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Developing Better Workflow Habits
Producing great video is tough, especially when you're the one doing all the work, from preproduction to delivering the final cut. If you're working on a freelance project, there may not be another editor to make suggestions for changes, or to notice glitches and spelling errors before delivery. Self-editing then becomes imperative. And as the volume and demand for your work increases, so does the importance of developing great postproduction workflow habits.
Editing video is a lot like editing for any other rhetorical medium. After sitting with your nose to the screen for 3 hours, it's difficult to achieve an objective angle on the details. Is it funny anymore? Is it compelling enough? I recently saw an interview with Ira Glass of the public radio show This American Life, talking about producing good video in which he said, "All video production is trying to be crap. It's like the laws of entropy... Anything you put on tape, from the moment you try to put it on tape... it's trying to be really bad. You have to be ruthless if anything is going to be really good." His point is that great video production requires an attentive orchestrator to make all the elements support the final edit.
Often, I've found taking a break from the details in which I'm immersed will allow for mistakes to emerge from the video when I come back to it later. Viewing the work within the context of its larger story will also help to gain a more editorial 3rd-person perspective. I'll watch the entire video from beginning to end and look for distractions or interruptions. You may want to break up your revision process into several steps. View the video once after a rough cut for major revisions, and then again as a sort of proofread for minor fixes like misspellings.
Every one of our filmmakers will have a different process for ingesting files or capturing tapes, but taking a moment to document or tweak your organizational scheme will give you the confidence to predict and manage your time expenditure. Clean organization clears the path for a successful edit by eliminating distracting clutter and providing easy access to media when you need it. Whether creating backups of media in intuitive directories or labeling footage in appropriate bins, defined workflow tasks will ensure that your focus is where it needs to be, on the timeline.
Editing video is a lot like editing for any other rhetorical medium. After sitting with your nose to the screen for 3 hours, it's difficult to achieve an objective angle on the details. Is it funny anymore? Is it compelling enough? I recently saw an interview with Ira Glass of the public radio show This American Life, talking about producing good video in which he said, "All video production is trying to be crap. It's like the laws of entropy... Anything you put on tape, from the moment you try to put it on tape... it's trying to be really bad. You have to be ruthless if anything is going to be really good." His point is that great video production requires an attentive orchestrator to make all the elements support the final edit.
Often, I've found taking a break from the details in which I'm immersed will allow for mistakes to emerge from the video when I come back to it later. Viewing the work within the context of its larger story will also help to gain a more editorial 3rd-person perspective. I'll watch the entire video from beginning to end and look for distractions or interruptions. You may want to break up your revision process into several steps. View the video once after a rough cut for major revisions, and then again as a sort of proofread for minor fixes like misspellings.
Every one of our filmmakers will have a different process for ingesting files or capturing tapes, but taking a moment to document or tweak your organizational scheme will give you the confidence to predict and manage your time expenditure. Clean organization clears the path for a successful edit by eliminating distracting clutter and providing easy access to media when you need it. Whether creating backups of media in intuitive directories or labeling footage in appropriate bins, defined workflow tasks will ensure that your focus is where it needs to be, on the timeline.
