One Simple Step to INSTANTLY Speed Up Your Documentary Editing

have you ever come back from shooting a film Project where everything went amazing and you're feeling great that is until you actually plug in the hard drive and fire up your editing program and suddenly you realize that you have absolutely no idea where to start [Music] I know that Panic All Too Well and as a cinematographer my favorite part of the filmmaking process hands down is actually shooting the thing but when it comes to documentaries so much of the story is shaped in the edit that if you want to put together a great film you have to focus just as much on the post-production as the actual filming and since not everyone wants to dedicate themselves to becoming Master editors it can be incredibly overwhelming when you come back from a shoot and that Panic hits when you figure out you have no idea how to start turning a hard drive full of dozens or maybe even hundreds of hours of footage into a meaningful story luckily there is one simple first step you can and should take when it comes to starting your edit that will both help you make sense of your footage get to know your storyline and streamline the entire editing process so you can start cutting with as little friction as possible that's exactly what we're going to talk about in this video and thanks to my friends at Blackmagic design we're also going to play around with the speed editor which is a really cool piece of tech that's going to well speed things up even more so let's get into it [Music] hey guys welcome back and if you're new here my name is Luke Forsyth and on this channel I teach the skills I've learned over 10 years working as a documentary filmmaker and photographer so for a long time I used to tell people that I hated editing I'd say things like a real documentary filmmaker's place is out in the world interacting with people and experiencing life not in front of a computer screen [Music] but of course that's not true at all and especially in docs the story doesn't really take shape until you start cutting it so saying you're a filmmaker who refuses to edit is basically refusing to engage with half of the job I'm not saying that you necessarily need to operate the mouse and keyboard yourself to be a real filmmaker but you probably should at least know where to start because I earn most of my income from being a cinematographer it can be even easier for me to avoid editing than for some people because I usually just get to hand off a hard drive of footage and then walk away at the end of a shoot but still every time I want to shoot a personal project where I don't have the budget to pay a professional which is let's be honest all of my personal projects in terms of money we have no money I have to face the same dreaded blank timeline as you which typically sends me into a dark pit of existential despair but over time I realized that I don't actually hate editing at all what I hate is the start of the process when you're confronted with a mountain of footage and you have no idea where to even start it's unorganized full of throwaway shots and you can barely really remember what was said during the master interview once an edit gets started though and I can easily find all the shots and sound bites I want I don't actually mind editing at all actually it's kind of fun and I can lose myself in it for hours at a time it's really just that initial hurdle that sucks so much when you first plug that hard drive into your computer and realize that you have 15 hours of material that needs to be cut down to 15 minutes and it can feel impossible to know how to get going luckily there is a tried and true First Step that will get the ball rolling help you make sense of what you actually captured and make the rest of the edit flow much more smoothly and that's cutting dailies if you don't know what dailies are the simplest definition is that they're Loosely edited timelines that show all the usable shots from a particular day or scene it comes from Hollywood where a dit or even a dedicated dailies editor will take all the shots from a given day trim out all the unusable bits and then string them out on a timeline for the creative leads to review at the end of the day you can call them dailies or Rush reels highlight reels string outs or really anything else you like but it's a tried and true method for making making sense out of large quantities of footage so that you can see what you really have to work with in the edit in docs the shooting ratios are much higher than narrative films but making dailies is no less helpful and actually it's maybe even more important the first time I tried to edit something for the local cable access News Channel where I did my high school work study placement almost 20 years ago I would just import the cards and then try and comb through the clips one at a time until I found something that worked this meant that I never really grasped the full scope of what I had to work with and so I didn't have a good handle on all the options for storytelling now for that channel premium storytelling wasn't really the emphasis but still I could have saved myself a lot of trouble and made things a lot easier on myself if I'd known about dailies much later on when I was working as a photojournalist and living in Cambodia and just starting to experiment with video really a friend working the video desk it's been on pen post tipped me off about the power of dailies and since then I've never edited a project without using them once I started making dailies it got so much easier to edit and I'll show you how how it helps in just a minute but first let me show you the mechanics of how to make them for yourself so I'm personally going to do this within DaVinci Resolve as I'm in the middle of switching my workflow away from Adobe for a whole bunch of reasons I'll cover in another video and that means I'm able to use blackmagic's own speed editor keyboard that integrates with resolve to make this process even easier which is a really great bonus the speed editor is pretty much the ultimate dailies making device but you don't have to have one of these to make dailies or even use resolve for that matter though I'm starting to think it's the best option out there these days I'm going to show you the process using the speed editor but you can achieve pretty much the same results in most editing programs by setting up keyboard shortcuts so don't stress if you don't have a speed editor I'm not going to lie though making dailies is a tedious process and the speed editor makes it quite a bit faster and easier but it's a luxury not a necessity by any means and speaking of making your life easier the sponsor of today's video is audio and I am crushing these Segways these days if I do say so myself but I'll talk more about them later so the first step to creating dailies and just a basic tip for Effective editing in general is to keep things super organized so I'm going to start in my blank project and I'll start by making two new Bins the first one I'm going to call sequences and then I'll make a second one and I'll call it brushes rushes