Editing a feature

T

taras4444

Well-known member
First of all sorry guys wasn't sure where to post this so mods please do move to the appropriate place if there is one. Just though I'd post the question on here as I find the af100 gang are some of the best when answering. Basically I'm embarking on a feature film (just under 2 hours) and being the longest I've ever edited with the bigger size hd files the af 100 and samurai pro res 422 provide, I was wondering what's the best method for editing in adobe cs6? Do most people use the one project and edit the whole film there, or is it better to edit the film in chunks (say 20 minutes) before stringing it all together and then grading?

Longest I've ever done was 2 hours but that was with the smaller file sizes of the old dvx100b, and was just wondering now as opposed to editing the whole thing as one and finding right at the end it's painfully slow. (My laptop specs are decent but not superb, i7 nvidia gtx 460, 8 gb drr3 ram, an external g drive 4 tb for source footage, an internal SSD for the OS etc).

All advice is appreciated and again apologies for posting here. Taras
 
awesome thanks guys. And how would you then put it all together finally inhouse? Would you copy the files and paste into one project, or export each 20 minute segment as a video then join those videos up? Thanks again
 
taras4444 said:
awesome thanks guys. And how would you then put it all together finally inhouse? Would you copy the files and paste into one project, or export each 20 minute segment as a video then join those videos up? Thanks again
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I guess that would depend slightly on the project itself, I would assume for color grading purposes you'd be better off with merging the projects but then again that increases the chance a problem will occur.
 
Depending on how you are finishing, will depend on when you stitch it together. On my last film, the mix house sent the final mix to online house and online house conformed the master to the mix and exported the digital master as well as hdcamSR. For my latest as it is a smaller budget, I will export the master reels from resolve and stitch them back together in Adobe.
 
Now don't make the same mistake I made. I did everything myself on a feature and then I took it to "Professional" post production places to get the sound and grading done. Guess what. It cost me a fortune and the result was probably worse than what I could have done had I simply acquired the software and done it myself. Post production places charge the time they spend on it, not the result. Your time is much less expensive then their time. This is especially true for audio editing. If I were you, I would do all the sound editing in house, and even the grading. I would pre-prix as much as possible in house and go to the final mix only if I felt I could not do it on my own. Please remember that while they will charge you a fortune to mix in 5.1, most people will see the film on DVD in stereo. My mixers charged me a fortune to deliver a 5.1 theatrical mix but when I had to make a DVD, the 5.1 mix was useless because regular TV speakers can't take the 5.1 theatrical dynamic range. I did not have the money to do a second mix with them. I had to make a 2.0 mix from the 5.1 myself and redo the levels and even redo the EQ to give it more mid-range. In the end I wondered why I had not done the entire mix myself. As far as Grading goes, that is even more pathetic. The colour grader spent no less than 10 days grading the movie on a Da Vinci with all the bells a whistles. The end result was okay, but nothing to write home about. I finally attempted to adjust some of his colour grading uning a simple colour correction effect in Premiere. Guess what. Please prefered my graded version to his. My grading took 2 days. He charged me 5000 Euros. My grading was free. He had all the Tools. I only had Premierer. If you want my opinion: post production places are for people who don't know how to use software themselves or have huge budgets. For the hands on director with a budget, they are just a waste of money and will yield mediocre results.
 
I think the other comments are basically worthwhile, I would just submit a few more pointers I've gathered over the years:

1. Your final output process is the key to knowing how to approach your finish. Have a plan for what's going to happen at every step, then you'll know if breaking it up makes sense, and at what stage to put it all together, and so on. It's different for different projects.

2. Breaking into sequences is sometime preferable for mix purposes alone, because inevitably your "locked" cut will be unlocked and fiddled by someone, then you've got mix sync issues that can become a bookkeeping/math nightmare. If you're working in smaller chunks, odds are not every one of your chunks will be affected when the edit changes and your mix is no longer in sync.

3. Generally speaking, working on smaller chunks is always preferable from a processing standpoint - be it NLE, audio, or VFX reasons - so it really becomes an argument as to why you shouldn't break it up. If you find a reason why you can't break it up that trumps all the combined benefits of working smaller, so be it.
 
