I had the privilege over this last weekend to edit a video. It wasn’t the normal editing (like there is anything normal about editing video) that I usually do. Normally, I mount my HDV camera to my Macbook Pro, start up Final Cut Pro, make sure the Easy Setup and the Audio/Video settings are what I want them to be, go to File -> Log and Transfer and pull the material from my deck into FCP. From there, its the usual process of pulling stuff into the viewer, setting in and out points, dragging it to the timeline and repeating this, along with an enormous amount of keyframes, transitions and other stuff that makes the video look and sound nice.
But this weekend, I can’t to edit a DVD. I’m not talking about editing video from my camera and making a DVD. I’m talking about putting a DVD in my computer, using Handbrake to rip the content off the optical disk, converting it so it will pull into FCP and then editing the actual finished content from the DVD.
In this case, I was editing a completed DVD production down to 28 mins and 26 secs so the video can be shown on the local broadcast station in the town where I live. Seems my friend, Jay, and I are starting to get noticed over here for our work on local history documentaries so the local ABC affiliate wants to pick up our stories. Being a real TV station, they have certain requirements, of course, so it fell to me to edit the content so that it fit those requirements.
This is usually not too big of a deal but in this case, we didn’t have the raw material that made up the DVD story so I had to import it as described in the previous paragraph.
So, after it is sitting there in FCP, I gotta figure out how to get the content to within a certain time limit. As you can guess, as soon as I start making cuts, the video jumps here, jumps there, has audio that just suddenly stops and a new song or new VO just starts. Needless to say, gave me a real headache looking at this stuff.
But, I really want to see this story and the other two stories that I do have the raw material for on the air in the next few weeks so I hunkered down and decided to make things work. I unlinked much the video and audio tracks. That allowed me to fade in the video while the audio track played. It also allowed me to move either the audio track or the video track so that I could create a smoother transitions between elements. Needless to say, I had to make sure the sound for the interviews was in sync with the video otherwise I would have ended up like one of those old Godzilla movies there the mouth and the words never seem to match up. I did a couple of overlays with text and other items to cover up some problems.
All in all, the video ended up not being too bad although there were a few problems left in the video. Nothing so extreme that it would prevent moving forward with the project. My only hope now is that I don’t have to do too many of those types of projects. They are very stressful. But, its good to know that it can be done.
Happy editing
