I did cover a lot of ground on the editing of The Caregivers in the last post, but perhaps it was a bit too headline oriented, I did not go into detail, so I guess I'll do it now.
We edited on an iMac but with Adobe Premiere (can't remember the version used). I've never worked on it before, but after years of working on diverse machines for editing, I believe anything that your operator is comfortable with is fine.
For 'The Caregivers', editor Pankaj Vashishta knew the software and the machine fairly well and had his boss, and our Post-Production Supervisor Snigdh Bhatnagar, available to solve any issues that came up.
We began slowly, I hadn't really seen the footage as it was being downloaded from the cards and later organised. The only point to remember there was that the recording keeping by our unit had been pretty bad. To the extent that the Assistant Director who made the notes couldn't read them himself! Anyway, its a half-an-hour documentary so the shot material wasn't too much, especially when compared to my last project which had massive amounts of material.
My first step in these edits is to organise the material into different bins, but the editor did not know how to do that. So I took a deep breath and moved into assembling the sequences right away. It took a week to do that, but now we had an assembly of sequences.
Then we began to put them on the timeline and adding in our narrators to get a complete logically constructed version of the shot material. All this came to and hour, and was ready by the end of week two.
We trimmed it down to half-an-hour fairly quickly and then screened it for a few friends, who could follow the story. We refined it more, this time with 'cleaned out' audio tracks and found we could trim it even more. Soon, we had a first cut ready. We then added music and a few effects. This is what we sent out to our sponsors.
The key to the structure was still what we were aiming at in the script- to tell individual stories and connect them using the medical doctor and the psychiatrist. I followed that as the'rule' and the structure sort of fell into place.
The story began to come 'alive', sequence by sequence.
That process continued till today when we added yet more elements to make the structure 'smooth' and easier for an audience to grasp.
I realise that's what editing is all about.
We edited on an iMac but with Adobe Premiere (can't remember the version used). I've never worked on it before, but after years of working on diverse machines for editing, I believe anything that your operator is comfortable with is fine.
For 'The Caregivers', editor Pankaj Vashishta knew the software and the machine fairly well and had his boss, and our Post-Production Supervisor Snigdh Bhatnagar, available to solve any issues that came up.
We began slowly, I hadn't really seen the footage as it was being downloaded from the cards and later organised. The only point to remember there was that the recording keeping by our unit had been pretty bad. To the extent that the Assistant Director who made the notes couldn't read them himself! Anyway, its a half-an-hour documentary so the shot material wasn't too much, especially when compared to my last project which had massive amounts of material.
My first step in these edits is to organise the material into different bins, but the editor did not know how to do that. So I took a deep breath and moved into assembling the sequences right away. It took a week to do that, but now we had an assembly of sequences.
Then we began to put them on the timeline and adding in our narrators to get a complete logically constructed version of the shot material. All this came to and hour, and was ready by the end of week two.
We trimmed it down to half-an-hour fairly quickly and then screened it for a few friends, who could follow the story. We refined it more, this time with 'cleaned out' audio tracks and found we could trim it even more. Soon, we had a first cut ready. We then added music and a few effects. This is what we sent out to our sponsors.
The key to the structure was still what we were aiming at in the script- to tell individual stories and connect them using the medical doctor and the psychiatrist. I followed that as the'rule' and the structure sort of fell into place.
The story began to come 'alive', sequence by sequence.
That process continued till today when we added yet more elements to make the structure 'smooth' and easier for an audience to grasp.
I realise that's what editing is all about.
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