is film industry jargon for raw footage in this rushes folder I'm going to import all the raw footage directly from the drive if I was ingesting multiple cards I would make separate bins for each individual card as well but since I'm only demoing this with one card I'll skip that part if I go back inside the sequences folder then I'll make two more folders one called dailies and one called edits thank you these are where we'll put all of our editing timelines and these labels should make it pretty obvious what goes where but the dailies folder is where the dailies go and the edits folder is where the timelines go that we actually edit on we're only focusing on dailies here for the minute so we'll just focus on that so I'll create a new timeline I'll call it b-roll daily put it inside sequences and there we go I'm going to be using this footage from a recent short film I shot in a dying Royal Prairie town as an example but I'll just start playing the first clip to figure out what scene or moment we're dealing with and then create a timeline for that scene which I've already done [Music] so it looks like this whole card pretty much is Just Landscapes and b-roll which is perfect for a demo so I'll just make sure there's no actual scenes in here yeah this is all b-roll so all I'm going to do then is start watching each of these and then using the speed editor or keyboard shortcuts I'm going to set an endpoint let it play count to about five and then I'm going to hit the place on top button and that's going to drop it into my timeline that's it then I might go back to the source monitor it's really nice having these dedicated buttons here I mean these are like super bougie luxuries but you really appreciate them when you're editing all the time my computer fan is starting to kick into high gear so apologies in advance for the audio then I'll watch the rest of the clip just make sure nothing changes no it's all the same shot all the way through so now it's time to move on then I'll open the next clip set an endpoint let it play through for five seconds set an out point place on top this would be a little bit different if I was doing a verite scene like I would grab the start and end point of all the different pieces of dialogue or if there was a specific action that I was capturing I would you know start and stop at the beginning and end of that action but since this is all just b-roll I can pretty much just take five representative seconds of it and feel pretty confident that I've captured the essence of the shot now the first point in doing all of this is to just trim away all those garbage throwaway moments where the camera is out of focus or maybe you're finding your frame or it's shaking in the wind um as I do this I can also use this really nice scroll wheel which is kind of a great alternative to the mouse basically means that I can do this entire process without really having to take my hands off of this control board and if you've ever talked to a professional editor the less time you spend moving your hands around on and off keyboards and different parts of the keyboard the better so this is a really nice solution to that definitely a luxury not something you need to have but once you start editing with a system like this or start cutting dailies with a system like this anyways it's kind of hard to go back I'm feeling a little spoiled I won't lie something that's really nice about doing this with the speed editor like I said are these dedicated buttons for everything you need you know there's the insert button there's transition buttons there's buttons to go back and forth between the source and the timeline without using the mouse and I can't lie the chunky keyboard sound it makes is so satisfying every time so let's just keep moving through this footage and maybe I'll speed it up a bit in post and then show you what we're left with [Music] foreign so now that I've gotten through the b-roll and laid it on the timeline this is what we're left with this is time consuming and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't dull but the speed editor helps quite a bit here and it is part of the reason why I'm moving over to resolve so I can use some of their really well designed and built-in hardware and oh just in case I need to say this I am not being paid by Blackmagic here I just think they make a great tool for this particular job anyways the result of doing this is that this long series of Clips represents every decent shot or sound bite from this scene now there are no sound bites here because this is just b-roll one of the reasons why this is such an important step is because now that I've personally watched everything and taken only the best bits of it I know exactly what we're working with before I start editing anything being familiar with your footage is really important so even if this making dailies process can be a bit mind-numbing it's super important now secondly rather than having to scrub through a bunch of really long video files every time I want to find something when I want to start cutting this footage into the actual film I can fly through all the different shots using just the keyboard and very quickly find something that works so let's say I want to start building out a scene and the first thing I want is a really wide landscape I'll just use the arrow keys to find a good one okay here's a good one and now maybe from there I want to move into a medium shot instead of having to put my hands on the mouse and then go back through and look for something that works just use the arrow keys on the keyboard and okay there is a closer medium detail shot so you can see or at least I hope you can see how much that would speed up your editing workflow so when you're putting together a scene on the timeline and you think okay what I really need is a shot like this you don't have to individually click through all these clips and scrub around until you find something that works you just fly through really really quickly and it's such a faster way to work the next thing I like to do is add markers onto the timeline that break it down into different stages of a scene so here I might put a marker called town b-roll and then I will extend the duration a little bit and then stretch it over all of the clips that are appropriate in this case everything here is town b-roll but if we were shooting a different kind of scene where there were a bunch of small moments in it um it will also give you another visual way to quickly go through your timeline and figure out what you have just by hovering over these little markers here you can see at a glance what's covered once I've got the footage chopped up I like to also drop some music onto the timeline and then watch the whole thing back so that I can get a feel for how this footage might actually feel when using the real edit the music helps to stimulate my brain about how I might want to edit this down the road and I personally do this by using audio the sponsor of today's video off the top of my head I might imagine this b-roll fitting with some more mellow music because nothing really dramatic is happening