I personally prefer editing a feature in one sequence because it allows me to better visualize the flow of the movie. When zoomed out looking at all ninety minutes, you can see by your cuts how it's paced and where scenes fit overall. Since my last three movies were cut on an outdated computer, I did an offline edit to make things easier. My proxies were 240p and it worked great.
 
Poppycock! You can't edit the movie in one piece because the computer will be too slow handling all these elements no matter what setup you have and making changes in a project that big will be unpractical and sluggish and is likely to make your system crash every so often. The way to do it is to edit each scene in a separate project (or at least 3-5 minutes worth of scenes) and in different versions if you want. You render each project scene in an intermediate AVI. Once all the scenes are cut and rendered, you import all the rendered AVI scenes in a work project and there you construct the movie and adjust it. If necessary, go back and recut the scenes you don't like, re-render them and re-import into the work project. Once you are satisfied with the flow of the movie and are reedy to lock picture, you export the entire work project movie in a large single intermediate codec AVI file. That will be your guide AVI. Next, you create a new project and import the scene projects one by one and adjust them to match the guide AVI file. You now have a single premiere project to work on. From here you do the sound editing and the titling and the grading. It is also this file which will be used to bring the movie to any post production facility. Put a beep at the beginning and end of the movie and then you no longer touch the edit. You may add titles and some fades but overall you should not change anything anymore. Whatever sound editing you do, please be aware that Premiere works in 48hz - 16bits whereas post production places usually work in 48hz -24bits. Is that a problem? NOPE. Is the premiere audio good enough for sound editing work? ABSOLUTELY. I even tested sound exports from Cubase and compared them to sound exports from Premiere. Premiere exports sounded better. Go figure. Some people will tell you you need to use ProTools and or sound programs to edit the sound. POPPYCOCK! Premiere can handle everything with top audio quality provided you hard drives are fast enough. The only problem might be listening to all the tracks together. Here you might have to render first. At some point you may want to decide if you want to mix the movie yourself or go to a POST PRODUCTION FACILITY. Be aware they charge by the time and their only real advantage is that they can listen to the entire project with all the tracks on in a calibrated 5.1 movie thater listening environment. They may also have tools to EQ badly recorded dialog. However, be aware that it is not certain that they will do a better job than you in a STEREO version. I know it sounds ridiculous to imagine that a giant mixing table with lots of lights and whistles may do less of a good job than Premiere, but facts are facts. The Premiere EQ function yields excellent results in stereo. I was blown away by what I could do with it. You may want to export a DVD version every so often to listen to your mix on different regular TV speakers. Once it sounds good on at least 3 different TV speaker setups, you have a mixed movie. Now this brings up the problem with mixing for movie theaters. You have no way of checking your mix in a 5.1 movie theater environment and that is why you need a post production facility where you can listen to it in a 5.1 large room setup. The secret is to break down your stereo mix into 4 chunks: Dialog, Music, Effects, Foley. Bring that to the mixers and they can use that to make a 5.1 mix rapidly. To export audio you use the OMF export which they can import into Pro-Tools. They will mix and give you back 6 wav files in 5.1. That will be your theatrical mix. You may try to make your DVD from that but it probably won't sound as good as your stereo mix. Sounds ridiculous? Yes, it is ridiculous but reality is never the way it should be. As far as grading is concerened, the grader must always work from the originals. That means you bring him the premiere project and all the files associated with the project. You will need to clean up the timeline and put all the scenes on one track. It might take a day. Grading is tricky because, like sound, you may have to make many DVD's before you are satisfied that the film will play on any TV setup. Do not trust anything you hear and see in one environment. It may look or sound awful in another environement. The only proven method is trial and error. And that is how you make a movie. May the force be with you. Always. :)
 
I typically break down a feature into the acts - ACT 1, 2A, 2B and 3. It will be way more manageable and you can easily combine them into a nested sequence to deliver screeners or rough cuts. That said, I have edited a feature in Premiere pro (with red footage) all in a single timeline and it worked. Wouldn't recommend it by any means, but it was necessary one film I cut.

