Project Workflows – Pace and Structure

This chapter is about the practical application of specific workflows associated with different types of video genres. There are some workflow techniques that could be applied to any type of video. The first section is a must-read for all. It’s about interviews but covers numerous editing techniques that support most editing styles. The Interviews section describes approaches to editing videos used in the other sections, so I would suggest that you read through this section no matter what your main interests are.

In this chapter, you will learn about Final Cut Pro workflows for different genres of video, from interviews, wedding videos, and conferences to full-length movies. Other workflows will teach you skills when editing social media videos as well as home movies, with added processes for cutting to beats in music videos. Lastly, you will learn about short techniques you will use throughout your editing career, including the...

Interviews

Interviews and the like include any type of video that has a voice track as the main focus. That’s not to say that the visuals are not important, but dialogue is the key element in this genre. Concentrating on the dialogue gives you the opportunity to cut out non-relevant words and even “ums” and “ahs”. For all intents and purposes, you should treat the video as if it were an audio-only recording. This means that the visuals will also be removed where the corresponding words have been cut out, but don’t worry – there are techniques to hide these missing image frames and jump cuts.

If you are the shooter as well as the editor, refer to Chapter 3, Planning the Video Story for details on setting up an interview shoot.

Tip

To hide the browser while editing a multicam, use Control + Command + 1. To show the browser again, use the same keys.

The following sections show workflows for the different stages of editing interviews...

Audio in sync

When you add a camera clip to the timeline that contains both video and audio, you should trust that they are both in sync. There is a chance, though unlikely, that audio recorded by a camera using a lapel mic may have a slight audio delay if recorded over a long distance. You will have to compensate for that manually, by using Detach Audio and moving the detached audio track one frame at a time with the arrow keys.

Also, be aware that the difference may be less than one frame of video. If that is the case, audio can be adjusted at a sub-video-frame level. Pressing Command and the right and left arrow keys will adjust the audio playhead to as small as 1/80th of a video frame (see Chapter 6, Fixing and Enhancing the Audio for details).

If the shoot was a multi-camera shoot or a single camera with an external audio recorder, you need to synchronize the tracks into one entity. I prefer to use New Multicam Clip for all occasions, rather than just Synchronize Clips....

Conferences and seminars

I’ve included a section on conferences and seminars here, as they are very similar to interviews but with the added advantage that there is less to cut out. The content is usually retained as a snapshot in time of the whole event. You will likely have much more B roll to work with, such as audience reaction shots, which can be used in different places. Conference edits will, of course, take much longer than interviews, and you will have different types of briefs from your client as to what they would like the edits to achieve.

You can expect two types of briefs:

• Edit the whole conference as one long event
• Extract important segments and turn them into short, independent videos

Let’s take a look at each of these briefs in the following sections.

One long event

One of the big advantages of this kind of brief is that your edits are only cuts between speakers with some breaks. If it’s a single-camera shoot, you can...

Weddings

Of all the videos that you are likely to edit, weddings have the most formality and offer the most lessons to learn. Wedding videos, unlike interviews, are edited in chronological order, much the same as for conferences and seminars. There is a set procedure for wedding videos that will save you from wondering where to start first. There are formal parts to the day – preparations, the ceremony, the photoshoot, and the reception, which has an entrance, cake cutting, speeches, and a first dance. I find it best to edit these separately and then combine them at the end.

Most of the time, there will be more than one camera to work with, so multicam syncing will be the next process after the media is organized into categories (see Chapter 8, Setting Up and Editing Multicam for more details). As you will see in the next section, you can organize your media into keyword collections before you start your first project (see Chapter 2, Organizing Media for more details).

...

