Prayers to the Edit Gods

Chris W

The night was sultry...
Staff member
I have a personal deadline of finishing a cut today. Wish me luck. It's not really due until Monday night but I want to have all Monday to score and fine tune it.

Oy. A mountain of footage and it has taken forever. It's challenging but a good challenge to weave so many characters and storylines together.

I've spent all last week and most of this week watching a mountain of footage and organizing it first into broad pulls sequences and then more focused but still broad pulls into sequences of everything I need to cut a certain scene or moment. I feel like most of my time during this rough cut stage of editing is spent watching footage and thinking about it and making selects. If anyone came by to look at what I've done during this beginning stage I'd have not much to show for it yet in terms of what I've edited. Funnily enough I think most of my best cutting happens when I'm going for a walk, on a drive, or in the shower lol. Just cutting the thing in my head.

But then once I finally start cutting it comes together really quickly. I'm on track to finish tonight. 🤞I think I have around 4 or 5 more scenes/moments to cut. Selects are all done and it's mostly cut in my head. Now just to download my head into the Avid.

Wish me luck! Lol
 
Ok this is cool.

IMG_20240313_081926_624.jpg
 
Just wanted to say that Avid Script sync is AMAZING and I don't know what is do without it.

Avid Script sync is a tool where you can sync up takes of a film to your script in the Avid so you click on a line and it'll bring your footage to the times the line is said in your dailies.

You can also use it with interviews and sync the footage to a transcript of an interview and you click on a sentence and it'll play that part of the interview.

I use the latter ALL THE TIME and it's an absolute lifesaver. Especially when doing "frankenbites". A lot of the time you need someone to say something for clarity that the interviewers didn't ask or you need to fix the tense.

My favorite example from ages ago is when people were talking about "it" all the time and no one said what "it" was. So I combined "graduate" and "situation" to create "graduation". Lol

Anyways. It's awesome and saves so much time. I've used it for features too and it's helpful.
 
Sometimes they do pickups for stuff like this but I hate pickups because the audio is always wrong and noticeable. I hate pickups so I always try to find a solution with what was already shot.
 
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