Analysing other people's edits

[kye]

59 minutes ago, MrSMW said:

Sounds like most wedding videos...

(Mine included) 🤪

You'll have to have a word with the talent then!!

[MrSMW]

1 hour ago, kye said:

You'll have to have a word with the talent then!!

Actually, it's a bit of both...

The reality is, it's their wedding day, not our shoot, but the more we can make it a collaboration, the better the chances at capture are.

I try and educate my clients in this regard and with a discrete subtext that I have a reputation to uphold so would rather not try to make a silk purse out of a pigs ear if I can avoid it, as ultimately, it will always be a pigs ear, just a slightly better pigs ear...but this is secondary to their day. There is a middle ground but we need to be on the same wave length in advance otherwise it's mainly reaction over action.

Some clients...most actually, get this. Or can be sufficiently educated to get it.

Others though, the princesses (and princes) are the worst to produce anything for as they are usually acting like manic mental cases all day long...and if that's how you act, that's what it looks like in the video!

 

 

 

[twav]

Its definitely an under appreciated artform. No one can see what you had to work with so you only do your best to try and cover bad direction. Another big problem is o people generally look at editing as post production when if you involve the editor at the start, if the editor is good and listened to can save time and a lot of headaches and possibly make your project more successful and interesting due to their understanding of pacing and structure.Editing has been getting faster as people are less patient and require more instant gratification, the problem with that is its harder then to produce peaks and troughs to make things interesting. 

[kye]

On 2/11/2022 at 11:55 PM, twav said:

Its definitely an under appreciated artform. No one can see what you had to work with so you only do your best to try and cover bad direction. Another big problem is o people generally look at editing as post production when if you involve the editor at the start, if the editor is good and listened to can save time and a lot of headaches and possibly make your project more successful and interesting due to their understanding of pacing and structure.Editing has been getting faster as people are less patient and require more instant gratification, the problem with that is its harder then to produce peaks and troughs to make things interesting. 

I completely agree.

I'm a solo-operator so do literally everything and I'm very aware of editing being limited to the footage captured - in fact one of my primary goals in learning editing is to shoot better footage in the first place.  My biggest challenge in editing is not having a clear understanding about what I'm actually doing, but the second biggest challenge has been working with my own rather mediocre footage!

Everything in film-making should have an effect on the end result, either directly or indirectly, but the way that the industry is segmented it's hard to get that overall understanding.  There are lots of resources available for each step in the process, or even each aspect of each profession within each step, but they mostly focus on doing things in a certain way "because that's how it works" rather than explaining the actual end result.  Alternatively, there are people who are solo-operators or work across many more departments and have a broader view, but they either don't know how to do things well, or do things really well but don't know how to explain what they're doing and why.

I've decided to devote my efforts in 2022 to learning editing (and sound design), as I feel it's the part about film-making I know the least about, and I think it might be the part that perhaps has the most to teach me about the overall process.

Welcome to the forums!

[kye]

Finally got around to looking at the TV episode I chopped up and, to be honest, I am completely blown away.

The show is a long running and award winning travel show with a few interview / talking segments per episode with b-roll sections in-between, or so I thought.

I've watched dozens and dozens of episodes from this show, so I am quite familiar with it, but on first inspection I have multiplied my understanding of it by perhaps a factor of 100.  

Some initial impressions:

• there is far more b-roll than I thought.  There are multiple b-roll sequences between most interviews, there are V/O with b-roll sequences within the interviews, etc.
• the sheer quantity of shots is just immense.  I have a pretty good intuitive understanding about how much shooting results in how much finished footage, and obviously I'm no-where near as good as these cinematographers, but even if their hit-rate is 10x mine, they're still shooting spectacular quantities of b-roll.
• the editors are doing strange things with structure, even "fading" between locations by cutting more and more b-roll into talking sections that the talking section kind of fades out and then gradually cutting in clips from the new location so there aren't any clear transitions and questions like "when does this scene end" become sort of meaningless
• it seems to be a lot like music with "call and response" where two or more things are intercut.  it also seems to be very technical in terms of the rhythm, where any timing queues established (by music or talking or anything) need to be aligned to, but can be doubled, or switched to the "off-beat" etc.  It really reminds me of programming break-beats when I was making electronic music.
• I've watched hundreds or even thousands of hours of content at this level but the editing is so seamless that I really had no clue about what was going on until I chopped it up and started to try and categorise and understand it.

