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Posts By bcleggtv

Avid and After Effects artist from Boston, MA. My interests include editing, compositing, color-correcting, making cool things but most of all, I love telling stories. This site will act as a forum for insights on my work as an editor. My goal is for it to be a community of people interested in telling stories in new and innovative ways.

FRONTLINE

March 27, 2014 · by bcleggtv

Produced by WGBH-TV Boston and seen on your local PBS station, FRONTLINE is considered by many as the gold standard in investigative journalism. For over 30 years FRONTLINE has been bringing you stories ranging from domestic politics and social issues to international wars. Over the years FRONTLINE has won a total of 57 Emmys, 27 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards and 15 Peabody Awards.

I have been lucky enough to be asked to help out on some promo work for The Outpost, which is FRONTLINE’s post and finishing department within WGBH. Working alongside Emmy award winning producer Missy Frederick we produced the above promo for Syria: Behind the Lines. Our first step was to watch the entire film. Both of us took notes on what we thought were the key points and messages. The biggest aspect of the film was just how in depth filmmaker Olly Lambert and his team were to conflict, at several points being within striking distance of an attack.

When I set out to start editing, I was able to find 2 pieces of music that I thought would work. Each one had parts I thought would work, so I roughed the two of them together with those particular sections. At this point is was right around our :30 mark, so I was able to use the nat sound from the footage to blend the two tracks together. My goal was to use the nat sound to add to the “musicality” of the edited track. A good example of this is the gun fire at the :08 mark that acts as an upbeat to the next measure (upbeat in the musical sense, as it goes without saying upbeat as an adjective to this subject matter doesn’t really work.)

When you watch the film the river that divides the two sides is a major theme throughout. I originally wanted to use the river shots as text backgrounds for two or three key points throughout the spot, but it was taking away from the incredible footage the team shot on location, so I decided to use it just for the tag. The tag was done in After Effects. While it could have easily been done in Avid, the ability to create masks and motion blur I find easier and faster in After Effects.

The next promo was for TB – Silent Killer, a film that chronicles the lives of those living with TB and the struggles with the long and arduous treatment that goes along with it. Jezza Neumann and his team tell the stories of Nokubheka, Bheki and Gcebile and how TB, as an airborne disease, doesn’t discriminate and can affect anyone. The key takeaway when crafting this promo was the human element. These are not faceless patients. We wanted to highlight that while there is sadness surrounding the disease and the treatment, there is also hope.

I encourage anyone reading this to connect with the team at The Outpost. They are extremely active in the post-production community and have given many presentations at local user groups including the Boston Avid Users Group and the Boston Creative Pro User Group. The best way to connect with the team is through Twitter.

Tim Mangini – @zip50

Chris Fournelle – @chrisfournelle

Megan McGough – @MMcGough_WGBH

Eric Gulliver – @GulliversEdits

Jim Ferguson – @jimferg

Steve Audette – @stevecutsdocs

Roche Bros “Feel The Love” Campaign

November 24, 2012 · by bcleggtv

It has been a wonderful first year of freelance editing, fortunately and unfortunately I have been busy enough to let the steady flow of content here diminish, and for that I apologize. During those busy times I have collected a pretty good back log of content that I hope to show and share over the next few weeks. I also have plans to update the look and feel of barryclegg.com to more of a website than a blog.

About a month back I got word, from Facebook no less, of Scott Lebeda’s company Good Natured Dog Productions whom he runs with his wife Alecia along with a stable of talented and creative folks, that they were looking for an editor for a spot with a quick turn around. Scott and had worked together multiple times on the road for corporate work and I had wanted to collaborate with Good Natured Dog for a while. Long story short, I emailed them and off I went on my first project with Good Natured Dog and the first gig I booked through social networking. Yet to find a gig through Twitter (@cleggthis), but I am confident this will happen at some point.

