Editing
And so began the editing process, after meeting in the morning to dump off all the kit at the stores we then headed to the production hub to begin editing individually, however we felt this would work best if we were in the same room so if we ran into any problems we could consult each other for help but most importantly share the files; we all individually kept backups but only one of us had a hard drive large enough to transport all the footage in one go.
I began the edit in Avid, got the rushes into the bins, one for each day, this was supposed to keep everything slightly organised but I actually soon decided to put them all in one bin, it just made it a little easier with the way I work; furthermore switching the view to enable thumbnails on each take was another necessity.
Despite the preparation the one thing I had not taken into account was for how long each individual shot stays on screen for, retrospectively this would have been difficult to document because of the fast paced tempo and frequent use of whip pans in this sequence, however I have decided to make a not of this for future projects. In light of this I decided to download the original sequence and using the audio from that I was able to match the new footage with the original open on the other screen as a reference.
Once this was done it was off to Da Vinci to add the colour grade, this a was difficult and a long process, mainly because we had one workshop around two months ago but also because the scene cut auto detector doesn’t work well with whip pans but despite restarting from scratch twice I was able to make some progress. The grade didn’t take a lot of time, having the original sequence on the other screen made it go by so much faster but the only problem we had was some of our scenes were too dark, so when I reduced the temperature of the colours to match the shots it just didn’t look right so compromises had to be made.
After exporting the finished cut I assembled each key stage of the process into Avid, beginning with our recreation, then the original, then the rushes and finally a comparison sequence between the graded and ungraded version.
