Vexercise 3 Check In

[lola]

 Hi folks! How is Vexercise 3 treating you? Are you trying the rhythmic editing, the sound editing, or both? Run into any questions/issues/confusions/fun discoveries? Found any inspirational videos or tutorials to share? 

Also, there've been a couple questions about process, specifically about whether people are making subclips, using pancake timelines, or just scrubbing through episodes. What have you been doing so far with the vexercises in terms of clip prep? What's been working for you? (or not working for you? :D) 

Comments

[jinkyo]

I am a footage scrubber. For years, I only edited one show and I know that show very well; scrubbing was no hardship. Last year, I added 2 new shows to my "I'm going to vid the hell out of these" list. I don't have the same fluency with those so I pulled out my lined paper notebook and made log notes on each episode.

This year I've added a number of new sources and am in the process of clipping them into master power bins for Resolve.

The edit starts with the song. It takes 1-3 sessions to trim the song down into something I'm excited about, ideally 2 minutes or less. I'm also thinking about the visuals and doing some pre-editing at this point. Building the subtitle track usually happens here as well.

The actual placing of clips technique I use is...stupid. I tend to do a fresh round of clipping each time I edit, because I'm editing a different subject or character so, I didn't have those things clipped previously. Clipping happens on one timeline. I close up all the gaps and then bring my song to this selects timeline and copy/paste the song so that it repeats for as long as my clips (about 15-20 min worth of clips).

From there, I just watch in real-time. I might get lucky with a clip that falls on a good section of the song right away. Most of the time I'm visualizing which of these clips I'll *really* use for this project and making some preliminary sequences. Usually, I have some clip/lyric/music matches already in mind based on my time editing the song, so I'll grab those right away too.

I make copies of all my round 1 culled clips and move them over to the actual edit timeline. The clips that magically were perfect go where they need to go. The rough sequences are placed and I might do some rough trimming.

Then it's repeat, repeat, repeat: digging through clips that got selected but not used, going back to the source and making new clips, gleefully rewatching a 50% done video over and over again until I realize the vid won't vid itself and I need to get back to work. I don't use markers much in constructing the vid because the audio waves are more visible and I usually have a paper edit to work from.

Depending on how clear the vid idea was to start, start to finish on a full timeline can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Ideally, I have time to do the really fun part which is the frame by frame adjustments. Titles are last - I haven't developed a passion for titling yet.

That was a novel! Anyway, for this check-in specifically, I'm doing the rhythmic editing because I just did an audio layered edit earlier this month independently. Turns out my shiny new HD footage was actually gunking up my edit rig so I learned how to create optimized media (my memory is fuzzy, but I think this is the same as rendering a timeline in Premiere. DaVinci just doesn't do this automatically - it's a process). The other big tech learn was pulling out my old Stream Deck switcher. It's a macro pad that I used to use for Twitch streaming but have now re-keyed with all my Resolve shortcuts - gamechanger.

[actiaslunaris]

My editor can't handle watching in real time, but I too repeat the song on the timeline and then render a draft, to make notes on what worked well the first go-around! It's really fun for me to see a rough draft get refined through this process.

It's also useful for me, because I can't watch in real time, to keep a few drafts around in the process, in case I make a change to the edit that doesn't work well. I usually number them to keep them organized.