The treatment for the spots was one of real customers giving testimonials about their experiences with Roche Bros. along with BROLL of their immaculate stores. Having picked up the footage the night of the shoot, I can say without hesitation that Roche Bros has the nicest food market store I have ever been in. Roche Bros was offering $10 gift certificates for anyone willing to be interviewed for the commercial, but having watched all the raw footage I have a feeling customers would have done it for free. Roche Bros really is one of those cut above kind of stores, the kind that still helps you bring your purchase out to your car. When was the last time your super market did that?

Before we got into it I had a phone call with Scott who was going to be the main DP on the production and was informed the primary camera was going to be the Canon C300. I won’t get into all the tech specs on the C300, there are a multitude of sites on the internet that can tell you anything and everything you need to know. There were a couple tech issues I wanted to go over before we shot since I had done some projects recently with the camera. First was to insist we shoot in Canon Log so that we had a nice, flat image to color correct from. For color correction it was all done within Media Composer with some shots being masked with the Animatte tool for some secondary corrections, but I am not going to tell you which ones were which…that would take all the fun out of guessing. On top of the correction I did some minor vignetting using a 35% superimpose with a black frame and an Animatte effect with a soft feather. Below is a before and after screen shot.

As far as frame rates go, most often with spots I have been dealing with 1080p/23.976fps source footage. Great thing about working in the Avid is you can easily switch sequence formats. Scott informed me he was going to shoot in 1080p/29.97fps. I hadn’t worked in that way yet going back and forth, but I knew that Avid would give me the flexibility to do whatever I wanted. What I discovered is I could do it all in the same project. When working in 23.976, the Avid automatically puts the pulldown on each clip, which inherently makes a motion effect on each clip, so you in essence always have an effect to render or playback in realtime. Since broadcast still takes 1080i, my workflow was to edit in 1080p, then at the end any and all graphic work was done by switching the setting over to 1080i. It was easy to switch back and forth, when editing footage I had the project at 1080p with no motion effects, then with graphic work switch back to 1080i and the footage had motion effects on them. The motion effects play in real time, so there was never any performance issues in either setting.

A majority of the BROLL was shot on Canon 60D DSLR cameras. All the footage was linked via Avid AMA. The 60D footage I transcoded to DNxHD 145 before editing since sometimes the H.264 format can get a little quirky with the AMA interface, but lately I have been having good luck with AMA linked H.264 footage. With our quick turnaround though I wanted to have MXF media to sift through. Plus, I ran it overnight before the edit began. The C300 footage stayed AMA linked throughout the process.

After Effects was used to do all the graphic work, which really only consisted of the logo bug, the catering logo (which only appears on one spot) and the end tag. The main reason I used After Effects and not Avid was simply really, I just enjoy After Effects for graphical work, I think it is easier and more flexible. It gives me one project/bucket for all my graphic work and all the logos were sent to me as .eps, which means I can natively import them in After Effects and continually rasterize to keep the quality at its highest no matter how much I scale, rotate, position, etc. I rendered all the graphics at 1080i so I could have fields for the final output to the 1080i sequence.

For the end tag I used two techniques I use a lot in my day to day work. One is the write on effect. You can easily so this by drawing a mask on your written graphic and adding a stroke effect and changing the mode to “reveal original image.” By doing this you can keyframe the “start” and the logo will write on.

If you look closely at the vignette on the end tag, you will notice the left side is the red of the Roche Bros logo and the right is the purple of the Roche Bros logo. I do this a lot when a logo is over white that I normally would put a vignette on and a company’s logo is two toned. It is achieved simply by making a solid with a soft ramp of the two colors and using that as the vignette source.

Enough of the tech stuff, I want to talk about the flow of the project. The commercials were directed by Ben Zidel and he was instrumental in getting all the great content from the interviews. Ben and I agreed that I would take the first pass at pulling :30 from all the raw footage since he wanted my creative input as well. This was great since it gave me some ownership of the spots as well as being efficient when it came to the point when we both sat down to make the final tweaks. We weren’t fishing through all the raw footage, but instead making edits to the keepers I had pulled the day before. I have to give Good Natured Dog credit, the amount of usable footage I was provided was a breath of fresh air. They basically had three units in the store, C300 with the interviews/key BROLL and two 60D units shooting beauty shots. One 60D on a slider and one 60D on a steady-cam. Needless to say, we had more than enough great footage, which is always a great problem to have.

