PROFESSIONAL TOOLKIT: Editing the Studio Shoot in Avid
MEDIA INGEST:
To start off the post production phase, me and Rob started to import our media and organize our bins.
To start off the post production phase, me and Rob started to import our media and organize our bins.
The media was directly imported as opposed to AMA linking it as we wanted optimum performance during our edit sessions, and compatibility in case we needed to switch between platforms.
At this point some basic separation was done in to a main and a pickups bin.
Also i gave Rob some notes on each shot to help him out with the edit.
PROBLEMS:
PROBLEMS:
At this stage however Rob encountered some major technical difficulties with his copy of Media Composer resulting in his project file and backup files being damaged, and due to some other personal matters he had to be relieved of his position as an editor.
Due to these events i had to use an old copy of the project file that only had the notes saved, in order to start again and try and complete the edit myself.
Also i learned that i had to become editor the day before we had to show a progress update to Anne. This meant that i had to try and do a rough assembly edit during our lunch break.
Thankfully as we had transcoded all the media and correctly backed up this version of the project, opening it on my own computer was not a problem.
Also, due to the fact that Rob had already marked In and Out points on most of the shots, it was pretty easy to select shots from the bin and splice them in using the V key on the keyboard.
This was the resulting timeline from that rough assembly edit
Even though this edit roughly gave an overview of the order of the shots, the pace and timing were completely off. However Anne said we were on a good track and gave some very good feedback.
She said that the shots in the beginning may need trimming down, just keeping the shots of the phone frames would be ok, and also overall trimming and pacing.
Out of our group meeting another great idea was to extend the opening shot with a long tracking from the distance to show all of the phones that the man previously had.
TRIMMING THE EDIT:
Now came time to fix the timing issues and try to get an overall good trimmed edit that ran at roughly 1-2 minutes.
I started by marking bits of clips with the in and out points, and then using the Extract tool to cut bits out. I also used the trim tool on some cuts to do slight frame cuts.
After a bit of tinkering around this is what i got:
Even though it still isn't completely refined, i have to lock it mostly now to export this edit for other things such as Visual Effects, Color Grading and Sound Editing and Mixing. The good thing is that if i need to trim down something i can still do that after everything else.
COLOR GRADING AND EFFECTS:
Before going to color grade, just to test if the green screen worked i tried using the specramatte effect on some of the clips, and saw that the greenscreen even though it wasn't perfect, it was ok to pull a decent key.
For the color grading Shahid offered to help out, therefore we went to the Avid Symphony room to continue the edit.
Now at this stage no visual effects were ready, so the grade was done using the original footage. However as it's easy to transfer effects over from clips, that didn't worry me as all i had to do later on is open up the effects editor, and drag the color corrector icon over to a new clip.
The direction i gave to shahid is that i wanted it slightly cooler, but i wanted to preserve the vibrance and warmth of the skin tones and the floor.
Overall i enjoyed seeing the results, and i thought that i would give him loose directions and correct slightly as we were going along as i wanted my colourist to have freedom in adding his own touch.
VISUAL EFFECTS:
The Visual Effects were quite an interesting challenge, as they required a number of different techniques, such as chroma keying, 3D tracking, image based modeling, and more.
One thing that was quite useful and saved me lots of rendering time was a tip i learned in the 3D workshops.
As rendering a single shot could take up to 2 days, i needed to find a way to speed up this time dramatically
I did this by "baking", a technique that allows me to pre-calculate the lighting and materials, and "bake" them in to an image that gets used as a texture on low-poly mesh.
This also meant that i could use the GPU to render the shots, since they didn't require complicated calculations any more.
This made the 2 day shot render in about 5 minutes.
SOUND:
For the sound after i got a clean ambient track and a narration recording of the ad from Ulysses i spliced them in on extra mono tracks i created.
After setting my reference tone to -18db using the Audio Tool and adjusting the levels using the Audio Mixer, to make the narration sound like it was coming from the TV i used an equalizer to cut off the highs and lows, and a reverb to give it some space.
To make the Apple inspired ad sound right, i purchased some royalty free music from audionetwork.com that resembled the apple tech demo music.
I decided that during the closeup of him realizing his mistake i wanted the audio to become non-diegetic, as if we're going in to his thought process and we can feel his intensity somehow. To do this i simply increased the volume over time using the track handles, and adding keyframes with the ' key.
Also to further balance my sound levels i added a compressor/limiter to the master track, limiting everything to -12db and keeping normal sounds roughly at -18db.
TITLES AND CLOCKS:
To create the ending credits i made a new title using the Avid Title Tool, and chose to use some simple rolling credits.
After all of the text was created and positioned, i rendered the title to my media drive, and spliced it in at the end of my project
To add the bars and tone at the beginning i imported the bars from the supporting files foler, found the clock from an earlier production and created some more titles with the information. To create a start filler with the right timecode i used the "Add filler at start command" to add 40 seconds of filler (10 for bars and 30 for the clock). Therefore the film starts at exactly 01:00:00:00.
