Last week I was in the hell of production. Running late and down to the wire I had a whole mess of production on my hands. The project was a 1hr dvd production for one of our large clients. They specificly requested greatness as far as the video goes.. dazzle me, they said.
I scheduled three weeks for the gig and if everything worked out, odds are that would of worked but, it didn’t, the time table slipped and well.. it got messy. It got especially nasty when it came to the dvd production side of it.
Basically there was three tasks in mind: digitizing, editing and dvd production. Each should of taken a week.
Digiziting:
The digitizing really bit us bad though. First I couldnt find avid’s media log application so that the person who called the shot on what they wanted in the video could select the clips and log them and or digitize them for me. I could of opt’d for a simple DV capture app but them in the translation of that just dv footage to the avid the timecode would of been lost. Sure the avid can import anything but if I lose the time code and theres problems with those clips then bad things happen. Once again I can’t stress enough how important timecode is, its everything on an edit, IF YOU HAVE issues, if you dont have issues.. then timecode isn’t so bad really. Its purely an anal move on my part to achieve victory however, my anal tendencies did make for more time. That wasn’t the only thing that slowed us down. The chosing of clips and what not slide into the week of editing, so now the one week for editing is also digitizing.. thats bad.
I was kinda miffed at Avid too, I really wanted to find this media log application and it was no where to be seen on their website and their info for contact etc is especially painful. I’m curious, how do people log footage who arent directly accessing the avid system then? I know media log is out there somewhere, its renamed as something else does a bit more but is essentially the same application.
Even if we media logged the footage another concern of mine was the fact we werent really working with decks, we have dv cameras but i hate to think of them as decks. They just arent decks. How reliable could they be in an automated batch digitize function, its really hard to say, and it was another unknown i didn’t have time for.
Another nastly effect of digitizing is bad clips or bad tape. We had some tapes that could not go past 3mins before they’d glitch freaking out the avid and making for some nasty footage. This stuff always happens and you dance around it really, u need 20mins of x, you grab it not in one segment but 25 of them and then glue them back together in the edit. Sucks.
Editing:
Editing is where starts to come together. Before editing you layout how you want it, this is here, that goes there, then this and so on. In the edit, its fairly blissful really, slap clips on the timeline, trimm and continue. One problem i had related to digitizing was that some of the footage was audio sampled in 32khz and other was 48khz, and luckily the avid didnt care on the timeline but anything rendered well.. gotta convert to which ever you picked.
Another issue while editing context, I was the editor on this project not the owner of the content. I didnt factor this in. And while other edits I’ve done I haven’t had the whole shibag on context I still cranked them out much quicker than this one. This project was high profile and for a big client and so I was merely the editor. I should of factored that in, I had a feeling early on about the level of scrunity I was going to get going in but thought I could deal with it.
Toward the end of the edit the gloves came off and we had some exchanges of edit this now this way going on. The bad thing is in order to move faster you need to set up a relationship where the two people work as one. One calls it, the other edits it. I had to establish that going into the final few days of editing. Ii didnt have time to teach this person how to edit, know the key strokes, the to dos and not to dos, or why avid liked x but not y. Sadly they sorta insisted along the way making for a more gruling edit process.
Then we did something new, and it worked out ok for the most part, we used the audio punch-in tool on the avid and used a telex headphone mic set to talk right into the timeline for voice work. But we couldnt do that in the day cause of the noise in the office. So weekends here we come on that. Still it worked out better than I expected really. Its a nice thing.
After sorting out the good, bad and ugly on the edit, I was nearly there. Then more footage arrived. Dang, we had to go back and digitize more. That threw me off completely really, sure I nodded and said fine, I mean what was i gonna do, we needed the footage, but it hurt!
As we got closer to the “edit” so to speak the realization of what we had to work with hit me. The footage. If you have bad footage you’ll typically have a bad edit, at least in the hands of an editor that doesnt know how to work with bad footage, I however, like to think of myself as a pretty good editor. Yes, rub my tummy, goood dad, good editor boy.. ROAR! Well its true, I endured ADV FILM’s trailer boot camp on how to take nothing and make it appear to be something, and I did a pretty good job of it. So on this edit, I can do this.
Many of the shots were rocky camera held action in dimly lit rooms. Gah. Stablizing some, not really, just edit it better, and the color correction, I can do that in the avid. Ok so now make all of that look good, right then sweeten the audio, this always takes a bit, how do you know what yer listening too will be that nice on a big tv etc? You dont, you just pray it will be.
