- What's up and welcome
back to another video. Today, we're gonna dive
straight in to DaVinci Resolve and look at my workflow
for editing a documentary. Now this workflow can be used obviously for smaller projects, for smaller corporate brand films. But the idea of this workflow
is that it's really simple, but it's also robust
enough to be scaled up to bigger projects such as a documentary. This video is definitely something that I wish I would have seen when I first started
editing longer form projects because these types of projects can become overwhelming really quickly because there's so much
raw footage to deal with. With this particular project
there was over 30 interviews and 26 terabytes of data from a whole range of different cameras and different sources, and footage shot over the
period of about two years. So tons of data to work with, and to try and just wrap your head around how much data there is, and then try and distill a cohesive, powerful story out of that is actually quite a fate. But one thing that really
helps with the whole process is a robust workflow. (peaceful music) The documentary, is linked in the description
to this video below. This is really an extended brand film, so it's definitely a
brand piece about a brand and the work that they're
doing raising king salmon here in the top of the
south of New Zealand. So it is a brand film, but the way we approached it is applicable to many types
of documentaries as well. So we've got the final timeline here, but what I really wanna
focus on is the workflow around file management, which you can see up
here in the Media Pool. So it's really simple,
there's just four folders, one for footage and audio, other people like to call this dailies, one for music references, one for assets, and one for timeline. Let's take a look first at
the footage and audio folder, and how we organize all of that dailies. So if we expand this you can see every single one of these line items here is a new day, or a specific day that was shot for this project, and if we expand that you can see there are cameras, and audio
sources within that day. So on the 11th of the 11th, 2020, day six was shot at the Takaka hatchery and you can see here we've got an Acam, which was an ASA, we've got an audio source, and a Bcam. And then also a backup of the Acam, which was recorded as a proxy
within the Atomos Ninja V. Now all of these green line items here, are days where we went and
shot a whole lot of footage, but not necessarily any interviews. Where the interviews are stored, are under these blue sections here. So if we expand this, all of the formal interviews are broken down into the subjects. So if we look for example,
at Aine O'Neill here on the 28th of 13nth 2020, we filmed a formal
interview with Aine O'Neill and you can see here the camera sources and the audio sources are all here. So it's just one clip for Acam, a few clips for audio and one clip for Bcam. This is organized for every
single formal interview all the way down. And then we have a whole range
of informal interviews here. Difference between formal
and informal interviews is simply the informal
interviews are in situ interviews where the subject is
walking around the facility or the scene that they're in. And it's not necessarily a
sit down formal interview. Then formal interviews can
also be classed as B-roll or cutaway footage, but I'd like to categorize
them as informal interviews 'cause there's often a
lot of dialogue content in these informal interviews that is really valuable
for the documentary story. So, if they're classed
as informal interviews and organized as such, then it just helps my mind I guess give that more priority than the B-roll cutaway shots
that we'll add in later. So that's basically it
for all of the dailies, as you can see the fall
structure at the top is really simple when you just
look at footage and audio, you've got a nice clean folder structure, but as you break it down and go behind the surface with
all of the folder structures, it does become quite robust. If this was a bigger production with let's say six to eight cameras, then simply within the dailies, you would just have more folders for all of the different cameras and it would be expanded
on just like that. Okay, so once we have all
of our footage organized within the dailies folder, the next step is to start creating what we call stringouts
for each of the days. And this just helps us
visualize all of the footage within a timeline. So that's where the timelines folder all four down here comes into play. We'll break this down the
further we go into this tutorial, but what I want to look at first of all is just the B-roll stringouts O2. So every single one of these timelines, which you can see here on the right, represents one of the
dailies folders on the lift. And it's simply just all of the footage that was shot on that specific day strung out in one timeline. For example, on the 18th
of the second, 2021, the Tentburn hatchery, if we double click on that and open it up. So all the footage within this timeline is a stringout of day 17
Tentburn hatchery footage. As you can see here, we've got a whole range
of different cameras and that is all represented
within this Tentburn hatchery B-roll stringout. So as we scroll through, we can just scrub through all
of the footage back to back and add a bird's eye view see
everything that was captured on that one day. So in this B-roll stringouts folder, we simply have a stringout of
every single one of the days in the timeline. This is simply just an
organizational technique it's a way that you can preview
the footage really quickly. For example, if the
director wants to come in and see all of the footage that was shot on that particular day, it's right there, ready to go. Once we have our stringout, I like to go ahead and
duplicate the stringout to create what I call a selects reel. And that is simply going through watching every single
shot within the stringout and selecting the best bits or selecting the bits that I
think will make the cut later. Now there's a selects
reel for every single day that we shot on production. It's just a really quick way to preview all of the usable shots