I look forward to working with Good Natured Dog in the future, they are a great group of creative people and I think these spots show that. You can see how much fun these guys have in the behind the scenes video.

Here are some more behind the scenes photos.

Jordan’s Furniture Bruins Promotions

April 21, 2012 · by bcleggtv

In celebration of the Boston Bruins once again on the verge of making a deep playoff run, I decided to talk a little about a couple Jordan’s Furniture spots regarding their Bruins promotions. I’ll keep this fairly short, you can read older posts about my work with Jordan’s.

This was the first spot for the new Bruins Big Check promotion. As you can see, it is based off the Red Sox Monster Payback deals where you buy furniture during a specific time period and if the team wins the championship you get your entire purchase for free. There was a whole campaign for the Big Check, this being the main spot.

I used both Avid Symphony 5.5 and Adobe After Effects CS5.5 to create this spot. The Bruins “B” logo was animated using GenArts Sapphire Spotlight and Boris FX Light Sweep. I wanted to create the feeling of being at the TD Garden after a goal when they spotlight the player who scored and to also give a sense to the red beacon that goes off from the goal referee. Right after you see the Bruins Logo you will notice we cut to a shot of Eliot on center ice as the lights go on. The lights were actually turned on in post using a simple Avid Animatte along with a couple 5 frame dissolves. In the jumbo-tron you will see the logo animation and those were added in using the Avid 3D Warp tool along with a GenArts Vignette effect.

All the text was done using After Effects, mostly because I wanted to get the motion blur After Effects creates. I could have easily used Avid for the text, but I do like the motion blur in AE. The logo animation at the end was something I created 2 weeks before the spot as it was being used on the web for promotional purposes. A layered Illustrator file was given to me by the Jordan’s graphic designer.

The second Bruins promotion Jordan’s did was for the mid-season rematch with the Vancouver Canucks which the Bruins defeated last year in game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals. For anyone of you who followed the team last year you’ll know that the Stanley Cup series was some of the best hockey seen in a long time. The footage after Eliot says “remember this” was supplied directly by the NHL on HDCAM, which was nice since a lot of times these type of things are sent over on DVD or some other non-broadcast format. My favorite part of this spot is the frame that I picked for the thumbnail, which shows Andrew Ference completely upending a Vancouver forward. The second is the amazing goal by Brad Marchand at the :02 mark. All the hockey footage is from Game 3 in Boston when the Bruins put an 8-1 beat down on the Canucks.

New England Women’s Leadership Awards

April 12, 2012 · by bcleggtv

As many of you know, I recently left my staff job I had for the last ten years. For those of you who are wondering where the editing tip of the week has gone or why there hasn’t been new content on barryclegg.com, fear not. Over those ten years I got to work on multiple projects which I will talk about about over the coming weeks. Some of the best stuff I got to work on, and some of the stuff I am most proud of, were the many pro bono videos that were used for fundraising and awareness.

There are lots of tools I have in my arsenal, but the one I am most proud of is telling stories. Starting in 2006, I started working on the New England Women’s Leadership Awards held annually by the Boy’s and Girl’s Club of Dorchester. Each year the club honors 5-6 women who demonstrate traits ranging from pioneer, community spirit and leadership. This project was something I was honored to be a part of for three years from 2006 – 2008. In all, I edited a total of 15 profiles, all of which are special in there own way. I did my best trying to pick one from each year, but in all reality any one of them could have been featured in this post.

If you grew up in the New England area, you will recognize Joyce Kulhawik as the arts and entertainment reporter for WBZ Channel 4. This was the first video I cut for this project, and one of the reasons I chose it was that it set the tone and feel for all the videos to follow. The artwork you see at the head of the video is actual artwork done by children in the Boston area at the Dorchester Boy’s and Girl’s Club. As you will see in the videos below, it is the brand of the awards. WBZ sent us a DVD of some of Joyce’s reports which helps the piece along by giving you a little insight to who and what she does. They were also good enough to send along the piece of Joyce participating in the American Cancer Society’s Daffodil Days, which included Lisa Hughes.

