
Repeat for all the various sections of the movie. Speeches are a challenge.
Cut to the syllable to eliminate unnecessary material. Paste cutaways over
the jump cuts. Lead with sound where new pictures are not steady enough at
the start of a clip. Looking good now. Play through and fine tune.
Last section to do is for the start of the movie. Marjorie has shot lots
of wonderfully artistic |
Make a number of small adjustments. Finished now. Make a couple more copies
- including one SVHS security copy. Quality is excellent as usual.
Take three frames from the movie to use on the video case sleeve. Design
the sleeve and cassette labels using pre-prepared templates from several
years ago. Print a proof. Change one of the pictures. Adjust the explanatory
text on the back. Print a final proof. Looks OK, so print an initial production
run and make the first few copies look smart. Very professional!
More copies can be done later. Now it's time to start on Border Post.
Not bad, though. Three days cover the whole of the above story - and I was
out for 2 half days in the midst of it all. Well done NLE! Didn't quite
make this month's twinning lunch, though. Oh well, ready for the next! |
