48 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2005
EDIT
YOURVIDEO
so you’ll be able to identify them without
having to view the entire clip.
Now that you’ve trimmed the film fat,
you’ll want to be more aggressive, and go
through and split your clips into individual
scenes. You should split clips where the cam-
era was stopped and restarted. Replacing
those herky-jerky camera-on/off transitions
with smooth transitions will make your video
much more viewable. You can also split clips
at natural transitions: the end of a conversa-tion, for instance. When you’re cutting individ-
ual scenes, make sure you leave a few sec-
onds of cushion on either end of the clip. You
never know when you’ll need those seconds.
In addition to naming the clips, we make a list
of all our clips, with the exact start and stop
times from the original footage. That makes
synching the audio from your soundtrack with
your video clips a snap later on.
If you shot with multiple cameras, you
should create clips of the same scenefrom all of your cameras at the same time.
By using footage from both cameras, you
can fill in gaps that would be present if you
used only one cam.
Do the second-pass splitting aggres-
sively and artistically. Get in touch with the
tempo and rhythm of the footage and the
music, and remember that you’re not cut-
ting the video for your use, you’re cutting it
for your viewers!
Once you’ve chopped up your clips, you
can move on to the next step and place the
clips in your project timeline.
This is a great time to backup your
collection of clips to optical disc or a sec-
ond hard drive. You’ve spent a lot of time
making the cuts, and it would suck to lose
them if a drive failed.STAGE 7: PUT IT
ALL TOGETHER
All home videos have nostalgic value, but
as we said before, what elevates your foot-
age to something universally enjoyable is
good editing. Here’s how we arranged our
final film—don’t be afraid to experiment as
you do yours.
With the audio track in place (Step 3), we
selected and moved all of our clips, including
the b-roll, into our project timeline. They’re easy
to sync with the audio because we knew their
exact starting positions, and we have the black
filler image to fill in any empty spaces. We
selected clips so there would be a good mixWhen you move from b-roll to a conversa-
tion, you should adjust the audio balance
from the background audio to the audio
from your camera, and then back to the
background when the shot changes again.A close-up view of the timeline during project editing.Synchronizing Audio and Video
Getting your clips synched with the
background audio track can be really
tricky, but the effort is worthwhile.
Nothing looks as impressive as a
video that seamlessly transitions from
background music to conversation
and back again.
The easiest way to synch your
video and audio tracks is to line up the
wave patterns in the top and bottom of
the timeline. Even when you’re using
an audio track from a different camera,
you’ll notice that the basic sound wave
is shaped the same, with peaks and val-
leys at the same places. Move the video
clip until the audio sections are perfectly
aligned, as shown in the image here.You can actually line up the waveforms
from your background soundtrack with
the video clips to sync the video and
background audio perfectly.