SIMPLE, EFFECTIVE EDITING TIPS: Documentary & Film Editing

[Music] hey what's going on guys I am talking today about editing and speaking of editing like the last chance to get in on the mez headphone contest I'm just extending it a little while to give everyone a chance because the channel is growing and I want everyone to get into it maybe if the Gordian turned into it you're like just do the draw already mark but uh all the information is below make sure to you know follow the channel leave a comment with the hash tag but yeah a lot of you guys been entering into it and you know I do believe in these I have them hanging right here I use them to edit all the time I love some headphones so let's jump into this right away though I want to talk about editing and I want to give you guys some tips some theory tips on storytelling but also to just some real practical tips like how I use Adobe Premiere how I edit I edited a lot of my own films if it's bigger films I'll work with editors on commercials and stuff but on my documentaries I love to edit I'd love to get my hands dirty in the Edit so my first tip is you want to get hot keys I can't tell you how long I spent not using hotkeys and it actually breaks my heart because I think of all the time I spent moving my mouse around my timeline and it probably was years it probably spent years moving my mouse around the timeline when I could have just been using hotkeys so the first hotkey you gotta add or the one that I like at least is the Edit key let's just simply put the splice in your video footage and in the timeline and it's super helpful because when you're doing long clips or interviews I like to put the Edit key as the K button here in between J and L so that I can just press forward and then hit K and then I press play again and hit K again and I just hit shift delete and it's gone it's just a quick way to edit a long interview or for me if I'm doing a YouTube video I'm gonna take this clip that I'm recording right now put that in the timeline and I'm never gonna touch my mouse I'm just gonna hit spacebar I'm gonna hit K what I'm gonna make it at it and it's spacebar again I'm gonna hit K again when I might want to make an edit and this shift delete and I by the time I'm done with in the time it took me to watch that clip I've already edited it all down so get the edit button my other hotkey that I love is paste attributes I think I've key mapped this to why I don't know why put it away on my timeline but but if you're like me you're constantly copying settings that you did on one clip and adding them to another whether it's reframing or color and if you just add this Y button you don't have to right click and say paste attributes it's a really quick way to just keep color correcting and keep moving because the whole point of hotkeys is so that you can keep editing because the more time you spend going through menus and not thinking about the creative project you're working on the less time you're actually spending making your project better you're just thinking about the technology so you want your computer to work for use and make sure you get a couple hotkeys there's no perfect way to do it you have to find the ones that you like yourself what is another hotkey let me think of one more here that I like myself oh I know I've added the ripple tool I added it to my W button essentially the ripple tool when you pull a clip to the side it keeps it where it is it just takes off the head or the tail of that clip it's really powerful tool it's really helpful so that you don't have to just use the normal edit tool and like pull it over and then drag it back to where it was get the ripple edit tool it's very very powerful it means you're using the mouse but sometimes you want to get in there and just finagle it with the mouse so now that we're using hotkeys my next tip is lay down your voice over whatever project you're doing if there's a voice over or if there's some sort of interviews with the scripts is work on those first trust that your b-roll will always be there and you're gonna go work through that but what you need is a good story and the human voice is often what will tell your story so the first thing I do in an edit is I go to my interviews or I go to my voiceover I go to the audio clips and I just lay that all down and then I play that back in my timeline and if I can't just listen to the audio clips that I've placed my timeline and actually begin to understand the story then I'm worried that maybe I didn't get enough in the interviews and I then we want to put the b-roll on top and see if I can help bridge the gap but you really want to work on your audio first so that you have a coherent story because you the frit if the first thing you're gonna do is start going through all the footage and just start putting in random places you won't actually know what story you're telling so work on your audio first I like to lay it all down actually sometimes even before I do the interview I'll find the music project and actually I get a lot of my music from epidemic sound they're great I just did a car commercial and I got a track from epidemic sound and it worked perfectly for the spa and actually what I did before I even shot the commercials I took that music and I put it in my timeline and I caught it up so that it fit 45 seconds and I knew exactly what my film was gonna be like you want to know as much as you can before you ever get to set because if you're on set and you don't know what you're at it's gonna be like or you're just hoping it's gonna work in the Edit chances are it's not gonna turn out the way you hope so before I ever went to set I cut that music down into 45 seconds in my timeline and then I just played it back and played it back played it back I just sat at the office on the couch and I just listened to