throughout that day of production. And this is really handy because when I'm back in the edit and perhaps I'm stuck with a shot specifically from that day, or it's just not quite jelling, I can go back to my selects reel and watch through the
13 minutes of footage and find fresh inspiration to pull footage from
into my main timeline. So essentially what we have at this point is all of our footage
organized into folders. And then all of this footage is then translated into a timeline which has a stringout of
everything from the day. I then go through and
watched the stringout and make my selects and duplicate that into B-roll breakdowns, which is the selects
reel here you can see. So now the third layer of
this organizational workflow is to take those selects reel and to start to categorize
the B-roll into themes. That's what all for B-roll
themed breakdowns is here. So throughout this documentary, there's obviously key
themes that we're trying to illustrate with the B-roll. And because this is quite
an informative documentary, the B-roll does a lot of illustrating when it comes to the storyline. So there's differently key
themes within the B-roll that we want to isolate, and slowly start building many sequences around all of those individual
themes of the documentary. So at this point, I'm not
doing any creative editing I'm simply still organizing footage into little categories into bends. So if we look at our four
B-roll themed breakdowns, we now have a whole sub themes that we can start populating with all of our B-roll selects. So for example, let's go to the establishing
aerials of the Takaka hatchery, which is what TH is. Now, I have a stringout of all of this selects of good footage of the Takaka hatchery, in the form of establishing aerials. So if we watch through this you can see this is just some really
beautiful landscape shots, and they're all really usable. They look great, they're exposed well, and this shot set I'm
potentially going to select for the final timeline. If we take a look at another example, we have the sea farms and all of the shots there
contain dolphins in them. So here in this sequence, we have a minute 20 of
usable dolphin footage within the sea farms. (indistinct) So all of this footage here has been selected from all of the previous
B-roll breakdown selects. So hopefully you can see that by categorizing all of this footage within the B-roll themed breakdowns, and also having stringouts and select reels for each day, I'm starting to get a really clear picture of all of the footage
that I'm working with. And that's the most important thing when you're editing such
a big story like this. You want to know where
every single shot is within your Media Pool. You don't wanna be
scrambling around in the edit trying to find a shot
that you know is there. And that's where a clear
workflow structure, a clear organizational
strategy comes into play when editing documentaries. So there is all of the B-roll
that has been organized. Now let's look at all of the A-roll, which is all of the interviews sync and how I've organized that and started to distill a
story from so many formal and informal interviews. So as we mentioned earlier, we have all of our informal interviews and formal interviews
categorized as blue here. And each name represents one
interview with that one person and all of the footage
for that one interview is organized nicely into folders. Now what we do is the same
process as we did initially with the B-roll and that's down here under timelines, O1, A-roll stringout markups. So you can see here under
interview stringouts, what I have done is for every
single interview that we shot have created a synced stringout specifically for that one interview. And that essentially means it's a timeline with all of the camera sources, all of the audio sources all synced up and locked together. And that is what we call a
stringout of the send view. So you can see here it's
marked with the Clapper, and then as we go through, everything is nicely organized. Now what we need to do is
simply create a stringout for every single formal
and informal interview. As you can see here, we
have a ton of timelines with all of the different
interviews for this project. That's what these stringouts are, that's simply a way to organize all of your source footage into a timeline where you can always refer
back to the original sync. Now one thing that you
probably notice up here is a whole lot of markers. In this video I don't really have time to talk too much about these markers, but essentially what we've done is we've exported this stringout, uploaded it to a program
called Simon Says, and then that automatically
transcribes these interviews using AI. Then what we do is we've round trip back into DaVinci Resolve, and Simon Says allows us to
bring in the transcription as markers within the timeline. This is probably the key to
holding this whole documentary together because all of the IP in the interviews is
simply in the markers here, and I can access that information
from those markers using the edit index up here. So if you've never used edit index before, it's a powerful way to
see all of the changes or edits within the timeline and using the three.menu, you can filter the things
that you want to see within the edit index. Now simply I've just selected show markers and show all markers. And what that does is it
brings up the transcription that's been brought in from Simon Says for this entire interview right here. Now what's really cool
is I can go up here, choose all fields and I can literally search for any word let's say salmon, because that's what
this interview is about. There are now all of these
references that I can see of Aine O'Neill in this interview talking with the word salmon within her sentence. So this is a really powerful
way to quickly find those key themes and key words within
a really long form interview. Traditionally, you would
have the transcriptions given to you and a stack of
papers next to your desk, but having the transcription
as markers within your timeline is so powerful when it comes
to using the edit index to quickly know where every
single specific word is within an interview. What's also really powerful
about having a transcriptions within an edit index is that you can quickly
isolate individual words if you are having trouble with the infliction of certain phrases. For example, you might