Production:
Now this should be the DVD phase, but its called production cause you have to do all the things ya need to do before you make a dvd, which check, double check and tripple check. You have to fix that edit, render that title, insert that graph.. oh and lets talk about that. Powerpoint slides just dont translate to video frames all that welll. I will agree with Mike on this one aspect of powerpoint, it makes people dumb in the sense that dont know any better. Its in powerpoint, just translate it over. In video you have lower resolution so you cant put down 10 point text and expect anyone to see it.
Now yer headed for the DVD, but then you get changes to the edit.. woah wait a sec, I’m on production. Ok changes to the edit always occur but at somepoint, as the editor, I’m like well tuff. Too late kids, nit picks are nice and all but were headed to the nexus of dvd produciton now.
Speaking of which I haven’t produced a DVD this big in about well 2 years. Dang. I opt’d to purchase Sonic DVDit’5 and pray to the gods that it would be simple to use. It was, it was a dream and it took and accepted avid’s main output of quicktime reference files as if they were its own. THAT was massive. I was so close to completion now. Sure I haven’t made a DVD in ages, I could figure this out.
Ok took me 3mins to get the hang of the app and I was good to go. I made my first test disc, burned it.. oh wait a sec lets talk media. I totally forgot what my recorder perfered. I know my home tivo like dvd-r, but the work one, no idea, so I had to buy some media, and i needed both kinds. I put this off until the last day thinking, micro center has got to have me covered, but i wanted dvdr media that was inkjet printable as well, even a little more picky eh? Did they have it? YES! Woot, I picked up Verbatim dvd-r and memorex dvd+r, both printable. I was good to go, I tried the verbatim first, worked like a charm, first disc burned without a glitch!
I was high on the possibility I could make it in time. The project manager informs me that based on my time estimates we’re now 30 hrs over budget on the project. And for some reason me saying things like “well everything slid from the start” didnt jive. Surely there was something wrong with the editor. They even had a meeting without me to discuss the issue. I heard afterwards that perhaps they should of taken it out of house, it would of been cheaper. The fact they had this meeting and convicted me without me being there to defend my self, my edit, my production, infuriated me. Now i’m angry and I still need to work. I realize they need to count the numbers assign blame etc but to put it on all me pissed me off since the project totally slipped from the beginning, before this even all began there was a report and yadda and all of that slipped as well.
Now i’m hacked off and motivation is slipping. How dare they I thought to myself. Maybe they were right really, if thats the mind set of who i’m working with, thats fine take it out of house. We’ve never done a full production like this one before. It was all possible, is possible provided we shake out the bad crap and ring in the new.
Back to the dvd I go. Now I had to build the big monster. The full disc. Completed, and then instead of burning a single disc i wanted to make an image so that if it worked, i’d just dupe it over and over. I needed 20 copies. First disc tells you what go back and fit in the edit, I had a safe title problem. I had text leaking out into the “you cant read me” space on basic tvs. Not a problem really on pcs but on tvs theres like an inch around yer tv set that you’ll never see.
I make the changes and then realize something else really nasty. Footage, the DV footage on shaky camera moves was bluring like mofo. Crap. How do I fix that. It was painfully obvious in some places. The first thing I did was slow mo it down, 35–50% of normal speed. Most of it looked good slowing down anyways. Burned another disc image, then disc itself ( which equals 5 hrs btw ), and it was still there. Now im thinking fields.. crap I bet this is a fields thing, top field bottom field dv fields, looks fine on a pc but sucks on tv.. fields. I needed to flip a field. After some searching I found it, switched all the clips to bottom fields and presto fixed the issue. This was however after I spent hours watching paint dry as my pc burned an image and then a disc.
Duplication:
I totally did not factor this one in at all until an project manager said to me “would it hurt to call?”, I figured the big houses like VDS in town couldnt meet my demands of same day turn around. But on a whim I called the one place in town I could trust when it came to production needs, the place I buy tape: Tape Central. They crammed into a small office in a less than favorable side of town and have sold me tape for years. Maybe they knew of someone I hoped. They sure did, they could do it, and the turn around time for 20 discs? 1 hour. Holy frickin shit I was saved. That night I finalized the end all be all master, chapters and all and burned the one disc that would be all discs. I made cover art and prepped the materials so that Tape Central could do everything it needed to do. ( btw, ink jet printed copies were 3.60 a disc ) not bad!
It was over. Copies were made, the sick were healed and i was off to sleep for 32 hrs.
Where’s the good? Well lots of good in there really. Now i’m itchin to do more DVD’s.
