How often do you finish a project?

[kye]

How often do you finish a project and 'publish' it by sharing it (either with the end audience or, if you do one step in a larger production, with the people who do the next step)?

Do you want to finish projects more frequently?  Less frequently?

What are you doing to accomplish this?

I'm interested in hearing about other people's workflows, efforts to increase efficiency, and barriers people face.

Personally, I make home videos and 'publish' to family and friends.  I don't publish as often as I should and recently I've just gone through a phase of reviewing my equipment in preparation for a couple of big trips I've got this year, so the production line of editing (and getting through the large volume of footage I've got) has stalled in preference for technical evaluations of lenses, camera settings, etc.  I'm almost coming up for air, but I've made a few key improvements to get a good workflow setup, something I wasn't completely clear on previously, so I feel it's been worthwhile.

[Anaconda_]

I film and edit a weekly 'docutainment' (I hate that word) show for TV broadcast that needs to finished every week on a Tuesday afternoon. It's then checked for any technical faults and sent on to broadcasters who - I assume - have an automated system to get it into their schedule and it hits the airwaves 2 days later for the end audience to enjoy. Since it's a very tight schedule with a hard deadline that simple can't be missed, I 'publish' every single Tuesday just before lunch. 

On top of that, I also live in a different country to my family and have 2 small kids, so I also make short videos of them learning and doing things to upload and share with family. I try to do at least two a month, but that's self imposed and don't put too much stress on it.

Then I also have a few personal projects that are closer to work than the family videos, mini docs and animations about random subjects that take my interest at the time. Those take a lot longer to finish, and publish as they're more time consuming than the family videos, and it's hard to find the time to do them. I treat them more as teaching myself a new skill or testing equipment and don't put any pressure on myself to finish them by a certain time. 

[Matthew Hartman]

On 3/26/2018 at 10:05 PM, Anaconda_ said:

I film and edit a weekly 'docutainment' (I hate that word) show for TV broadcast that needs to finished every week on a Tuesday afternoon. It's then checked for any technical faults and sent on to broadcasters who - I assume - have an automated system to get it into their schedule and it hits the airwaves 2 days later for the end audience to enjoy. Since it's a very tight schedule with a hard deadline that simple can't be missed, I 'publish' every single Tuesday just before lunch. 

On top of that, I also live in a different country to my family and have 2 small kids, so I also make short videos of them learning and doing things to upload and share with family. I try to do at least two a month, but that's self imposed and don't put too much stress on it.

Then I also have a few personal projects that are closer to work than the family videos, mini docs and animations about random subjects that take my interest at the time. Those take a lot longer to finish, and publish as they're more time consuming than the family videos, and it's hard to find the time to do them. I treat them more as teaching myself a new skill or testing equipment and don't put any pressure on myself to finish them by a certain time. 

You follow a scripted format correct? Is it pretty much a template at this point?

How do you peronally handle drives full of footage that needs sorted? What's your process?

I've been using frame.io for some shorts. I love it. The director can make annotations right on a timeline, which imports right into Premiere as an extension too. 

[noone]

All the ti

[Anaconda_]

9 hours ago, Matthew Hartman said:

You follow a scripted format correct? Is it pretty much a template at this point?

How do you peronally handle drives full of footage that needs sorted? What's your process?

I've been using frame.io for some shorts. I love it. The director can make annotations right on a timeline, which imports right into Premiere as an extension too. 

It's kind of a template yeah, like the layout of the project is set, and I fill it in. So it's half an hour, split up into 4 to 5 minute segments which are different each week. As it's documentary, it's a lot of tying interviews together, making a coherent story about whatever the subject is for that item, and writing a voice over to fill in any gaps to get each story across within the 4 to 5 minutes. This is sometimes super easy, and others quite hard.

We have a local server with all of the footage in (http://axle.ai/), and there's a plugin for Premiere for direct import, working off the server. There's someone here who encodes all the footage into the same format, fills in metadata and renames everything to be easily found later down the line. We make around 10 shows that range in subject matter so each show has it's own code for the footage to be filed under. For example, mine is all about the music industry, and someone else makes one about film. My interviews won't very often be related to their show, so they can search their show code + interview and only get relevant results. or showcode + movie title for a whole list of material relating to the movie they're searching from interviews, to original behind the scenes footage, red carpet events and trailers. or we can refine the search to showcode + movie + actor name for example, to only get footage relating to the movie with that specific person is in.

Since I film, edit and write my show, I guess I'm technically the director too, so make my own notes haha. Once I've finished it to my standards it's sent to a guy in the next studio down who watches it looking for dodgy cuts and checking the audio levels to be extra safe. He then makes the final export which is sent out to our clients. If he finds any errors beyond a really simply fix it gets sent straight back to me with an angry note - so far I've had none haha!

[Matthew Hartman]

1 hour ago, Anaconda_ said:

It's kind of a template yeah, like the layout of the project is set, and I fill it in. So it's half an hour, split up into 4 to 5 minute segments which are different each week. As it's documentary, it's a lot of tying interviews together, making a coherent story about whatever the subject is for that item, and writing a voice over to fill in any gaps to get each story across within the 4 to 5 minutes. This is sometimes super easy, and others quite hard.

We have a local server with all of the footage in (http://axle.ai/), and there's a plugin for Premiere for direct import, working off the server. There's someone here who encodes all the footage into the same format, fills in metadata and renames everything to be easily found later down the line. We make around 10 shows that range in subject matter so each show has it's own code for the footage to be filed under. For example, mine is all about the music industry, and someone else makes one about film. My interviews won't very often be related to their show, so they can search their show code + interview and only get relevant results. or showcode + movie title for a whole list of material relating to the movie they're searching from interviews, to original behind the scenes footage, red carpet events and trailers. or we can refine the search to showcode + movie + actor name for example, to only get footage relating to the movie with that specific person is in.

Since I film, edit and write my show, I guess I'm technically the director too, so make my own notes haha. Once I've finished it to my standards it's sent to a guy in the next studio down who watches it looking for dodgy cuts and checking the audio levels to be extra safe. He then makes the final export which is sent out to our clients. If he finds any errors beyond a really simply fix it gets sent straight back to me with an angry note - so far I've had none haha!

This is brilliant. I really appreciate you sharing your process. It helps to have someone doing the encoding and tagging for you, and the fact that you're also the director and can make the calls.

I'm sure there's moments when you feel like a story just isn't coming together and you just have to forge ahead. 

[Anaconda_]

No worries, glad it helps. and yes, having someone to organise all the material is indeed what makes everything work so well on these tight schedules. That's where having a voice over comes in handy. I, personally, don't like the voice over and would rather let the artists speak for themselves, but any information that can't be presented through the interviews can be slipped into the VO to push the story forward