Our Post-Production Secrets (DaVinci Resolve + +) // Making a Film Company S4E3

this might look like a boring office but here is where the magic happens the post production you guys have seen us on many different shoots filming music videos commercials and fictional projects but what happens after that how do we organize our material and edit videos as a team what kind of computers softwares and gear do we use and how do we deal with the clients in post production this topic is quite overwhelming in just one video so bring your coffee or tea and join us as the people here at views share their best advice in post production sorry first okay [Music] let's even though we run the production company with eight employees the steps we're going to talk about can relate to solo filmmakers as well hope you enjoy the first thing we do after a shoot is to back up everything we have two different server uh one one of them which is the main one that we work off of this is the qap TS 1635 ax and it has 8 18 terab drives which gives us in a raid a total capacity of almost 150 tabt uh in addition it has 4 terab of SSD cache so it's really fast this is connected to our switch with a 10 gig cable additionally we have another uh backup server which uh takes backup off of the main server every single night in addition to this we take backup off to cold hard drives um every so often so that we have several copies we have the same kind of folder structure on every project where we put it in the footage we shot The Stills if we have some BTS for YouTube uh we have that in our folder and also when we start a project we create folders for things like music templates Graphics exports and things like that of course uh on bigger International projects which we do sometimes work on for example for Netflix they have very strict uh rules for how you're going to offload your footage by using programs such as shotput Pro and of course for big project that is really good to have these kind of uh stricter uh regulations how you offload but for our usually smaller project uh we've been fine by just doing it the old manual way now for six years and 100 different projects the server is connected to the rest of the office here we have eight different computers in addition to a Mac in the editing room each of them have their own dedicated 10 gig connection if you have been working with a client you probably experience that they want to do new edits they want to do new changes to your edit because they get so excited to see what you have edited make sure beforehand that you have made an agreement written agreement on how many revision rounds you're going to have and also what you're going to deliver is it uh different formats what's the length approximately do they need subtitles all of this because time is money and if you are using a lot of time on every project because you need to add things you haven't agreed you're going to lose money you really don't want the client to come to you when you're you think you're done and they're like but where's the social media video where's the short version of it where's the subtitles and you're like H we didn't agree that make sure you agreed on this because it's going to make a lot of Chaos in in the post production if you haven't agreed on that also so it helps when you give the um client a budget if you know exactly what they want delivered so that's a good idea to think [Music] about we could talk forever about the editing process we are making a dedicated video all about editing that you've been asking for a lot but for now we're just going to keep it to our most important and practical advice when it comes to editing and how that affects our workflow since we are running a production company that means that we are often multiple people people working on the same project one person might be doing the ref editing while another is finishing up the video someone might work on the grade while another is working on the sound and then some might working on the VFX or the graphics so this means that you have to be really mindful of the people you're working [Music] with we've used D true resolve as our editing software for for a year now one of the reason we love resolve so much is the black magic Cloud this has really changed our workflow the way it works is kind of like a server multiple people can work on the same project and it updates in real time and you also have extra security if something were to go [Music] wrong Winer editing and especially as a team it's important to have a organized project so this is generally how we we like to do it the project I'm using as an example here is actually a mini documentary that we made about our switch over to doin resolve the video is out now on our Channel if you want to have a look so if you want an update uh on that this is it we have now used it for a year and uh things are going a lot better and no we are not sponsored by result so here are all our folders of course we have the folder for the raw footage in here I like to always separate the different cameras the different location the different days then of course we have the timelines as you can see there are a lot of them then of course you'll have folders for everything else like music Graphics VX sound design or any other elements that you want to use in your edit when you work as a team someone might want to go back and look at the footage or they might get ideas that you hadn't thought of from the start I like to have all my raw footage in one timeline where I do my selects so it's easy to go back and I always duplicate the timeline when I'm making a new drift probably my best tip that really affects our workflow is how I do my select I love color coding my selects it just makes my life and I think everyone else's life easier so as you can see that is what I've done