Staring right with this first video, I knew that the story telling was going to be key here. It all started with the project’s director/producer Katie McKinley. Katie took the time to really dive into each recipient’s story and find the best moment’s to tell it. Once the main outline was done, both Katie and myself worked on the A-Roll edit to make sure that each key aspect was represented. It was a great collaboration that lasted through the life cycle of the project.

One of the things that was great about the first round of videos was the classy interview setup done by Pete Sutton, the Director of Photography. Some may say that it is simple, but as I said before the stories is what drives these videos, not the elaborate set on the shoot. In year two, logistics made it impossible to recreate the same type of setup since the subjects were not all going to be shot on the same day in the same location. A decision was made to shoot green screen and use the artwork as the background in order to keep consistency.

The next time you are in the supermarket, make sure you keep a lookout for Dancing Deer desserts. Trish Karter has created a company with a spirit that most would only describe as inspiring. An environment that never looks at profitability over the human condition. Trish’s philosophy that the golden rule applies not only in life but in business as well I think is something we should all strive for.

Like with Joyce, Dancing Deer sent us a B-Roll DVD of their bakery. You may be wondering what exactly all those employees are doing and why they are dressed somewhat unconventionally. What you are seeing is the typical birthday celebration that happens at Dancing Deer. No matter who or what your role is at Dancing Deer, you get the same company wide celebration as the next person. In most productions, when you have an interviewee sit down you have them say and spell their name and give you their title for lower third information later. I think this is the only time I have actually USED that part of the interview, and when you hear Trish’s answer you can tell why.

Kevin Youkilis, Tim Lincecum and Nick Swisher…what do they all have in common? All three played for the Cape Cod Baseball League, the country’s premiere summer league for elite college players. For anyone who has spent a lot of time on Cape Cod, you know that Cape League baseball is fun, competitive and best of all, free. One of the major reasons this league is so unique is the fact they still use wooden bats. Most baseball players never use them until they reach the professional level. Judy Walden Scarafile started as a baseball writer for the University of Connecticut and stayed in the sport her whole life and since 1991 has been the president of the Cape League.

For Judy’s video we had access to some clips from the documentary”Touching the Game.” I highly suggest you watch it, it is a great story and a great documentary. One of the things I love while editing pieces like these is finding great natural sound in the B-Roll. In fact, all these videos have great little bits from B-Roll that help tell the story. So they next time you are shooting B-Roll, remember to leave the camera mic on and don’t talk over it.

The reason these stories were able to come to life was the great work by the production crew, Director of Photography Peter Sutton and Location Sound Engineer Chris Engles. You can read more about Peter and Chris at their respective websites.

Peter Sutton – http://petesuttonfineart.com/index2a.php Twitter: @PeteSuttonFA

Chris Engles – http://chrisenglesphoto.com/ Twitter: @ceshoot

Jordan’s Furniture Warwick Sony F3

March 24, 2012 · by bcleggtv

A while back I wrote about my experiences editing Jordan’s Furniture. They were one of the first New England companies to broadcast their spots in HD. I can’t comment on if they were one of the first to shoot their spots on the Sony F3, but I can say that this campaign for the new Warwick store did.

When I was informed the new Warwick spots were going to be shot on the F3, I had a distinct concern as far as the post process was concerned. All Jordan’s spots are shot in 1080/23.976fps. When the camera is the Sony F900 HDCAM, a JH-3 deck is used to do a pull-down and the footage is actually digitized at 1080i/59.94fps. This is great since all the deliverables need to be in that format. With the F3, the footage is XDCAM EX coming off SxS cards, so there is no way to have a piece of hardware do a pull-down on the footage.

You can read in my original post how quick the turn around times are on the spots, so I had limited time to make a decision how I was going to deal with the footage. I knew that the first step was going to be to use Avid AMA to link the footage in the Avid Symphony. What I didn’t know was where I was going to start as far as the master project went. 1080p/23.976? 1080i/59.94fps? The footage would link AMA into either project, but didn’t know if I should edit in 24 and then reformat to 60i after the edit or before. Should I transcode the footage before working?