Perhaps the most significant impression is that this is completely beyond anything I have seen on YT, or even discussed anywhere online.  and I mean, this is several orders of magnitude more sophisticated.  Admittedly, I haven't found many good resources for editing online actually, so I'm hoping they are out there and that I'll find them.

If anyone is reading this and is tempted to start cutting up great work then I encourage you to do so.  Once you start looking you'll start noticing things immediately - it's like opening a window and looking through into another world, and you don't get to see it unless you pull it into an editor.

Take a look at this:

It's obvious from this that there are a series of sections of building intensity with faster and faster cuts, leading up to a change of pace and going much slower.  One interesting thing is that the transition actually happens at the playhead (red line), and the two shots prior to that are the release of the tension before it changes.  The playhead is where an ad break is placed.

You might think that this would be obvious, but the problem is that the above image represents about 5 minutes, which is very difficult to watch and keep the overall structure clear in your head - the above is about 160 cuts!

Also, if you look more carefully, it starts off with shorter bursts that then find a mid-level of pulsing intensity then a final push and then release.  Even if you could keep track of the pattern of building intensity over and over you wouldn't be noticing that pattern.

I'd imagine that not everything these masters are doing will be obvious from looking at the edit, but there's so much that is that it's an all-you-can-eat buffet regardless.

[kye]

I have noticed that there seems to be a world of subtle timing with editing and the edit points themselves.

All edits have a rhythm and pace of their own, music or no music.  Try clapping your hands to an edit, any edit, and you may be able to "find" that pace.  

So, edit points can happen on the beat, slightly before/after it, deliberately off the beat (either on the off-beat or intentionally nowhere near any beat and therefore unexpected).  When there is music then there is a time signature involved and there will be bars, where the first beat in that bar is more important than the other beats and may be emphasised.  So then you can have edits aligned to the first beat in a bar, or the third beat in a bar, etc.  

So much variation....  but it's hard to really "see" them, because our hearing is much more time sensitive than our vision.

Here's a super niche trick to 'hear' the edits in Resolve.

1. start with an edit with separate clips.  use the Scene Cut Detect if you need to
2. get a sound file with a short sound and put it in a bin on its own (a short beep sound is good)
3. duplicate the audio part of all the clips in your edit to another track
4. highlight them all and disable the Conform Lock Enabled option on them (and ensure it's on for all other clips)
5. right-click on your timeline and select Timelines -> Reconform from Bins
6. on the Conform Bins, unselect all bins except the one with your beep sound in it
7. in the Conform Options, select only Codec (that's the only setting I found that works)
8. hit ok
9. every clip that you disabled the Conform Lock on in your timeline should now be your beep sound, and if you've trimmed it right then you will now have a track that beeps every time there's an edit point
10. adjust volume on the track to be something sensible
11. watch your footage and be able to 'hear' the edits

Let me know if you actually do this and what you find.  I'm currently looking at Mustafa Bhagats work on Parts Unknown and he has a fantastic sense of rhythm and timing (being a musician in addition to an editor probably helps with this) so I'm hoping to learn from these.

[jgharding]

I see it as the edit being another "dimension" of movement.

In narrative it allows you to drastically alter the mood by action or inaction in terms of cuts. I'm a big fan of unexpected shot holds. The evermore frantic pace of editing in general is a bit of a shame as the actor's performance eventually ends up suppressed by the edit rather than enhanced.

A fun one is music video, for example you can move cuts on and off the rhythm of the song to enhance different things. When you're on beat it's all tied together, when you're off it creates a change in feel, the picture becomes a little less attached to the sound so you can create an extra sense of "flow" this way. As you leave the beat its more of a film backed by music, as you tighten up to the beat it's a music film.

YouTube editing seems to be inexorably tied to prescription amphetamine abuse, with even a still talking head head cutting to a new post-punch-in zoom every two seconds.

[kye]

14 hours ago, jgharding said:

In narrative it allows you to drastically alter the mood by action or inaction in terms of cuts. I'm a big fan of unexpected shot holds. The evermore frantic pace of editing in general is a bit of a shame as the actor's performance eventually ends up suppressed by the edit rather than enhanced.

I can definitely see it as a crutch for narrative film-making.

14 hours ago, jgharding said:

A fun one is music video, for example you can move cuts on and off the rhythm of the song to enhance different things. When you're on beat it's all tied together, when you're off it creates a change in feel, the picture becomes a little less attached to the sound so you can create an extra sense of "flow" this way. As you leave the beat its more of a film backed by music, as you tighten up to the beat it's a music film.

