Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Editor's Note: Editing is a pain in the balls.

I am in the midst of editing my last short and it has been a bit trying. My first speed bump had to do with the audio. This is my first project where I've had to sync audio with video manually as we shot the short using a DSLR camera. To sych audio & video you must visually find the clapboard (see above) mark/clap and sync it with the audio mark/clap. It's incredibly tedious, especially when you have numerous takes. While doing this, I discovered we only recorded one channel of audio, which means balancing all of the audio, then merging all of the balanced & synced clips together. Literally hours of work to get this completed. I took all of my footage to a friend who is much more proficient than I, to make sure I was doing things correctly. I was indeed doing it correctly, but I discovered I was originally supposed to take all of the raw footage from the DSLR and convert it to a new format before any editing should commence. Therefore, all of the hours of work that I had completed so far was a complete waste. Neat!

What's tickled my fancy as of late: The Fighter (dir. David O. Russell), The Way Back (dir. Peter Weir), A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin ( I am currently reading book 4 of this massive series), Nine Types of Light by TV On The Radio, and Hot Sauce Committee Part Two by the Beastie Boys.