“The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.” - Auguste Rodin
My favorite artist of the abstract area is Jackson Pollack. He is most famous for his painted works that appear, to the untrained eye, to be random assortments of strokes that have neither rhyme nor reason. His ability to convey captivating emotion in the confines of chaotic paint splotches and dripping brush strokes both astounds and mesmerizes me. I have, on many occasions, attempted to paint in a style similar to Mr. Pollack and have arrived at one very simple and concrete conclusion…I am not Jackson Pollack.
Pollack, like many video editors, forms structure out of chaos. He finds harmony where once there was none and his works, while immensely complex, appear simple and easily re-creatable to the audience. This, of course, is not the case.
Editing is both an art and a science. It requires skill and technical proficiency but also a creative mentality to arrive at work that is seemingly simple to the audience. In this article, we’ve compiled a list of considerations that relate to MindBites-specific editing. However, many of these tips hold true in other forms of editing as well. The art and skill of editing is something, unlike Pollack’s genius, we can all participate in. Don’t let the complex programs and technical terms frighten you. With ample time and contemplation, anyone can create a video masterpiece worthy of the MindBites seal of approval.
Let’s start with the definition of editing (as it relates to video): choosing material and arranging it in such a fashion that it forms a coherent whole. There you have it. Simple, huh? Well, let’s break it down.
All editing programs, while colored with different interfaces, operate in essentially the same way. You begin with unaffected video material, or raw footage, chop it up, rearrange it, and paste it back together. As you assemble the whole, you’re able to compose different sections, interchange clips, and rearrange as you go along. This is called Non-Linear editing, or the ability to access random source material at will, just one of the many gifts of modern technology. This process is possible because the footage is being stored on your hard disk as digital information, as opposed to being accessed directly from the original source, like a tape or DVD.
While this is all fine and dandy, it means you’re going to have to capture your footage, or import it into your computer, before you can begin editing. All editing programs will have the ability to capture footage, though the process will be more intuitive on certain programs than others. You’ll begin by connecting your camcorder to your computer via a firewire or USB 2.0 cable and switching the camcorder to playback mode. This will allow the computer to recognize the camcorder as a deck, which it can operate remotely through the cable. You are now ready to begin capturing, which, unfortunately, is going to take a while. Importing footage occurs in real time, which means for every minute of footage shot, it will take a minute to capture. Painstaking, yes, but assuming all goes as planned, you won’t have to baby-sit your computer while it does this. So just get the process rolling and feel free to hit the local pub for a pint.
Now, some of you will have a good deal of footage and you’ll find that proper organization is necessary to keep track of it all so you don’t spend hours searching for that second-long shot that would fit the intro perfectly. The key to this is remembering that no matter how many times you cut the video, no matter how many ways you split it up and reorganize it, you are not actually affecting the original raw footage that you spent so long capturing. This is because that footage is saved elsewhere, independent of your work in the editing program, and no matter what you do to it the original is always recoverable.
So, with that said, go crazy. In our opinion, you can’t chop up the footage enough. Just like tackling any big problem (and hours of footage is a big problem) you want to take it in chunks, and the smaller those chunks, the more manageable. After you’ve divided up the footage into easy-to-handle sections, you need to implement an effective naming system. How you do so is entirely up to you, but make sure you understand your system through and through, otherwise you’ll just have created a labyrinth for yourself, one that’s full of headaches and misery.
Every non-linear editing program will have a playhead that allows you to scroll over footage and designate a point at which an edit should be made. As video (in America) is made up of 30 frames per second (29.97 frames to be exact), this means you can theoretically make a cut in the footage 30 times every second, though this would generally be a terrible idea. Frame accurate editing is another one of the many advantages of modern, non-linear technology.