in this project all of the speaking Clips are in this orange color then we have the pink for B- roll and then I'll also have a third color for the shots that I think are just so good they have to be included like I want toing zoom in the cuff page so when I go through their interviews and I'm picking the best Clips I will give each of them their own color if we're making a video about a specific lamp I will probably color code those clips showing that lamp really well in a specific color later when I'm editing and I'm like oh I need some b-roll of of this lamp because we're talking about it then it's so much easier for me to find I also sometimes like to take my selects to the track above to make it easier to just copy and paste into another timeline or makes it very easy to see what it is that I like as you can see here the timeline ended up really quite uh colorful and beautiful and I just think that this is a much easier and more visual way of seeing what your edit looks like you can see if you have a lot of b-roll or maybe you're missing a lot of b-roll and also last but not least when you're working as a team I think this is a much more efficient way of working because you might be the one doing the select but then another person is coming in and continuing the edit And if every CLI lip is just the same color they will have to actively go through and watch much more in order to decide what they need and especially if you're sitting with the client getting feedback in real time it's just going to be so much easier for you and you can find the clip you're looking for so much faster and it's going to make you look a lot better using shortcuts is essential to be an efficient editor we got to test out tourbox to optimize our workflow and tourbox is fully customizable we've mentioned previously that we tested out the speed editor from Blackmagic but it wasn't really for us one of the reasons is because it's not fully customizable the shortcuts like qwe didn't exist with the tour box however you can choose exactly what shortcuts you want there are only 14 buttons on it but with your own combinations you can have a total of 40 different commands so here are some of the shortcuts we have set up for our tour box this one is play and stop this wheel is to zoom in and out in the timeline this one is to move forward or backward in the timeline one frame at a time this one is to speed up the video this is save this one on the side is undo then these four are qw and reple delete then we use this one to select all the clips starting from the playhead this one is trim mode this this is delete gaps and this one is delete then you can do whatever combinations you want and double clicks so I'm going to give you a few examples if I double click on this one it's enable clip this combination is copy and this one is paste all of this being said we have experienced some weird bugs some commands not working as they should or just stop working altogether so we are hoping that they're working on it and that it's something they will fix in the near future unfortunately black magic doesn't have an open API for the vure resolve so although the tour box works really well in the edit page it doesn't really work the same in the color page as the Blackmagic color panel does Adobe however does have an open API so it does work even better with Premiere Photoshop After Effects and so on music and stock footage is something we often use we have a subscription to both our list and epidemic sound and we use it for both our commercial work and YouTube videos and we also use them for sound effects depending on the project and budget you might want to use stock footage to enhance your videos and when we do we get hours from art grid we recently tried to make a commercial using only stock footage music and sound effects so if you want to see how that went you can go check out the video when it's time to do the bfx we start by locating the clips that require VFX inside the V resolve this process can be easily done by color coding the shots that require VFX when you're putting the edit together depending on whether the edit is completely locked or there could be possible changes we might choose to add handles on each side of every clip around 10 to 20 frames when this is done we export the VFX footage as separate Clips in apple progress 4444 with the log color profile from the camera then we do our VFX inside of After Effects making sure to add a temporary CST as an adjustment layer so that we can work in Rec 709 that way all the adjustments and color matching we do inside of After Effects will fit with the log footage when we turn off the CST and Export it back into the V result for color gring I personally haven't used Fusion that much but I know that some people at the office have and we've come to the conclusion that as of right now we're still going to opt for after effects when it comes to more advanced VFX so these are all of our most important tips about our editing workflow and now it's time to send over the first [Music] draft when we are sending our first draft here at the office we use dropbox it's very convenient because you can just quickly upload to Dropbox and send a link to the client uh remember to give the file name a good name so it looks professional maybe the project name with draft one or something like that what we usually do as well uh is to burn in a Time code into the edit from the editing software uh what's good about this is that first of all they will get reminded it's just a draft so what we're asking for is just a feedback for the skeleton that the story another good thing about adding the time code in the video is that uh they can then use that to give feedback so they know exactly in which seconds uh they want to give feedback on and they can mention that in the email when they