EXPORTING:
After finishing the edit fully, copying all of the color effects to the new vfx shots, and double checking everything i decided to export.
To export i used the Avid DnXHD 185 codec. I used 8 bit as the camera was not shooting 10 bit files, so that would be unnecessary.
REFLECTIONS:
Overall even though the editing process was a bit last minute, i enjoyed it and for the amount of time given i am happy with the result. If i could change something however, i would choose to communicate more with my team to avoid some of the confusion that made this project so last minute. Lastly i'm also going to attempt to continue my edit of the Silent Woods project to further gain experience in editing using avid, thankfully though i've started using avid for personal projects and so far it seems to fit in with my pipeline. Let's see how this goes...
Now came time to fix the timing issues and try to get an overall good trimmed edit that ran at roughly 1-2 minutes.
I started by marking bits of clips with the in and out points, and then using the Extract tool to cut bits out. I also used the trim tool on some cuts to do slight frame cuts.
After a bit of tinkering around this is what i got:
Even though it still isn't completely refined, i have to lock it mostly now to export this edit for other things such as Visual Effects, Color Grading and Sound Editing and Mixing. The good thing is that if i need to trim down something i can still do that after everything else.
COLOR GRADING AND EFFECTS:
Before going to color grade, just to test if the green screen worked i tried using the specramatte effect on some of the clips, and saw that the greenscreen even though it wasn't perfect, it was ok to pull a decent key.
For the color grading Shahid offered to help out, therefore we went to the Avid Symphony room to continue the edit.
Now at this stage no visual effects were ready, so the grade was done using the original footage. However as it's easy to transfer effects over from clips, that didn't worry me as all i had to do later on is open up the effects editor, and drag the color corrector icon over to a new clip.
The direction i gave to shahid is that i wanted it slightly cooler, but i wanted to preserve the vibrance and warmth of the skin tones and the floor.
Overall i enjoyed seeing the results, and i thought that i would give him loose directions and correct slightly as we were going along as i wanted my colourist to have freedom in adding his own touch.
VISUAL EFFECTS:
The Visual Effects were quite an interesting challenge, as they required a number of different techniques, such as chroma keying, 3D tracking, image based modeling, and more.
One thing that was quite useful and saved me lots of rendering time was a tip i learned in the 3D workshops.
As rendering a single shot could take up to 2 days, i needed to find a way to speed up this time dramatically
I did this by "baking", a technique that allows me to pre-calculate the lighting and materials, and "bake" them in to an image that gets used as a texture on low-poly mesh.
This also meant that i could use the GPU to render the shots, since they didn't require complicated calculations any more.
This made the 2 day shot render in about 5 minutes.
SOUND:
For the sound after i got a clean ambient track and a narration recording of the ad from Ulysses i spliced them in on extra mono tracks i created.
After setting my reference tone to -18db using the Audio Tool and adjusting the levels using the Audio Mixer, to make the narration sound like it was coming from the TV i used an equalizer to cut off the highs and lows, and a reverb to give it some space.
To make the Apple inspired ad sound right, i purchased some royalty free music from audionetwork.com that resembled the apple tech demo music.
I decided that during the closeup of him realizing his mistake i wanted the audio to become non-diegetic, as if we're going in to his thought process and we can feel his intensity somehow. To do this i simply increased the volume over time using the track handles, and adding keyframes with the ' key.
Also to further balance my sound levels i added a compressor/limiter to the master track, limiting everything to -12db and keeping normal sounds roughly at -18db.
TITLES AND CLOCKS:
To create the ending credits i made a new title using the Avid Title Tool, and chose to use some simple rolling credits.
After all of the text was created and positioned, i rendered the title to my media drive, and spliced it in at the end of my project
To add the bars and tone at the beginning i imported the bars from the supporting files foler, found the clock from an earlier production and created some more titles with the information. To create a start filler with the right timecode i used the "Add filler at start command" to add 40 seconds of filler (10 for bars and 30 for the clock). Therefore the film starts at exactly 01:00:00:00.
EXPORTING:
 |
| Final Timeline |
After finishing the edit fully, copying all of the color effects to the new vfx shots, and double checking everything i decided to export.
To export i used the Avid DnXHD 185 codec. I used 8 bit as the camera was not shooting 10 bit files, so that would be unnecessary.
REFLECTIONS:
Overall even though the editing process was a bit last minute, i enjoyed it and for the amount of time given i am happy with the result. If i could change something however, i would choose to communicate more with my team to avoid some of the confusion that made this project so last minute. Lastly i'm also going to attempt to continue my edit of the Silent Woods project to further gain experience in editing using avid, thankfully though i've started using avid for personal projects and so far it seems to fit in with my pipeline. Let's see how this goes...
 |
| Using avid for personal projects seems to be a good way to train myself |
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