The editing thread. What are you editing? How is it going?

[kye]

Just finished a first pass on footage from a trip late 2018.

Over 18 days I shot 3024 clips totalling 5h37m, but somehow after I've gone and pulled my selects into a timeline I for a minute there I thought I still had 1984 clips totalling 2h35m!  Using the Source Tape view in The Cut page of Resolve it looks like I was half way through when I marked an in point but didn't mark an out point and then did an Append to End of Timeline and so I appended every clip from my in point to the end of my footage to my timeline.  Oops!

After fixing that little surprise, I now have 839 clips totalling 41m - much better!!  I was thinking how many of the really cool shots I was going to have to cut and getting quite sad about it!

I must say that I am really enjoying the new Cut page in Resolve.  Especially the Source Tape view (despite the above snafu) as you can just use the J-K-L keys across all of your footage without having to manually go to the next clip.  Combined with I and O and then P to append the range to the timeline I can edit with one hand and have a drink in the other 🙂 

[jimconner20]

Im currently  editing some of my family trips last year. I got too busy with work that I forgot I have a lot of footage to edit. The pandemic gave me a lot of spare time and my newly bought monitor is perfect for editing. If anyone is looking to upgrade their monitor, find more information here.

[PannySVHS]

@kye Editing, the menace of every no budget cinematographer 🙂

[ntblowz]

Haven't edit trip videos for few years as they been at hard drive all those years. The way too many clips i shoot somehow make me not want to edit them 🙁  As result i stopped shooting video when i m on trip in recent year.

Wonder is there a way to overcome it?

[kye]

On 7/9/2020 at 9:03 PM, jimconner20 said:

Im currently  editing some of my family trips last year. I got too busy with work that I forgot I have a lot of footage to edit. The pandemic gave me a lot of spare time and my newly bought monitor is perfect for editing. If anyone is looking to upgrade their monitor, find more information here.

Welcome to the forums Jim!

How is your editing going?

6 hours ago, ntblowz said:

Haven't edit trip videos for few years as they been at hard drive all those years. The way too many clips i shoot somehow make me not want to edit them 🙁  As result i stopped shooting video when i m on trip in recent year.

Wonder is there a way to overcome it?

I feel your pain.

I used to also be like this, but what turned it around for me was two things.  

The first was Resolves new Cut page.  I'm not sure if you've edited in Resolve, but the process to review footage was a bit painful previously.  You had to double-click on a clip in the Media pool to load it in the viewer, then JKL and IO to make a select, and I set P to insert the clip into the timeline.  Then you had to navigate with the mouse to load the next clip.  I could never find how to set keyboard shortcuts to get to the next clip.  I suspect it might have required a numeric keypad, which my MBP doesn't have.  

Then Resolve created the Cut page.  Theres a view in the Cut page that puts all the clips in a folder end-to-end like a Tape Viewer.  Then you can just JKL and IO and P all the way through the whole footage.  No using the mouse, or even having to take your fingers off those keys, and can do it completely without looking.

It sounds ridiculous but those extra key presses were adding enough friction to really make an impact.  Looking at my current project, if it took 5 seconds in total to take my hand from the JKL location to the mouse, navigate the cursor to the next clip, double-click, then put my hand back at JKL, and I had to do that 3024 times, then that's 4.2 hours just navigating to the next clip!  Thinking about it like that it doesn't seem such a small thing!

My suggestion would be to try and optimise your setup to have as little friction as possible, as even little things will be adding up unconsciously.

The second thing that I had forgotten when I stalled in editing was how lovely it was to look at the footage.  Not only did I get to re-live my holidays, and only the best bits of them at that (we don't film the awful bits, when you're cold / hot / tired / grumpy and things are smelly etc doesn't come through).  Also, I've found that though the sheer quantity of footage I take, the lovely shots are inevitable and finding them is very rewarding.

I do find frustrating things sometimes, like when I was in the boat in the wetlands and I missed the shot of the eagle swooping down and pulling the fish out of the water because I was filming something else in some other direction, or when I get out of sync and record the bits in-between the shots and don't record the bits when I'm aiming the camera at something cool, that's frustrating!

The other thing to keep in mind is that for our lives, and family or friends, the footage actually gets more valuable as it ages, not less valuable as it does for commercial or theatrical footage.  In that sense, keep shooting because sometime later on you might pick it up and go through it.  Or someone else might.
I don't know about you, but if my grandparents or great-grandparents had vlogged, or recorded videos of holidays, or whatever, I'd be very interested in looking at that footage.  In a sense, our own private footage is about history, not the latest trends.

Also, the longer it has been since you shot the footage, the more objective you will be in editing it.  Street photographers often deliberately delayed developing their film because the longer they delayed the better they were at judging how good each shot was, rather than remembering the sentiment and context around it.

Hope that helps!