I'm exploring this in the videos I'm looking at and my own work, which for travel is mostly montages with music.  

The works I'm analysing seem to use the intensity of cuts as an added device to build and release tension along with the music and wider sound design.  To a certain extent it's like b-roll is part of sound design and as long as the visuals are remotely relevant then you can kind of cut them up in whatever way you want to, creating everything from a slow peaceful progression to frantic wall-of-sound-and-visuals type moments.  There was a particularly good example of this in one of the Parts Unknown episodes in a high-pressure region (IIRC it might have been Beirut) where they built up to fast cutting of b-roll of the signs of war there / a heavy metal rock band / and the whistling of a pressure pot steam valve in full release.

15 hours ago, jgharding said:

YouTube editing seems to be inexorably tied to prescription amphetamine abuse, with even a still talking head head cutting to a new post-punch-in zoom every two seconds.

ThusGuyEdits did an interesting video on that....

Definitely editing for short-attention spans...!

[jgharding]

9 hours ago, kye said:

ThusGuyEdits did an interesting video on that....

Definitely editing for short-attention spans...!

YouTube cutting sometimes makes me feel a little ill. It's usually constantly cutting within the same linear shot, so not removing content, just putting in a cut so you can constantly punch in and out, plus it's often accompanied by brickwall mastered pop tunes with every frequency at maximum all the time!

[BTM_Pix]

1 hour ago, jgharding said:

It's often accompanied by brickwall mastered pop tunes with every frequency at maximum all the time!

I'm going to pitch this to YouTube as a new option so I don't have to keep switching otherwise potentially interesting videos off.

[kye]

I've been persevering with analysing editing, and the more I do this the more I recommend it to anyone who wants to improve their skills.

One piece of advice I would give, which seems actually kind of painful, is to cut up the video yourself manually.
I cut up a show using the auto-magical tool and set it to be pessimistic (so it misses some cuts rather than has false-cuts on strong action) and then made a pass to manually add-in the rest of the cuts that it missed.  This manual pass made me examine, frame by frame, some of the faster more complex parts of the edit.  I'm cutting up travel shows with stylistic edits, and I have been noticing all kinds of tiny details in the editing.

Some things I've found include:

• digital punch-ins for one or two frames before / after an edit to add a zoom effect or glitch effect (if the punch-ins were offset in X and Y from each other)
• jump-cuts to remove maybe 2-4 frames in some shots to add pace and style to b-roll shots with movement in faster montages
• barn door / sliding door effects on edits
• 'burst edits' where there is a longer shot, 1 black frame, 2 frames b-roll shot, 1 black frame, 2 frames b-roll shot, 1 black frame, longer shot
• whip pan transition
• wipe transition where a blurry object moves rapidly across the screen to obscure the first shot and reveals the second shot
• whip pan transition with a single frame of crazy motion-blur between the two shots - the single frame wasn't at all similar to the others so it kind of creates a flash effect
• fades...   the combination of fade-out / fade-in is used (noticing when it's used is interesting) but fade-out / hard cut in from black was another combination I saw, interesting aesthetic
• colour grading variations - sometimes the colour was one way and sometimes another - seeing this choice of different looks was very interesting

This might sound super-trendy but it wasn't from a travel YT video - this was from a major TV travel show episode that won multiple awards for editing. 

There are probably other things in there I haven't noticed yet either, but there are cuts in there that I've spent whole minutes just rolling back and forth and looking at and thinking about.

Also in addition to seeing things at the micro-level with individual cuts, I'm noticing things at the structural level where the relationship of scenes within the final edit is laid-out.  if you're making up the edit then the relative structure becomes visually obvious and the act of doing this makes you think about what a scene really is.  Do the shots that get you to and from a location count in this scene?  What is a "location" - some "scenes" might move between rooms or buildings and others might just stay put.  The analysis forces you to notice these things.  Sometimes they might have one scene that moves around and another that doesn't - trying to understand why is very useful.