the music and I just pictured the film I pictured what moments I wanted and then I would write it down okay I think I want the car spinning here this would be a good moment to see our talent and I played that over and over again and so that when I was actually on set I just heard the music in my mind and I was like okay this this is the pacing this is the vibe this is the feel for the commercial so I like to get the music and what's really awesome about epidemic sound not too many people are doing this is they allow you to get the stems and the stems are really important what the stems are is it's the different part of the music it's your melody it's your percussion it's your bass or different elements like that and you can pull those elements out if you don't like them and what's really great about this is often you find a song that you like certain parts of it in certain moments of it work for your film but then other parts just suck so for example I just got this track off epidemic sound I'm gonna play it for you here so here's the track from epidemic sound it's good vibe feeling it I could use this even in my new film no country is an island but then this starts happening [Music] so I don't know what the heck that is that's like a modified accordion or something but what's awesome about epidemic sound is they actually highlight it so here's the piano and I love this piano it sounds really good it's a five and then here's that weird accordion [Music] yeah just not feeling it it's not my jam so what's awesome is with epidemic sound they give you the stems so I can just use that super moody vibey piano or I can even take that weird accordion if like someone else likes it that I'm working with and I could lower the volume specifically of that so they give you some creative Liberty some creative license with their audio tracks and the new search that they have an epidemic sound before I actually found it kind of difficult to find tracks in epidemic but they've completely revamped this and it's amazing it gives you such specific moods textures and tones and so you can really dial in exactly what you want and it's really helpful because searching for music is like half of editing it's half the time you spend is looking for music so I really love the new set up that epidemic sound has it's working really well for me so I love using that so I also - for the next 10 days if you use the promo code mark bone on epidemic sound you can get two months free for the creator subscription and one month free for the business subscription no strings attached go check it out use the subscription code mark bone they're awesome I love what they've done with the epidemic website it's making searching for music so much easier and that is so helpful in editing because searching for music sucks especially when it's bad music but the great thing is if they're stems you can take out the bad parts I don't know how I can forget this but epidemic sound has tens of thousands of sound effects available in their library - which we used actually a bunch on no countries in Ireland it's awesome I don't know how to forgot to mention that but they not only have tons of music but tons and tons of sound effects and you get that with your subscription my next tip is get it out of the bins like just get out of the side where you're looking at thumbnails and bins get all your footage in two timelines and there's a few reasons why one you can start dividing your timelines up into themes so for example no country is an island we had ours in two hours and hours of footage so we divided everything up into very very specific timelines we had Church b-roll we had aerials we had interviews we had street b-roll and that way quickly if we know we need a shot we can go to that timeline and what's even cooler about this is you can do call his pancake editing where you divide the timelines up so you put them on top of each other like a pancake like a really good club sandwich if you're vegan it's like a salad with falafels on top whatever it is but you put them on top of each other and then you can simply grab the shots you want so the way I add it is I have all of my different timelines above my edit so I my edit on the lower one nothing else is there and then I put all these different timelines all the different b-roll and so that as I'm editing if I know I need a shot I'm not digging through the bins looking for anything I'm just simply clicking on that timeline it's a simple way of editing it's my favorite way to edit it's just really effective it keeps you from digging through the bins because again you're trying to be efficient you're trying to stay creative you don't want to get distracted you want to just be thinking about stories so so make sure to put all your footage in to timelines you won't regret it another thing you want to do inside those timelines is you can add markers and I'll show you so you go you want to make sure you've clicked on the timeline here you're not actually clicked on the clip because if you add a marker it'll go right to the clip so make sure you clicked on the timeline hit marker hit it again and now come up here and name this when I name this elmeshad interview and then I'm gonna grab the duration and I'm gonna increase it here maybe just like 10 15 seconds when you come back to the timeline here you see that it's created this marker I'm actually gonna grab the side of it here and extend it now when I look at my whole timeline here I can quickly tell that oh this is the homage awed interview and I could add these markers all along here what is this oh that's me I could add this is mark bone increase this I'm gonna change the color I'm gonna make it blue increase this you know it's really helpful when you do this especially when you have a lot of footage so that you can again not be searching