But breaking it down into acts also helps you to ensure that you have a beginning middle and end for each act and prevents them from bleeding into each other. Your major plot points will be more defined.
 
I have yet to edit a feature in PP but I did a long short and I find that sequences are well named. I use the timeline sequences for scenes and view them together on an "all" timeline. You can drag sequences right on a timeline to do that.

Other great suggestions on here by Amadou. Thanks.
 
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Amadou said:
Poppycock! You can't edit the movie in one piece because the computer will be too slow handling all these elements no matter what setup you have and making changes in a project that big will be unpractical and sluggish and is likely to make your system crash every so often. The way to do it is to edit each scene in a separate project (or at least 3-5 minutes worth of scenes)...
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I must be extraordinarily lucky then, because it works for me. My computer isn't too slow. Making changes wasn't impractical. And my system never crashed. And I was using Adobe Production Premium CS6 on AVCHD footage, anywhere from 1.5 to 2 hours of footage from each camera to make a approx. one hour of BD/DVD output. Used dynamic links to pull in AE footage, used 20+ photoshop stills per project, pushed the audio to Audition and back. Output to BD/DVD via Encore and dynamic link again. And it all works really quite well together.

I did this four times last year, for four separate presentations. Had two camera streams which ran mostly continuously for the duration of the presentations. So once I got the cameras and audio synced, all I needed was there. Just ran the normal PPro multi-cam edits using the method in the Adobe PPro CS6 documentation.

I don't see any advantage in breaking up a project like this into smaller pieces and working on them in smaller projects. Indeed, this would seem to be a fair amount more work just due to the sync issues alone.

Just because film projects used to be done in reels doesn't mean we should still do it that way. The concept of a "reel" doesn't even exist anymore in the digital video world.

One of the advantages of an NLE is that it allows easy non-linear editing. And part of what I was doing with these presentations was moving footage around, rearranging things to make the customer happy. For example, I moved some footage from the back of one presentation to near the front. Becaues I organized the work as one big project, the move was trivial. It would have been a PITA to do this if I had broken the project down into sub-project reels.

That said, I think people should work with these tools in ways that make them comfortable. If it makes you comfortable to work in "reels" then by all means, have at it. But the joy of NLEs these days means you don't have to work that way anymore. Just because "we've always done it that way" doesn't mean that we always will. Just sayin'.
 
Bruce, If all you have are back and forth cuts on a multi camera setup, the of course you can use just one project. However, this does not applly to a fiction movie. In a movie, you may have two or three thousand cuts with a 50 to 1 shooting ratio and 4 or 5 different versions for each scene, each of which need to be tried and tested in the general flow. Now even if you can manage to put it all in one timeline, there will be so many tracks and elements all overthe place that you will have trouble just making room to make the smallest change and test it. Forget it. Work with rendered scenes and play around with those prior to locking picture in a final projet.
 
Most features, if not all are in the same project. You need to see the entire film for pace, rhythm, and overall development from beginning to end. While you may start with scenes, then combined scenes, at some point you will need to have the entire film in the timeline. You also never know when you might need a shot from one "scene" in another to make it work. Jumping between projects will make that problematic at best. "Alice in Wonderland" for example had 5000 bins in a single project.

