Most Effecient Editing Workflow For Express Edits

[andybiz_2005]

Dear friends,

I need your insights on something important. In the future, I will have to take on wedding gigs where I shoot the whole of the morning until afternoon, say from 8:00am in the morning till 1:00pm in the afternoon (average about 1 1/2 miniDV tapes at 60mins/tape). That would be about 90mins of raw footage.

I will then have to rush back to my studio to upload the morning shot to Premiere Pro 1.5 & edit just the important highlights into a 5-8min MTV video to be shown at the dinner reception on the same day. I will have to be at the dinner venue around 6:00pm. So, that gives me around 3.5hours to edit assuming I start uploading my tapes at 2:00pm & finnish rendering & burning the DVD by 5:30pm.

Given that I can't afford the Firestore Pro (80GB) portable harddisk (costs $7500 in my country), that I stick with miniDV tape & can't speed up the upload process, what kind of workflow would you recommend I implement to speed up the edit process? Much thanks from all of you in advance, as express edit is quickly becoming the trend in my country.

Andrew

 

[TeleDan]

Andrew,
Whew, sounds like a long day. I've never done one myself but I believe they are called 'same day edits' in the States. A harddisk recorder would be the ideal tool from the standpoint of savnig the download time but, as you say, they aren't inexpensive. If you have an assistant and extra camera, you could have the assistant start the download to a laptop as soon as the first tape is filled.

Alternately, check out an inexpensive shareware program called Scenalyzer ( http://www.scenalyzer.com ). One feature that could help is that it can compile a scene index from a DV tape in about 5 minutes. You then just select the clips/scenes that you want from the tape and it will batch capture just those selected clips without having to run through the entire tape in real time. So if you need just 10 minutes of footage off the tape, you have it build the index (which runs in fast forward), select just those clips, and tell it to capture. It will automatically fast forward/reverse the tape to the each clip and do the capture. You can download a trial version to test it first. As far as I know it only works with SD DV so if you're using HDV, this won't work for you.

You might also check out the wedding and event forum over at www.videouniversity.com . I haven't visited there for a while but they talk a lot about 'same day edits' there.

Good luck,
Dan