After a thorough, yet fast paced, discovery phase I came to the conclusion that I was over thinking it. All I had to do was create a 1080i/59.94fps project, AMA the footage into a bin and edit in that format. Avid automatically does a pulldown motion effect on any mixed frame rates on the timeline. I will say though that in my opinion the pulldown that was done with the JH-3 HDCAM deck is more “solid” then the software based motion effects you get in Avid.

For those out there looking for some info on the lens configuration on the Sony F3, I can tell you this. A zoom lens was used. Robert Magro was the DP on this and while he said it would have been great to use prime lenses, the quick changes in setups coupled with the dolly shots warranted the need for a zoom. This campaign was shot during the last initial phase of construction at the store so there was very limited time with all the setups. I have worked on another video with the F3 in which primes were used and there is a definite difference, but I also believe overall the F3 holds up no matter what lens you use. One of these days I’ll get some footage with S-Log.

An Open Letter to a Good Friend

March 4, 2012 · by bcleggtv

“The tradition of Festivus begins with the Airing of Grievances. I got a lot of problems with you people! And now, you’re gonna hear about it.” ~ Frank Costanza

Back in January I gave my thoughts on the new Avid Media Composer 6, and thanks to the social media networks of the world a lot of people were able to share in that review. In my overall opinion Avid has been moving in the right direction for some time now, embracing 3rd party technologies, the AMA workflow that has made file-based acquisition post faster, and realizing that they are one of many tools in any post-production workflow. For the last 10 years or so, Avid has been my main tool for all things editing. I have used Final Cut Pro, Premiere, linear tape to tape systems and even Media 100 (that was a LONG time ago) but have always felt that Avid was the cream of the crop. In 2002 I got an internship with NAB in Vegas and was reading a review of Avid Xpress 3.0 and Final Cut Pro 3 and remembered this line – “While I would be more than happy taking Final Cut Pro on a date, I would marry Avid.”

Having said that, Avid has a lot of things they could improve on, and I only say this because one big thing Avid has been doing well is listening to their user base, so hopefully my concerns won’t fall on deaf ears.

Avid has a Pan and Zoom tool that allows the user to point to a still image to do flat art moves. It is better than importing the image and using the 3D Warp tool by keeping the same resolution of the original image. The tool has a couple problems though. First, you have to render any filter than gives you optimized results (I exclusively use the Gaussian filter by the way.) Second, there are no rotate handles so all the moves happen on the same plane. If Avid could incorporate still files (.jps, .tiffs, .pngs, etc.) through a link method like AMA and the files would come in at the same resolution of the original image (like how After Effects works), this feature I think would be met with great adulation from the user community. You can watch a quick overview of this tool work here, and as you can see it is useful, but clumsy and outdated.

Avid has two ways of creating titles, the original Title Tool or Avid’s proprietary title software Marquee. One great thing about Marquee is that it saves each title as a .mpq file and you can open them without having to go through the timeline. After that, I don’t really have many good things to say about Marquee. It is an outdated software that needs to be revamped or retired.

A few weeks ago I spent some time with Adobe Premiere. It was a simple job where I was trimming clips from AJA Ki Pro decks and posting to YouTube. If you have edited anytime over the last decade you know that you have be part compression tech. For a while now Avid has shipped with Sorenson Squeeze compression software, and having been a full time compression tech I can tell you Sorenson is a great tool. What I discovered when working with Adobe Premiere is the functionality of Adobe’s Dynamic Link. With this feature I was able to open up my Premiere sequences directly through Adobe Media Encoder and make my files for YouTube. It was fast, efficient, and an eye opener to how it can be done. My appeal to Avid is, if you have a working relationship with Sorenson, is there a way to make this kind of link between the two programs? Having the ability to open Avid sequences in Sorenson would be, well, awesome.

For now I am going to keep it at that, I know sometimes it is hard to hear constructive criticism, but it is also sometimes necessary. I also write the above letter based on version 5.5 of Avid Symphony and Media Composer, and I know Avid has made some great strides in Version 6.0.