Michael
 
I just don't understand how anybody can seriously cut a serious feature in one project. But since we are having this discussion, let's go all the way into it. Let us assume for a moment that your computer can handle very smoothly a project this big. Let us also assume that you are the best editor in the universe who gets most of the movie structured and cut properly the first time around. Now, how do you solve the following problems in a one giant project file? (1) If you have more than one version of each scene, where do you put the extra versions? If you put them at the end of your giant project, your unused scene version project will be ten hours long and it will be near impossible to find anything in it. (2) What if you want to test three scenes all of which have three versions? Do you construct 3 X 3 = 9 giant projects? And from then on, which project do you work on while you make up your mind? It just becomes unmanageable. Even the smallest change requires that you make no mistake or your entire project may me out of sync or lose something here or there. It is UNMANAGEABLE. With my technique, you just drop in the scenes you want and you can quickly activate or deactivate the piece you want or don't want. This allows you to structure the movie quickly without having to spend time going back to the micro-editing step of a scene. If you want to use another take for a shot, with one project per scene, you don't have to go digging in a zillion folders and watch each take to find the shot. You simply go back to you scene work project where everything is already organized, and use the unused stuff at the end or your scene on the timeline. No need to re-invent the wheel and look again for stuff you have already cut before. Bottom line, in one project per scene, all your work is preserved and you can easily re-work the scene in many different ways. In the one project approach, everything you don't use gets lost and you can never go back without having to redo things you have already done before. In the one giant project approach, trying different combinations becomes complicated and unmanageable. This of course assumes again that your computer can handle giant project easily (which is a big assumption). Now unless there is something I don't know about Windows 8 and the latest version of processors and the latest Premiere patch, I would say that just opening and saving the giant project will quickly become a major pain in the ass.
 
Computers have been handling entire feature films for a long time, be it Mac or Windows. Personally I have never done a feature film on Premiere Pro, and this is not a "which is better NLE" statement, but Media Composer handles entire feature films in one project for over 15 years. As I mentioned, a friend was the 1st AC on Alice in Wonderland which was stereo 3D and had twice the footage and management all in a single project. Not only a single project, but multiple editors and assistants working at the same time. I have seen projects with 500, 700 and 1000 hours worth dailies in it. Organization is key, but can be done in one single project and is done all the time this way. Creatively, as an editor, I concentrate in the footage and easy access within the project. Versions, and versions of versions are all easily managed within bins, folder and the single project.

I am surprised that the same cannot be done in Premiere Pro, I will have to look into that a little closer.

Michael
 
Amadou said:
Now don't make the same mistake I made. I did everything myself on a feature and then I took it to "Professional" post production places to get the sound and grading done. Guess what. It cost me a fortune and the result was probably worse than what I could have done had I simply acquired the software and done it myself. Post production places charge the time they spend on it, not the result. Your time is much less expensive then their time. This is especially true for audio editing. If I were you, I would do all the sound editing in house, and even the grading. I would pre-prix as much as possible in house and go to the final mix only if I felt I could not do it on my own. Please remember that while they will charge you a fortune to mix in 5.1, most people will see the film on DVD in stereo. My mixers charged me a fortune to deliver a 5.1 theatrical mix but when I had to make a DVD, the 5.1 mix was useless because regular TV speakers can't take the 5.1 theatrical dynamic range. I did not have the money to do a second mix with them. I had to make a 2.0 mix from the 5.1 myself and redo the levels and even redo the EQ to give it more mid-range. In the end I wondered why I had not done the entire mix myself. As far as Grading goes, that is even more pathetic. The colour grader spent no less than 10 days grading the movie on a Da Vinci with all the bells a whistles. The end result was okay, but nothing to write home about. I finally attempted to adjust some of his colour grading uning a simple colour correction effect in Premiere. Guess what. Please prefered my graded version to his. My grading took 2 days. He charged me 5000 Euros. My grading was free. He had all the Tools. I only had Premierer. If you want my opinion: post production places are for people who don't know how to use software themselves or have huge budgets. For the hands on director with a budget, they are just a waste of money and will yield mediocre results.
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With all due respect, I followed your threads about your feature, and the professional advice given to you. The problems you had and money you wasted trying to compete this project were all on YOU, not the post house/colorist/audio mixer. It was your lack of experience and lack of communication, which led to your improper workflow, then you ignoring advice from talented professionals whom you had asked for help.
 
MichaelP said:
I am surprised that the same cannot be done in Premiere Pro...
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It can, and fairly easily. It's just that Amadou doesn't want to do it that way. Not a reflection on either Amadou or PPro IMHO. People should work with a workflow in which they are comfortable. Else they spend way too much time fighting their tools and not enough time making films.

For me, that comfortable workflow means building the film in a single project using multiple sequences (aka timelines). And PPro does that just fine.
 
So to answer my question: In a sigle workfile project, where do you place the unused versions of each scene?
 
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