It is having several effects on me:

• It is making me realise how shallow the level of skill is on things like wedding videos (despite them being perfect for many of these innovative techniques) as they're multi-layered and very stylised
• It is making me realise how little is actually required to get a nice edit - some of the videos I've really enjoyed watching have been very very simple edits just having a simple structure and just music and no other sounds
• It is showing me how much you can get away with - knowing what is in an edit frame-by-frame and then re-watching it and not seeing what you know is there (or removing a single frame and re-watching it and not noticing a difference) it really shows you what is perceptible and what isn't**
• It is adding more and more tools to my editing toolkit
• I'm realising the importance of sound design
• I'm learning so much by watching the cinematography too

** yes I have checked that my editing setup is playing all the frames (I've actually examined the latency and jitter on my setup by filming my laptop screen and external monitor with my iPhone at 240fps and verified that the image timing is identical on both screens and also that each frame is visible for a similar amount of time, ie ~10 frames at 240fps per frame of 24p).

I cannot recommend this type of analysis highly enough.  We watch so much content and yet so much of the artistry is simply not apparent until we go deep and really look, frame-by-frame, at what the masters are doing.  Pick something done by the people at the pinnacle of the craft and go deep on it and see what you find.  You won't regret it - I find it's actually more entertaining than just watching TV or a movie so it's not a chore at all, but like opening a window to new ideas you wish you knew earlier.

[webrunner5]

Well that might be a reason even a simple commercial on TV has a crew of 50 people involved. No one on here is going to become some master of every trade involved to make top notch videos. Sure we all need to get better, but there is a limit to talent, ergo intelligence, mine is getting worse by the day, and time involved.

  We hardly ever talk about audio on here, heck it is just as important as the video at times if not more important.

[kye]

11 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

Well that might be a reason even a simple commercial on TV has a crew of 50 people involved. No one on here is going to become some master of every trade involved to make top notch videos. Sure we all need to get better, but there is a limit to talent, ergo intelligence, mine is getting worse by the day, and time involved.

  We hardly ever talk about audio on here, heck it is just as important as the video at times if not more important.

I really think that editing, and analysing editing, is the best way to improve everything else.  People talk about "shooting for the edit" and that's a great strategy if you know what the edit is going to be, but I suspect most people don't.

The edit is really "where the rubber meets the road" and you can have all the great shots and nice sound that you want, but if it doesn't work in the edit then it isn't good, period.  So by deepening your understanding of the edit you're really deepening your understanding of what "good" really is.

I'm noticing so much stuff about cinematography and it's really making me think about shooting differently too.  

I'm much less advanced on my understanding of sound design than I am of cinematography, but I'm really starting to notice things about this as well.  Apart from the ad-breaks where obviously every element in the edit all stops/resets, there aren't so many neat pauses, rather the structures of these edits are more like a continuous stream where threads are interwoven and so visual themes, voice-overs, music, sound design (eg, ambience), and other elements are all overlapping.  It gives a great feeling of carrying the viewer along on the journey, with a really rich experience, and it also provides a great tone from which to break if you really need to.  

In one episode there's a scene in a restaurant where the host is interviewing some people and all of a sudden some gangsters drive almost into the restaurant in a stolen car and get out and have guns and the place just goes instantly to chaos with everyone crouching down but the cameras keep rolling.  In that section they cut to just raw clips with basic editing, which contrasted starkly to the rich multi-layered production just previously.  It further added to the feeling being changed.

It's great to see how they're supporting the whole aesthetic theme of each episode with all the layers and techniques - a true alignment of all departments all pushing in the same direction.

[webrunner5]

I think we over think a lot of this stuff. I follow a lot of people on YouTube and most of them, well all of them are just regular people, mostly with a GoPro and a Drone and since it is them and their content I overlook a lot of editing because the content is so interesting. And surprisingly their editing isn't that bad. The more you do the better you get.

 I don't think if it were shot on an Arri it would be much better. Not when you are knocking out videos every day or so. I just look forward to new content and consider some almost like family I have following them so long. I am even a Patreon on most of them.

[leslie]

first thought, you should do a comparison, like cutting up home and away  and get back to us with the results. 

2nd thought, how are you getting your footage?  using a capture card to import it or from online ? kinda curious 

 

[kye]

17 hours ago, leslie said:

first thought, you should do a comparison, like cutting up home and away  and get back to us with the results. 

2nd thought, how are you getting your footage?  using a capture card to import it or from online ? kinda curious 

Are you suggesting that I cut up something like a soap opera (that's likely to be done to a timeline rather than with an eye for detail?).  Not sure that would work because I'm cutting up travel shows, not narratives.  The more I look at this stuff in more detail the more that I see that it's completely different.