EMD Serono Cape Cod Getaway MS Bike Ride

February 23, 2012 · by bcleggtv

Over the last couple of weeks my days have been jam packed with editing, traveling, thinking and planning. I apologize up front for not having a consistent “Editing Tip of the Week.” In fact, I have one somewhat written right now about compression and what you need to know about it as an editor, but I got about 75% done and realized it needed to be re-organized and outlined better. We’ll move that to next week. After the Rule Boston Camera Pub Night with Dr. Bob Arnot I was having a fresh barley based beverage with my good friend and colleague Brendan O’Brien and realized I had a great project in the can that would be great to share.

The ride take place over two days and goes from Boston to Provincetown, MA a the end of Cape Cod. Total, I believe it is just under 200 miles, not exactly a leisurely ride along the Charles River. This year the goal of the video changed from being a recap of the weekend to what exactly were people riding for. There are many different riders riding for many different reasons, but each has a desire to see the negative effects of MS seize to exist.

For a ride that encompasses over 2000 participants, with the majority of them from EMD Serono, Inc., the need to for two crews is essential. Brendan O’Brien, the director/producer of the project, literally took the course and mapped out exactly where the two crews would leap frog. Cody Morrow and Russ Jaquith used Panasonic HVX200 cameras recording 720p/23976fps, which on the camera corresponds to the 720p/24PN setting. You can see a better guideline for the camera as it relates to Avid here. The one thing I do know about P2 is that the ONLY setting on the camera that gives you native 23.976fps is the 720P/24PN setting (the “N” stand for natural or something like that.) All the other settings on the P2 cameras that relate to a 24 frame rate actually record at 30fps but with pull-down. (Side note: I don’t think the Panasonic P2 cameras do a good job at pull-down, to me there is too much artifacts.) There were also two GoPro cameras as well, but it was the first time those had been used and we hadn’t figured out that a little bit of Rain-X on a misty day would help with GoPro plastic cover fog.

We edited at 720p/23,976fps anyway, so the P2 setting worked just fine. Using Avid AMA, we linked all the footage and was ready to edit in about, oh, :45 seconds. Avid AMA is still going through some growing pains, but when it comes to P2 or XDCAM footage, AMA is hands down the best in the business.

I will say that one thing the Panasonic HVX200 and other P2 cameras do well is their over-crank settings. You can see these shots near the tail end of the video. Super smooth slo-mo. I know software has come a long way in doing motion fx, but nothing seems to compare to old fashioned over cranked footage.

The story flushed out like this. We knew we had plenty of great bike riding shots. In years past we attacked this in a very linear way, starting with the starting line and finishing with the finish line. With the 2011 video, like I mentioned before, we wanted to to tell the story of the riders. Instead of laying in some music and editing great BROLL shots over it, we started with the interviews. By picking out those first, we found the first sound bite you hear. His description of “we can ride for you” was clearly the best way to start the piece off with. It was definitely the theme for everyone there. We also wanted to start off the video with a stat that conveyed to the viewer the impact MS has.

As you will notice, there are no lower third fonts for any of the riders. There was originally a plan for that, but we decided that EMD Serono rides as a team and by keeping everyone the same it played into that very well. The road element you see on the side when people are talking was meant for text to be layered over it, but even when we cut the text the road still looked cool. So we kept it.

The entire edit was done in Avid Symphony 5.5. No After Effects. All color correction was done with the Symphony color correction tool. That is, except for the shots where you see a yellowish blur vignette. Those shots were corrected first with Symphony, then I applied the GenArts Film Effect with color correction and blur. After doubling up the shot on track 2 with a soft garbage matte, I was able to achieve the look you see. All the film transitions were done with…wait for it…an old film cutter Beta SP I still have laying around. I didn’t have to worry about frame rate conversion, my DBETA A500 went right in the 23.976fps project and then I did a simple transcode right in Avid. And since it was just film burns, I don’t think anyone would notice if the frame rates were a little different. I see this transition all the time with FCP edits, I am assuming there is a canned transition right in the software. For this, I did a 12 frame edit over my cuts and did a superimpose blend from 0 – 100 – 0 opacity over the edit. I also used it over the edits to the road overlay elements, but that was only 7 frames and went 0 – 50 – 0 opacity. The road was composited using GenArts Layer effect. The graphic overlay in the last section of the video was done using Photoshop to create an alpha element.