so I'll go into audio and I'll maybe tick the boxes for chill and Earthly and then scrub through a few tracks until I find one that might work just bounce around quickly through the whole song to get a general sense of it and by no means am I picking the song I'm actually going to edit to right now I'm just looking for something to add a bit of mood to the sequence I kind of like this one uh actually so I'll download it and then bring it into resolve after creating another bin in the project called music because you want everything here to be as organized as possible then I drop it on the timeline and maybe duplicate it a few times to cover the whole sequence and then I'll watch it through there's a few reasons why I like audio for this and it's not just because they sponsor the channel though that is pretty cool of them I'm not gonna lie firstly it's because while audio might not have the biggest library of all their competitors it's really well curated I've had subscriptions to pretty much all the other Services out there at one time or another and I used to think that more was always better but as I used them more and more I realized that I actually didn't want to have thousands of options every time I wanted to find a song because the choice overload hurt more than it helped with the more tightly curated selection on audio there's way less junk and I can usually find something super quick that works and then just get back to editing the other reason just to be straight up with you is the price these subscriptions can be really expensive and especially if you're just looking for simple tracks to lay over your dailies paying hundreds of dollars can be a burden typically a service like this is around 200 bucks or more for a year but if you use the link in the description and then add the code Luke 70 you'll get access to their Pro Plan for under sixty dollars a year which is hands down the best deal I've ever heard of for something like this since I started working with audio it's been the only royalty-free music site I've needed for all of my projects both YouTube and personal films so if you do need music use the code Luke 70 and save yourself 70 and starting this week they're also going to be launching audio Originals when which is a collection of music from Independent Artists that you can't find anywhere else online and I personally think this is really exciting idea because sometimes with music sites we end up all using the same tracks over and over again so I absolutely love the idea of having access to more original and exclusive music and I can't wait to see how this grows in the future all audio originals are going to be included with the Pro Plan so it's just one more reason to give it a try but I know you're all here for the editing stuff so I'll leave it there for now and let's get back to the video [Music] so if this was a normal dock I'd go through this scene by scene but this is just b-roll for example purposes but on a normal dock I just keep moving through the footage card by card and do exactly the same thing for every different scene or beat you can also organize these by shoot days or characters or any other way you want to but the point here is to a familiarize yourself with what you've shot and B create a timeline where all the garbage is cut away and you can quickly scroll through everything that could potentially be useful I also like to create extra timelines for the master interview and any specialty shots you might have like drone or whatever once I've combed through every piece of footage I'll paste all the separate scenes or timelines onto one master timeline called master or something equally original then watch the whole thing through once while I take notes that I'll base an initial script off of I'll also add markers to that Master timeline in the same way that I just showed you because yeah when it's like a 12 hour timeline of everything that you've shot it's really handy to be able to see visually what's there when it's all done you should have watched more or less every minute of footage that you've shot thrown away all the junk and then be left with well-organized timelines for each of your scenes that you can then use to edit super fast I'm not going to pretend that making dailies is fun because it is not it's time consuming and seems to take forever but in the long run it makes things much faster and you end up saving a lot of time in the actual edit phase because you don't have to hunt for anything you know exactly what you have because you've watched it all and there are no throwaway Clips or long takes to scrub through because you've trimmed all the fat on really long shoots there can be a ridiculous quantity of footage that you need to comb through and that's why I love using the speed editor here because it helps get through the process as painlessly as possible once you get used to it you rarely need to touch the keyboard and mouse and you can absolutely tear through footage at lightning speed and get this part of the process out of the way as quickly as possible because at the end of the day it's not really editing that sucks it's getting the footage organized enough to make efficient editing possible that sucks and any tool out there that helps with that is a winner in my books once again and I'm not being paid by black magic I just think this thing is really great and it makes the worst part of the editing process just a little easier making dailies really is the most important First Step at least in my opinion when it comes to getting to know your footage and getting it into a state where it's easily editable it's the answer to that soul-crushing feeling you get when you've imported a bunch of shot cards onto your computer and you're staring bleakly at that empty timeline asking how the hell do I make sense of this and taking the time to make dailies well is absolutely going to make you a faster better editor and at the same time familiarize yourself with the material so that you can tell the best possible version of your story in the edit so there we go why dailies are important and how to make them thanks to Blackmagic for letting me try out the speed editor and I should say that I only barely scratch the surface of what this thing can do it's also got built-in keys for multicam sequence editing basic cutting and trimming commands Transitions and a bunch of other stuff that I didn't mention because I wanted to keep this video focused it's such a nicer interface for ripping through mountains of footage and so even if I'm not exactly utilizing it to the fullest I really appreciate what it's doing for me I'll put a link to the speed editor in the description if you want to check that out because it does make this a lot faster and I'll also put a link for you to grab that 70 discount on audio as well hope that video was helpful and that it maybe makes editing your next project just a little easier see ya [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Luc Forsyth

Views: 69,487

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Id: x-ibpSIPyn0

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2023