around your bins going double clicking it bin then double clicking another clip and then opening it up in the viewer and scrubbing through that no no you just go into the timeline and you drag your cursor along it and you'll see everything that you have my last editing tip is get proxies but not get proxies create proxies if proxies are essentially a less compressed version or I guess I'm or compressed version rather of your footage that is much easier for the editing software to use it's less high-res it's just a much smaller file and what's awesome is it's super simple to make you just go into your bin click on the footage right click and say create proxies and then once you have those proxies there there's actually a button over in the timeline that says toggle proxies so you can look at the full res footage or you can work on your proxies it's super simple and I highly recommend it when you have a lot of footage because when you start using a ton of 4k high res high bitrate footage you can start really slowing down your edit can make the project file bigger you're more susceptible to crashes because sometimes Premiere doesn't like when you have a giant giant project but the proxies are really easy to work with now if you're using something like a drone or a mirrorless camera that resets the numbers whenever you record so that every time you put a new card in it starts at zero zero zero make sure you rename all your files in that project so that none of the clips have the same file name now the problem is if you have the same file name and you're toggling proxy the computer doesn't know which file to look at so it's gonna go back to just probably the first one sequentially so we've had this problem in past projects where then when you toggle your proxies you're looking at a completely different shot than what is actually in the original file so tip rename all your files if there is duplicate file names from two different memory cards also two bonus tip duplicate your timeline often that way if you change a bunch of stuff and you don't like it you can go back to a previous timeline it's like keeping a history of what you've been doing I also find - when i duplicate timelines it makes me a more brave editor cuz I'm not afraid to pull apart all the work I've done and try something new so duplicate your timelines mark the date down save version 1 version 2 or just November 15th or whatever but be brave try something new so I hope those tips helped just a recap make sure to get hotkeys especially they add a key if there's one key you need it's the Edit keats like the splice tool get away from going onto that tool bar and clicking and finding your thing just slowly remap your keyboard so that you don't have to click on anything as little as possible it takes time it takes time but it's worthwhile number two is cut all your audio first from your interviews from your narration then I like to put the music down before I ever start putting b-roll on top or even listen to the music before you ever go out into the field then you'll know the style of filming that you want to be doing to capture the best footage so that everything is working together number three is pancake at it put all your footage into timelines get out of the bins work in timeline that way you can look at all your footage very very quickly and then you can just drag and drop it's awesome and don't forget about that link selection tool once it's clicked on then you have your audio linked in your video link when it's clicked off then you can just grab down and there's only video number four use proxies get away from using full res footage in bigger projects if you're just doing a quick project doesn't really matter but I found recently I don't know if you've had this issue but Premiere 2020 sucks with drone footage we even have an iMac Pro in the office just over in the edit suite we spent like $15,000 on it adding all of the best software into it and all the best hardware and it still can't playback aerial footage from drones right now in Premiere 2020 so Adobe if you're watching this please fix that I really would love for that to be improved because it looks ridiculous we have to transcode it all into pro res that doesn't really matter but anyways thank you guys for watching us don't forget that promo code for epidemic sound mark bone I get you a free few months of the Creator subscription and a one free month trial if for the business solution and also to forget to sign up for the headphones because if you're gonna be listening to good music on something like epidemic you want good headphones for that but I'll catch you guys on the next one leave some comments below let me know what kind of videos do you want I know some people been asking about my coloring process other people have been asking about what lenses or how I approach my shot listing from documentary I'm happy to talk about the nitty gritty I love to talk about the more detailed stuff as you know I don't really care to talk about gear as much as other youtubers I prefer to talk about filmmaking because I enjoy filmmaking in the gear there is to help become a filmmaker not the other way around you don't become a filmmaker by knowing gear it's so funny gear is great but it's really not the point of filmmaking and if you enjoy beer then maybe work in a rental shop or bnh photo that would be a great place but stop making us watch your travel videos anyways see you guys in the next one [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Mark Bone

Views: 136,980

Keywords: filmmaking, documentary, documentary editing, film editing, video editing, editing workflow, matti haapoja, matti haapoja color grading, editing tutorial, premiere pro, film editing techniques, peter, peter mckinnon

Id: Psxd3ydYC2E

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2019