Editing Techniques

Editing Techniques
Final Cut Pro:

Scratch Disk:
When starting a project in Final Cut pro, or accessing it again we have to set up the scratch disk so that the render files and other cache files do not end up being saved into someone else's folder. To do this, every time that we edit our work we have to Shift-Q after starting up final cut which opens up the scratch disk settings, and then press "Set..." on all of the highlighted options.

After clicking set on each of them the file browser opens up and I have to search for our groups folder to save into. This is to stop any of our work becoming corrupt if another group deletes their project folder.

Importing Files & In and Out:

Importing files is a lot more straight forward, you simply click File then Import and then you select the folder containing all of the footage you wish to edit with. After the files have imported they will be available on the left hand side of the application where you can then view them by selecting them and pressing the space bar which will play/pause the clips. You can then create IN and OUT points by pressing I or O whilst playing the previewed clip; this way you can select smaller parts of the clip to be shown before even placing them on the editing time line. After selecting the in and out points all I have to do is drag them to the right of the application and into the red "Overwrite" box, they will then be placed on the timeline and cropped to the selection that you made.

Blade Tool:

After the clips are on the time line I arrange them in order and then use the BLADE TOOL which is accessed by pressing B on the keyboard; this allows me to cut sections of the the clip to cut them and place them together precisely. After that I press A to return to the arrow tool and drag the clips around, this is very useful for inter cutting clips especially for this project where we are often intertwining footage from different scenes.

Rendering: :(

Rendering is the most freaking annoying thing ever. is an essential part of editing, after clips are altered, video or audio; they must be rendered so that Final Cut can play them smoothly after the change has been made. To do this all you do is press Command-R and then wait for it to finish, once it is done the clips can be viewed in real time. Without rendering the file the clips are next to unviewable in playback and everything must be rendered before the project is finished. 

Adobe After Effects:

After effects is used for adding Special Effects, Colour Correction and even basic things such as zooming in digitally.

Importing:

To import clips to have effects added to them using After Effects all we had to do was  simply click File-Import-File.. and then select the video clip from the file browser. The clip is then viewable in preview and should be dragged onto the time line to edit.

Zooming In/Repositioning/Time-Vary stop watch/Rendering and Exporting:

I had been given a clip of a long shot of our lead actor singing and given the task of turning it into a medium close up that slowly zooms out to a long shot. To do this I resized the video frame and repositioned it so that only his face and chest were visible. 

I then went into the Transform settings for the clip and selected the "Time-Vary stop watch" on Position and the "Time-Vary stop watch" on Scale, this would then create two points on the time line of the clip at the beginning registering how far the video was zoomed in and where it was centred. I then went to the end of the video clip and zoomed it back out and repositioned it so that the centre was no longer the lead actors face and was instead the centre of the actual video. This then creates two more points registering those values. The video will now slowly zoom out and reposition it's self gradually from the start point to the end point, after that all I did was send it to the render queue where it rendered and it was then saved as a separate QuickTime. file that could be imported into Final Cut Pro as a normal clip, with the effect on it.