I can say that the travel shows I have cut up are several orders-of-magnitude more sophisticated than some of my favourite travel videos I have watched on YT.  One video on YT I really liked literally just had shots, cut to the beat, over music, and had no location audio at all.  Compared to this, the award winning edits I'm seeing from TV are from a different dimension!

The footage I'm cutting up comes from YT and I just download it.

I'm also thinking I should look for some music videos too, they'll be quite b-roll heavy and cutting with extreme sensitivity to the music is a big deal there too.

[leslie]

home and away might have been a poor choice, as you say. I would expect  a level of difference between youtube and produced stuff. However if  youtube stuff was up there with the travel guides then they'd probably get snapped up for a job  pretty quickly i'd imagine.

I might be showing my age abit here, but not sure everything that has a beat can be qualified as music.   although i do think yt offers people more options off getting noticed, rather going begging at the doors of record companies.

[kye]

6 hours ago, leslie said:

home and away might have been a poor choice, as you say. I would expect  a level of difference between youtube and produced stuff. However if  youtube stuff was up there with the travel guides then they'd probably get snapped up for a job  pretty quickly i'd imagine.

I might be showing my age abit here, but not sure everything that has a beat can be qualified as music.   although i do think yt offers people more options off getting noticed, rather going begging at the doors of record companies.

Actually, a number of people that stood out on social media have had offers to transition onto more "mainstream" editing gigs.  Remember that there have been a smattering of people that won various Vimeo Editors Choice (or whatever it was called) and that got you real attention.  I've heard the odd mention from people saying those lead to getting job offers.

Now there's an entire shadow industry of people either shooting/editing for YT on shows where there's room for a camera operator, or just editing when the people shoot their own material.  Lots of channels I watch have done a "we're hiring" mention on their channels, even ones you wouldn't think are large enough or have enough followers.  So "professional" is taking on a new meaning in that sense.

IIRC Casey Neistat used to edit about 1-3 minutes of final edit per hour spend editing when he was doing his daily vlogs, and I've paid attention when other vloggers casually mention their stats and it's something like that.  If that was true then a professional editor would get a week to edit a typical "hour" show (40-50 mins), which seems in the ballpark, but I'm not sure if that includes the time spend by the DIT and Assistant Editors also likely involved.  More likely they get a 1-week turn around timetable, which is quite different.

I also notice that almost no YT people that edit their own work use control surfaces either, which is crazy as a simple analysis shows you that you can get crazy ROI on these things.

[leslie]

As yt  bloggers and the scene matures, i think they will gradually transition to control surfaces and it will become more mainstream. Depends a lot or whether its tax deductible or not. If you go the resolve route, it gets expensive pretty quick, hard to justify for mums and dads i think. While its more plug and play than it used to be, if you go down the middle road and use other surfaces like arturia or midi then thats cheaper but adds another learning curve as well. 

If your inside and have a studio setup then i would presume you wouldn't need to tweak too many knobs for a consistent look and maybe you could persevere just with a keyboard. If your outside, well life would be much easier with a control surface. It also depends on just how much time people are willing to invest into their vlogs. An enthusiasts gear will be different from a more mundane approach like mums and dads.

Again i presume a lot and i don't wish to put mums ands down. however we all have different priorities and expectations.   

[kye]

5 hours ago, leslie said:

As yt  bloggers and the scene matures, i think they will gradually transition to control surfaces and it will become more mainstream. Depends a lot or whether its tax deductible or not. If you go the resolve route, it gets expensive pretty quick, hard to justify for mums and dads i think. While its more plug and play than it used to be, if you go down the middle road and use other surfaces like arturia or midi then thats cheaper but adds another learning curve as well. 

If your inside and have a studio setup then i would presume you wouldn't need to tweak too many knobs for a consistent look and maybe you could persevere just with a keyboard. If your outside, well life would be much easier with a control surface. It also depends on just how much time people are willing to invest into their vlogs. An enthusiasts gear will be different from a more mundane approach like mums and dads.

Again i presume a lot and i don't wish to put mums ands down. however we all have different priorities and expectations.   

Remembering we're talking about editing here, and not colour grading, the Speed Editor is quite modestly priced, and the jog wheel (which is the thing you're interacting with most of the time) is super high quality.

Having something where you can add one-press functions is really useful too.  Lots of tasks can be hugely streamlined with this kind of tweaking.  Something that saves even a fraction of a second can save hours or even days of work per project - the average feature film contains about 2000 shots per hour of edited footage and when you think about how many times an edit is adjusted and tweaked during the process....  With numbers like that it adds up really quickly.