Logging

Last Tuesday and Friday I started working on the basics to video editing for the very first time. A welcome experience, and a relatively straight forward one too. I didn't really expect basic video editing to be very challenging - and sure enough, logging took up the majority of my time and was more time-consuming than anything.

Maybe some of that was the fault of my work process.  I initially worked by making a huge amount of time markers in the original video file clip (well, in the software's window of it at least) at the end of each scene's different takes so that I had a rough estimation for where I'd be cutting. Eventually I started habitually zooming in to re-adjust the marker to a finer position in milliseconds so that I didn't waste any frames by cutting earlier or later than necessary. Getting more familiar with the spooling key commands to fast-forward/play faster really helped me in this stage of the process when I got more familiar with it.

I reckon using Adobe Premier Pro, I can probably now do something that I've always been curious how to do (and suspected it was rather simple) - that is, how to cut certain scenes I like from larger video files. For an example, I've always wanted to know how to cut fight scenes out of a martial arts movie so that I don't have to skip through the movie to find the scene if I wanted to watch that scene in particular.

What was more interesting to me that I learned while catching up on missed lessons, was the different types of camera shots there were (Extreme Close Ups, Close Ups, Mid Close Ups, Mid Shots, Mid Long Shots, Long Shots, Wide Shots and Extreme Wide Shots) and how to recognise them as well. Adding descriptions to the generated sub-clips by referring to and from my notes was easily more enjoyable than actually generating them. I started off with a very minimal approach, noting pretty much only the type of shot and character shown and gradually got more descriptive of the scene itself. The descriptions more or less resemble a more concise version of the storyboard now.

My base video having a different time code to everyone else threw me off a bit as well. Still not all that sure how that happened. It's made me a bit suspicious that somehow my project's gonna end up weird and potentially miss things, but oh well. One way to find out.