Three-point editing is a workflow used by most trained professionals in the industry that forces them to spend more time contemplating each cut, instead of haphazardly throwing random footage around à la the MTV style. It is comprised of three edit points: the starting frame (or in-point) of the raw footage clip, the ending frame (or out-point), and the frame at which it will be dropped into the final sequence. These three designations take care of all important considerations when editing. While certain programs allow for simple drag and drop capabilities, it is a generally better idea to take the time to perform three-point editing. Your cuts will have more thought behind them and your final product will benefit from the extra consideration.
In the good ol’ US of A, editors have a certain term for what they do almost every moment of every day: cutting. To make a cut is to designate a point of separation in the raw footage. That is the foundation of editing; the ability to slice up the raw footage into smaller chunks so that some may be tossed aside while others are arranged into the final sequence. However, this idea of cutting lends itself toward a certain philosophical viewpoint: that to edit a sequence means to cut out the bad components and what remains is the final product.
This way of thinking is antagonistic to the editor’s actual task. The British describe themselves as joiners as opposed to cutters. The process is, of course, the same, but the mentality exists on a more constructive foundation: to edit is to join together the proper pieces to form a cohesive and well-balanced whole. Yes, we know, it’s semantics, but noteworthy nonetheless.
As you begin to wade through your sea of footage on “How to Stealthily Shave Your Roommate’s Head”, keep in mind the idea of joining vs. cutting. To merely remove the unworthy (or unusable) footage is only half the battle. Look objectively at your video and take time to contemplate the eventual structure of your MindBite and how the pieces must be joined to form the whole. You’ll end up with something much more cohesive and ultimately more informative for the viewer to enjoy.
Every video, just like life, has a rhythm. Finding it is simply a matter of taking the time to look. This goes back to the idea of structure and style we keep drilling into your head. Once you’ve finished a rough cut of your MindBite, take a step back, a big one. Put the work aside for a day or so, travel to the country and camp out, find yourself in the mountains, and then, after your transcendental experience, come back to your editing. Watch your MindBite with an objective eye and see how you feel afterward. If it has all the information you wanted to convey in it, but still feels off, there’s probably a problem with the rhythm. You can try cleaning up some of the edits and reorganizing the clips, but ultimately you’re just going to have to feel the rhythm and accommodate accordingly.
More than likely, your editing software is going to come with a veritable cornucopia of cheesy transitions and effects. Please, for the love of all that’s good, use these sparingly if at all. The ol’ cross dissolve and fade to black are tried and true transitions that, used with some common sense, will definitely enhance your MindBite. But when you begin pursuing the other toys available with your software (i.e. the star wipe and zig-zag dissolve) your work will begin to resemble late night public access television or, even worse, wedding videos. So use your discretion with these tools, you’ll thank us later.
Sometimes when you piece clips together, the video might cut perfectly, but the adjoining audio tracks won’t mesh properly with one another. This might occur due to volume differences, discontinuous background noise, or any number of audible phenomena that occur in independent video production. One solution to this is placing a cross-dissolve transition on the adjacent audio tracks, which will hopefully blend the incongruous sounds together so that they sound succinct.
Though we’re sure your watchful eye is ever-observant and scrutinizing, there is always the chance that something might slip past you and make its way into your final product. Flash frames of unwanted material or black slug (blank video) are easy to pass up, as are audio “pops” and “hisses”. So, before you export your masterpiece and upload it to the web for millions to view and criticize, make sure you police your sequence one last time for any mistakes.
So, there you have it. Everything you need to know about editing…well, almost everything. This is a difficult skill you are trying to master, but take your time and use your best judgment and you’ll do fine. Always remember to save often. Technology is a wonderful thing, but it’s hardly perfect. We’ve lost many hours of work due to computer’s random and illogical choice to power themselves down mid-edit. We’ve since learned from such experiences and save at every opportunity.
Finally, we’ll leave you with the words of Mr. Pollack: “Every good painter paints what he is.” Granted, that’s in regard to art, but the same rings true for creating anything, including a MindBite. Stay true to yourself and you can’t go wrong
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