Chapter 14 n Editing

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If you are missing shots because they haven’t been shot yet, you can use a placeholder, such as a title, that describes the missing shot. If you have lots of effects shots and composites, you can use low-resolution proxies imported from your effects software (more about effects in Chapters 16, “Color Correction,” and Chapter 17, “Titles and Effects,”), or you can create a temporary effects shot or composite in your editing project to use until you get the real thing. Managing lots of temp footage, proxies, and other elements can be an organizational nightmare if you let it get out of control. Be sure to develop some type of naming convention to indicate what’s temporary and what’s final.

High-Res HD Is Unforgiving

If you’re editing with a low-res codec, be aware that when you up-res your project, you’ll be able to see a lot more than what you saw in low-res. You may find focus problems, sync issues, and objects in the frame that you weren’t aware of, such as microphones and cables. And if you “cheated” any dialogue or cutaways, you may find they are glaringly apparent on a bigger screen.

Multi-Cam Editing

Projects that are unscripted, involve lots of action, or cover a “live” event are often shot with multiple cameras. Sports events, talk shows, reality TV, and concert performances are typically shot multi-cam. As long as the cameras are properly synchronized with matching timecode, editing multi-cam footage is a breeze if you have editing software that can handle multi-cam footage.

The first step is to digitize the footage from each camera, breaking it up as needed and maintaining consistency in the clips across the different cameras. For example, if you’re editing a boxing match, you could create a clip for each round that overlaps by 30 seconds or so. As you log and capture, you would do the same for all the cameras so that if you, say, have four cameras, you would then have four clips for round one, four clips for round two, and so on.

The next step is to link the clips from each camera together. The way this is done varies according to your editing software, so refer to your user documentation. Each group of camera clips is synched together using matching timecode from the shoot or a sync mark. If the film isn’t recorded with timecode or properly slated, you’ll have to find and set the sync marks yourself. You’ll have to find a discrete frame—the moment a football flies out of the quarterback’s hand, for example—and use that frame to sync all your cameras together.

Now that the clips are locked together, you can start editing. With Avid Media Composer, you load your grouped shot into the source monitor, switch to a multi-cam view (Media Composer allows you to view four or nine sources in a window), select the camera you want, set in-and-out points, and edit the shot into your sequence. The reference to the grouped shot remains intact so that at any time you can match back to the other shots in the grouped clip or use Multi-cam Mode to switch between cameras or, if you have your keyboard set up for it, use keystrokes to switch cameras on the fly. Apple Final Cut Pro now offers multi-cam editing, too.