A Wider Net

Episode 3 – Your Visit to the Edit Suite

You spent the last 3 days on location shooting your master piece.  Cramer’s team of directors, producers and production staff has captured your message in its raw form.  The lighting was great, there were some laughs at the outtakes and you were amazed at what goes into shooting on location.  Now it’s time to bring it all together.  Now it’s time for the edit.

Welcome to the post production department at Cramer, the home of the premiere Avid editing system in all of New England.  There are 6 Avid edit suites, 2 Pro Tools audio rooms and a team of video animators ready to bring the magic from the studio onto the screen.  You took a right turn leaving your house instead of a left and are ready to come in and finish telling your story, and we are glad you are here.  Come in, take a load off in a big leather chair, grab a cup of Green Mountain coffee from the café and find out what is for lunch, and if it is not to your liking, let us know we can get a hot or cold sandwich special ordered for you.

Here is some information you should know in order to make your visit to the edit suite enjoyable and fun, while at the same time efficient in getting your video done correctly and on time.

1. Have Fun. I mean, look at this place!  There are sky lights as you walk in, there is all this cool equipment that creates all kinds of fun stuff, and you get a free hot lunch!  Look at this like a field trip in grade school to the Museum of Science.  Most likely, it is better than your normal day to day routine.
2. Greet the Editor. A lot of times when you come in either myself or one of our other 5 editors will be preparing the footage, setting up the Avid project, importing graphics or grabbing more leather chairs for you to sit in that sometimes the actual greeting gets lost in the shuffle.   We are going to be working together for the rest of the day, so we might as well introduce ourselves.
3. Do Your Homework. I know no one likes to do homework.  But if Cramer has sent you transcripts of your interviews, mark down the sound bites you think will work best, and while you’re at it, put them in an order you think will work best.  Remember, this will most likely change and we are more than happy to do that, but having a good jumping off point will give us more time to fine tune your video and make it even better than you had originally imagined.  Do you have a company font or color scheme?  Bring that information with you.
4. Plug In. We have power outlets and internet connections at the client desk.  There is also wireless internet throughout the building.  Bring your laptop.  This way you can show me that funny YouTube video that is being emailed around to you and your friends, and yes, I want to see it.
5. Have Lunch. As I mentioned before, you get a free lunch!  Remember that saying “There is no such thing as a free lunch?”  Well here in Norwood, we don’t believe in that.  Salad, Soup and an entrée are waiting for you mid day.  Not liking what is offered?  Well, we have a sandwich menu right in the edit suite.  And remember to eat lunch too, for my sake.  Come mid day I start to get hungry, but I won’t stop working until you stop working.  So don’t be afraid to say “Hey, let’s go eat!”  The last thing we want is a stalemate of you and me waiting for the other to break for lunch.  Trust me, if you are hungry, I am hungry.
6. Be Patient. The computers and technology have gotten much faster over the years, but this stuff still takes time to render or process.  I will do my best to manage that time in order to make your day here the most productive it can be.  Lunch time is a great time to let the computer render, but this can be unavoidable at times.  I don’t like waiting either.  Also, when we are working, give me time to push the buttons.  If we are working on a complex effect, I need time to play with it and make it right, and that means I may not put the text in its final resting place right off that bat or the picture in picture box is still too small.  Give me time to play, and trust me, I can make it right.  Feel free to use this time to play too and find yet another funny video on YouTube.
7. I Can Hear You…sort of. The distance between the client desk and the editor’s chair is about 5 feet.  So whatever you say I can hear you.  If you are discussing our next step with the director and/or producer, most likely I have heard you and am already working on it.  Although, maybe while you are discussing this I have be diligently working on making the effect from before work, in which case my concentration has been on that and I didn’t hear you.  What is my advice here, well, don’t discuss an editorial decision and then always relay that information to me, but also don’t assume that I have absorbed that decision either.
8. Use the Client Monitor. When you come in, you will notice that I have 2 computer monitors.  This because my creativity just cannot be contained on just one screen…no, I am kidding.  This is because the Avid editing application needs two screens to hold the interface.  The right screen is where the timeline and video play, so the really smart engineers at Cramer decided long ago to send that signal to the back of the room, where you will be sitting.  So what you see on your monitor is what I see on my right monitor.  Use this to tell me to move a clip left or right.  If you have any questions and what you are actually looking at, let me know, I will be glad to assist.
9. Now What? It is the end of the day, the video is looking great, but it may or may not be ‘quite there yet.’  So now what?  Well, we can do many things here.  Our most popular step from here is to make a 500k Windows Media File to post on our FTP site so you can then share with your colleagues the story you told.  We recommend this because WMF looks great, is a small file size and is universally played on all computers (YES, you can play them on a Mac!)  BUT, we can do a Quicktime, or a Flash or an MPEG or a DVD.  Basically, whatever you need, we can do.  A lot of this can be done right here in the edit suite, but if it is something very particular we will have our gurus in the Media Lab whip you up something.

So this has been a broad overview of what to expect from your day in the edit suite.  The overall message here is to enjoy your day.  Do you have more questions?  Leave a comment down below and I will answer them for you.  See you when you get here!

Tags: Suite Talk

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 10:25 am and is filed under Marketing Technology, Video Production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.