Video Editing

[mitchleblanc]

I haven't really been a part of a video editing job before... My question to ya'll with experience: Do you edit the video to music by adding the music, then editing? Or would you edit the video, then add music, then fix it up?

I also wonder how they do it in a movie (say, the matrix for example) .. because they have a guy making the score, right? But how can he make the score without the scene? (Think of the chateau fight scene in Reloaded, it goes perfectly with the music) .. so they must edit to the music? Or does he make the music to the edit?

Obviously they're seperate questions, since I won't be editing my own music... but I do have a friend how mixes and makes stuff on his computer, so he might...

Suggestions? Do you use Adobe Premiere?

[dcentral]

Premiere is good. After Effects is great after you've cut your movie and want to add additional effects.

Final Cut is great too I actually like it a lot better if your on a mac.

You can edit music anyway you want really. I've picked my music based on what has been playing in the background while I was editing my piece.

Just really depends on what kind of mood you want to set.

You can also have music picked and then you edit the clips to match the song. If you are doing a lot of quick cuts you can actaully arrange clips pick up on beats or elements of the song.

You can edit the track to fit the section by cutting out parts of the song.

With movie scores sometimes I think they don't play the final score until the movie is finished and play along with the movie to get the proper timing and length. They can start creating a score befor ethe movie is finsihed because they storyboard everything before the movie even starts so they know what kind of feel they are going for.

Todd would know more about editing the music in larger scale productions.

I personally think music editing can be harder then video editing.. just video is way more time consuming.

[mitchleblanc]

Does Premiere or Final Cut (who makes Final Cut?) allow you to do edit the audio tracks as well as the video? Or do you use an audio editor for that too?

Premiere allows you to do effects and stuff no? .. what is it that after effects does different? I guess I could just download the damned programs.. .. er.. I mean buy them.

Yeah, obviously I'm interested in making a couple of videos...

[dcentral]

Final CUt is only on mac's its an apple product.

You can do some effects and such in Premiere but it's just basic stuff like transitions etc.

After Effects is like photoshop for video only on steriods. It has a lot of cool features but can be a lot to get your head around as there's lots of menu's etc.

The same for audio you can do some basic audio editing in Premiere but you can't really do a whole lot with it. If you are just going to drop a song on to your timeline then it can deal with that and some fading in and out. But if you need to clean up the audio or you want so other effects added to it you should use an audio editing program.

[tracstarr]

dcent pretty much has it covered. I use both Premier and After Effects for the stuff I do. Both take a little while to get use to, but learning with them to start with is way better than switching later. I started using another program that only let you do super simple things, and it was a pain to switch. Premier can be super fast to edit with once you got it mastered. I find after effects pretty good, you want the effect you can do it. I suggest a really good computer if you want to watch the previews on the fly though.

Now do you edit to music or edit then add music? well, most of the time I edit first and add music later. My biggest reason for doing it that way is it's a lot less time consuming. I can edit a video super fast, get what i want and then spend way too much time finding the right music. I've done it the other way too, finding audio first then edit to it. I find it a little more frustrating and time consuming overall. And unless you have a lot of footage to play with, it's often harder to edit to the music. (IMO of coarse)

Premier and AE allow you to edit the audio tracks. Premier is easier. You can also edit in premier and open the same project file in AE and render it from AE. It's not as seamless as you'd hope though. I often have problems with fades missing and little things here and there. I've found it easiest to render from Premier then import the render into AE for effects. But it's probably just as simple as a friggin setting I haven't found yet.

[Fred]

I've taken a crack at editing myself but have no idea what i'm doing. I'm experimenting so that I can eventually edit our Kentucky footage from last year.

Mitch, I use Premier. You should get that one and then you can teach me LOL

so... once you edit your full size clip what kind of format do you guys save as for web? NTSC? PAL? Streaming? And how does DrTopo make their vids so big and such good quality for download?

[dcentral]

Well if you are keeping your video on your computer and not exporting to tape or dvd. Use square pixels, cut your frame rate down to 15. That will help for cutting down the size and keeping the quality.

ALthough the best program for compression is Sorenson Squeeze. IT has amazing resutls for putting videos up on the net. Can take 40 megs down to 4 no problem. It can do smaller too. Not sure if they use sorenson's but it's all in the compression you use and knowing where to cut corners.

The Visual Quickpro guides are good books to pick up if you are trying to learn either program. I like after effects for it's ability to create 3d layers.

If you are exporting to tape then use NTSC. Unless you are in Europe the use PAL.

Cutting down on the quality of audio will help reduce your size for web as well.

There's lots of ways to do it.