Full-length movies and documentaries

With Final Cut Pro and other editing apps, the postproduction of full-length movies no longer necessarily needs the hordes of staff that were required in the days of film. Now, the majority of the postproduction stages can be handled by one single editor, using the techniques described in this section. That is not to say that all full-length movies are edited by just one person. It’s the exact opposite in reality. It’s more about splitting editing into logical sections. As you have seen in earlier chapters, editing assistants are tasked with assembling media into organized categories, and then junior editors are entrusted to add the media to an initial assembly. This is where the senior editor will become involved with producing the rough cut, which in turn becomes the picture-locked version that is then sent out to specialists for external color correction and audio improvement.

As stated, all of this could have been done by a...

Social media videos

Social media videos are not just about the different vertical or square aspect ratios; the content is presented in a completely different way. You could use just one word to explain it – fast. But that misses the point. The cutting is done fast, but the real key to social media editing is to get the point across quickly. A social media audience is fickle, and once you understand that they will only stay to watch the video while their interest is piqued, you are on your way to knowing how to edit the material. It’s easy to understand why they are so quick to switch to another video when you consider the millions of other videos at their disposal. See Chapter 3, Planning the Video Story about how to convert a 16x9 aspect ratio video to vertical or square and more details about the editing process.

It should be noted that the examples of social media videos in this section are marketing-focused. By marketing, I mean videos that promote a cause as well...

Family holiday movies

A family video should be kept low-key in terms of production value; it is about memories. The focus can be on the destination, but the real key to making the movie valuable as a future asset is to feature people. Your great-grandchildren are going to be more interested in how you dressed and reacted to situations than a long pan shot of the Tuscan valley. With this in mind, I feel it is appropriate, in this section, to talk about how the video should be filmed. If you are reading this section, then you are likely the sole editor as well as the shooter, so you need to have control over the media.

Let’s look at some important points to keep in mind when shooting your travel movies.

It’s easy to say that you should plan what you are going to film. Yes, you should, but you are on holiday, so what is likely to happen is that you will turn up at an interesting location and get the sudden urge to record the amazing architecture, a festival, a street...

Cutting to a beat

Whether you are creating a music video or just want to match your cuts to a beat, there are several manual methods in Final Cut Pro. This is a useful procedure for slideshows or even short selections of similar or random video clips.

There are three different ways to mark beats, and these all involve you manually selecting the beats yourself. This is fine if you only want to create one or two projects; otherwise, I suggest that you look at software that will find the beat for you. See Chapter 17, Supporting Software Applications for Final Cut Pro for a review of BeatMark Pro (https://ulti.media/).

The first manual method is as follows:

1. Create a new project.
2. Select the music track in the browser and press the Q key. The music track will be added to the timeline as a connected clip, with a gray empty slug above.

Figure 9.38 – A music track with a gray slug above

3. Zoom into the view so that you can see the...

General techniques

In this section, we will explore a range of general techniques that can complement our overall editing process.

Cutting angles with a green screen

Earlier in this chapter, in the Interviews section, you looked at the technique that uses 4K footage and allows you to zoom into an image by 50%, without losing quality in the 1080p timeline. With the image being 50% larger, you can, at the next cut, return Scale (All) to 100% and repeat the change from 100% to 150% for each alternative clip by using the Paste Attributes command. However, this is much more complex when the interview is filmed in front of a green screen. When a green screen is not involved, changing the angle to 150% also increases the size of the background to 150%. The same applies to the background when the cut is returned to the original size; the face and the background both return to 100%.

Figure 9.44 – 4K footage – 100% on the left and 150% on the right...

Summary

This has been a long chapter that I’m sure will have tested your dedication. Not all of the techniques and editing methods will be of use to you now, but many will be in later projects, so there is a good reason for you to review them all – it is very likely that you will encounter a time, in the future, where you will need to employ these techniques.

You learned the specific editing techniques for interview videos. If there is just one section that you should have read through in detail, that is the one, as it covers a broad spectrum of techniques that you will need to use in other workflows.

After you read through the Interviews section, you learned about specific workflows for conferences and seminars, as well as the formality of wedding videos. They are the training ground of many professional full-time editors, as the different procedures represent a microcosm of virtually all editing styles and influences. Some sections are dialogue-based, and others...