cut a sentence halfway, and the last word within that
sentence sounds unfinished or is rising in terms of its infliction. And you might want to go back
to the original interview and search for that specific
word that you want to change and then you'll have references for every time that word appears within the overall interview. And then you'll have
a whole range of words to be able to choose and replace if you were trying to
change that infliction. So again, a really
powerful way of working. And this is honestly probably the key to this whole documentary workflow. All right. So now we have all of our
interviews laid out as stringouts with the transcription as
markers within the timeline. Now, the second step from here, just like with the B-roll is
to duplicate that timeline and over here, I've created a whole series of what I like
to call interview selects. Now an interview select for example, now with Aine O'Neill, it's about five minutes
of selected statements from Aine O'Neill's interview and I've identified key statements and key themes that she's talking about within her interview. You'll notice on the selects, I've removed all of the
transcription markers, and I've started to create
my own reference markers which you can also see here
are under the edit index. These blue markers here are my words that I've edited as I've listened through the interview. And they're just a way of prompting you remember what is actually
in these interviews. So now this two layers of
organization with my interviews have distilled all the key
themes down within the selects. Then what I want to do is
go another step further, just like with the B-roll. And that is to create A-roll sync pulls. Now these pulls here are
essentially selections from all of the interviews and I'm organizing them into categories or into themed groups. And then I'm starting to create timelines specifically around a
specific aspect of the story. Now all of these timelines can be found under O5 A-roll sync pulls. And you can see here, if
you just read through these, these are all of the themes that I've categorized and pulled selects from all of the interviews
into these folders to start creating these
themed based story timelines. Now the result of all of this hard work, 'cause it is a lot of
work to get to this stage, but what we have now is a really beautiful organizational structure where we have every single key theme that will possibly appear
in the final documentary. And we've got little many stringouts of all of the interview talent are speaking to their specific topic. So it really sets us up for a win when it comes to pulling all of this down into our master timeline. All right. So there's a lot of information so far let's recap really quick
before we move on further. What we have, is we have
all of that footage, whether it's interviews, formal interviews or informal interviews, or all of our B-roll footage shot on various different cameras and all of our audio sources. We've got all of them categorized and organized within the
footage and audio folder, which is up here under dailies. This is all of our raw footage and all of this raw footage is then translated into daily stringouts, which is under here under timelines. So all of our interview stringouts are organized nicely here per person, all of our B-roll stringout are organized by the day that they were shot. And then what we do is do
a second layer of selects so that's when we're watching
through all of the B-roll and taking out the pieces that we like and just getting rid of the
pieces that we don't like. Remember, we can go
back at any single time to the original footage up here if we want to source a clip that perhaps was admitted when we
created the selects reel. But we're just slowly refining the footage that we want to use in the final edit. So we have our B-roll selects, and then we do the same
with the A-roll interviews. So we create interview
selects which are all here. The original interviews
were anywhere between 45 to an hour long interviews. And the select reels are
generally five to 10 minutes of just the good bits and the relevant bits for
this particular documentary. After the select reels for
both the A-roll and the B-roll we start to do themed pulls. We've created categories or themed based sequences
for every single topic that the documentary will be covering. This was largely inspired by the content that came
out of the interviews. So as you're listening
through an interview, you might hear the interviewee talk about a particular topic, and then that will become a topic within the A-roll sync pulls here. (soft music) And that's the basis of
all of the organization when it comes to documentary editing. And then what we have
is a great foundation to start doing our creative editing. Now the first step is to just
get something on the timeline when it comes to a first draft. At this point in the project it can be very overwhelming 'cause you have all of these ideas floating around in your head as to how you're going to
tell the long form story. It's your job as the editor
to distill all of that and take the first step in creating a timeline for the story. So my approach to this is
to start with the A-roll everything should be based
around the interviews because the interviews are naturally where the story is being told. And if we can have a strong
story with the interviews that is supported by strong B-roll, that is supported by strong music, then we're going to have a strong story. (soft music) I'm gonna stop the video there because we've already talked about so much maybe we'll do a part two. But I really wanted to
give you a high-level idea of how to organize your
footage in a way that helps you creatively edit when it
comes to documentary editing. If you have any questions,
please let me know, add a comment in the comment box below. Hit bell notification, you like and subscribe to this channel. Your support is much appreciated. But most importantly, please comment below what you would like to see more of, because I really want
to be giving you value and giving you value in
areas that you actually need. So be great to get some idea of what you'd like to see more of, and I'll be sure to make
videos on them to come. But now peace out and thanks
very much for tuning in. (ominous music)