answer back and if you're sending uh several files uh it could be a nice idea to have folders so maybe the WID screen videos are in one folder the vertical videos are in one folder so it's organized and professional uh the clients always like that then comes the scary part the feedback from the client there are different ways to do this uh and uh I would recommend you guys if you are sitting with someone show them the draft before you send it to make sure it's it's not too crazy it's not too far off in Dropbox you can also comment on time codes and give feedback through Dropbox there's also something called frame IO which uh we have used sometimes to get feedback from the clients when the edit is locked we do two processes at the same time it's sound design and color grading both of these are very big topics so again we're not going too deep into it in this video but basically for sound design if it's an easier smaller video modus our sound designer will do the mix inside of fairl light if it's a bigger project will will export out an AA which he will use in his uh other program which is nendo which is his program of choice um so that's where he will do bigger projects when it comes to grading I try to simplify the timeline by putting everything on one track or at least as few tracks as possible that way it's a lot easier to keep track of all the different clips and it's simplifies the process generally we add a color space transform node and get the footage into the right color space from their original log space and this gives of course a nice starring ground to start grading before the color space transform we will add some noise reduction if that's needed and also some nodes to balance out the image in terms of color and uh exposure uh and then we add some nodes after to give uh a nice look to the image for example we often use the built-in film emulation stocks in the winol and our favorite way of grading our footage is to use a plug-in called film box this is a quite expensive tool but it's uh by far the best film emulation uh software that we have found it gives a really nice look to the image it's has nice grain inhalation and this is sort of our go-to on a lot of our project of course if we have some project that doesn't require such a stylized look we'll go for more of a cleaner Rex 79 image so finally at the end of the note tree we add one last note that can correct uh anything that needs to be fixed after the look has been applied so for example to adjust the black levels after the film emulation has been added um any sort of shift in image that you want to do we do in that last node now that we are ready to export here are the settings that we use for our deliveries we use Quick time for better audio export and we usually deliver everything in 4k unless anything else is specified we set the automatic quality to best and if we have subtitles we will either burn them in or export a separate SRT file unless the project requires otherwise we usually export everything in h264 the reason is that this can be played on all media players so although h265 will give you slightly better quality not all of our clients are able to play this on their end and lastly for sound we use linear PCM codec and 24bits in addition to videos it's also important for us to document our shoots with still photos that we can put on our website and social media for this we have set up a centralized Lightroom Library uh that's synced across Dropbox so we can use on all the different Compu computers it's not an ideal solution but it works okay for now as long as we're just using it one at a time inside this Library we have all the different projects in different folders as well as we created a collection for each of the members of our team so it's easy to find photos of the different people here of course we also use uh Photoshop to fix some of our photos and it works really nicely together with Lightroom and lately we've started using the tour box for editing photos inside of Lightroom as well to get a more hands-on experience and it's working really well so the last step of our workflow process is creating content for our own Instagram this past year we've been a lot better at taking Stills while we're on set and this way we have really high quality photos that we can use both on our website and on our social media so we edit all of our photos in Lightroom I then take the best of the best I put them into Photoshop to put on our borders that we use on all of our Instagram and social media photos I put on our icon and some text and then they are ready to be published we also of course post videos and reals on our social media and for these I try to keep them around 20 seconds no more than a minute and I really try to choose the best of the best shots so make sure to follow VI on Instagram to keep up with the latest projects we are working on that was a lot of information on how we do our workflow from start to finish a lot of things have changed the past years so we always try to adapt with a new software new gear to be as efficient as possible with our workflow so I don't know maybe in a year or two this video will be totally different but we hope you learn something new And subscribe for our next video which is going to be about editing which is also a big topic so it's going to be interesting and also we have videos coming later which is about building a Sci-Fi Street in our studio so you have to subscribe and stay tuned on this it's going to be awesome uh if you want to check out our film course go into annex.com and send us an email this it's this June and we have five spots available uh at this moment so check it out and we'll see you again next [Music] [Music] week

Channel: Andyax

Views: 29,291

Keywords:

Id: jGhZJcmnLAs

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2024