March, 2008

The Art of the Edit, con’t

 

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Production Pains

Production can be exhausting, with long days of hard physical labor, but it’s vital to stay alert.

Microphones can fall down, batteries can die, a cable can go bad. Without headphones, you may not know until it’s too late.

“If you know from your headphones there’s no hope for the microphone,” Corcoran says, “you can unplug it and let the camera mic try.  It’s going to be better than what you’ll get otherwise.  Nothing can kill a production faster than bad audio.  Wear your headphones all the time.”

For most productions, steady images make the most sense.  Always use a tripod.  Hand-held looks, well, hand-held.  There’s a trend right now to overuse this technique, but avoid the cinema verite, or “shaky cam” look unless you’re after a strobed look or the effect is actually motivated by something in the script.

Be sure to allow for preroll.  When you switch a camera from the stop mode to record, it rolls back several seconds before it achieves “speed” and begins taping.  Allow five seconds, 10 to be safe, before cuing the talent to begin speaking or executing your shot.

Unless your edit system is very precise (plus or minus two frames) you will have trouble editing to the word, so make sure that you have two seconds or more of silence before your talent begins.

This is better than saying “action” to cue the talent: if the narration begins too quickly, you may end up losing two seconds of narration in edit to cut out your cue.  Instead, count “five, four, three” . . . and cue talent after a silent count of two and one.

With high-end systems, you can encounter a similar problem.  If the tape is checked and action begins too soon, you won’t be able to back up over the break in control track to execute the edit.

To allow time for a good transition, instruct your talent to fix a gaze on the camera for two seconds before and several seconds after a narration.  A quick, sideways glance for approval, a swallow or a lick of the lips before or after speaking may be difficult to edit out.

If you don’t have control over the talent’s timing and delivery-for example, when shooting a training session or weddings-your cutaways and reaction shots will be critical to mask cuts.  Remember to shoot plenty. 

Next month, we continue with Part Two of “The Art of the Edit”.

Excerpted from “the Videomaker Guide to Video Production”, a Focal Press title available in the School Video News On-line Store.