This was one of those projects that I didn’t know what the end result would be. I can say without a doubt, the end result was one I am very happy with.

If you would like to join the fight against MS and you like to ride bikes, you can find out more information about the 2012 ride here.

Anyone looking for DPs, the contact info for Cody Morrow and Russ Jaquith are below:

Cody Morrow – coder82@hotmail.com

Russ Jauith – rjfilms.com

Editing Tip of the Week – Keep it Good

January 22, 2012 · by bcleggtv

Wanted to make sure I got this week’s editing tip in because in about 4 – 5 hours the New England Patriots are going to be playing in the AFC Championship game and my day will be spent watching the game and either (hopefully) celebrating a victory after that or wallowing in despair.
***update, I celebrated!!!***

This week’s tip goes along with this theme I have going “Keep it ____.” What exactly do I mean by good? Does it mean it is well written, well edited, the FX are good, the color-correction is good?

What I am really talking about is good in an over arching sense. When you work on something, whether that be an edit, a script, a shoot, a lighting design, anything really, know that your name is on it. We all at some point work on projects that aren’t exactly creative or something that gets those creative juices flowing. It can be easy to say “well, it is just this or just that, it doesn’t matter.” Guess what, it does. Why? Because your name is on it.

The first video I ever edited as a professional was cutting 4 segments together, putting a dip to black between the 3 cuts and putting a fade on the head and tail. Sounds easy, right? I was working at an entry level position trying to work my way into the editing suite. That day I realized that if those simple edits weren’t correct, I may not be able to get more chances to edit. Those were the best damn fades and dip to black edits to ever leave a NLE edit system. Why? Because they had my name on it.

Whether you are working on a complex build in a video composite or you are editing the boss’s daughter’s wedding ceremony, always make it good. Never let apathy get in the way of quality.

Avid Media Composer / Symphony 6

January 18, 2012 · by bcleggtv

Let me first say as much as some may want to hear it, I am going to abstain from any inkling of the Avid vs. Final Cut Pro debate. Over the years I have been involved in many such discussions and I have learned one undeniable fact, nobody has ever watched a program because of what it was edited with. It would be like debating whether you shoveled your driveway with a aluminum or plastic shovel…isn’t the only thing that really matters is that your upstairs neighbor did it before you got up? That is what I thought.

Symphony 6

Having said that I won’t make any secret that I am an editor first, an Avid editor second. For the majority of my time as an editor Avid has been my tool of choice. It is what I know, it is what I like, but it doesn’t mean it is the best tool, just a tool. Tonight I attended the Boston Avid Users Group demo at Avid Headquarters in Burlington, MA, and the following is a recap of the new version of Media Composer and Symphony 6. It isn’t an endorsement or argument for using the software, just my thoughts and info for those that are interested.

BAVUG sign on crystal screen

The group was lucky enough to run into Bob Russo from Avid giving the first part the presentation, a general overview of Version 6 as well as an more in-depth look into the stereoscopic 3D tools now available. If you haven’t seen Bob present I highly recommend it, of all the software evangelists out there I think he is one of the best. Matt Feury is also very good, but I have yet to get a chance to meet him in person although I have seen many of his presentations.

Sterescopic 3D

Last time I ran into Bob Russo I had a lot of questions about the first stereoscopic 3D project I was going to be working on with Cramer. At the time we were shooting with the Panasonic AG-3DA1. The great thing about this camera was that it took all the bulky camera rig setups with beam splitters and parallel rigs and put it into one, more intuitive camera. The camera recorded a left and right eye stream to AVCHD onto two SD cards. After that we used Cineform HD to mux the two streams into a stereoscopic file that was then translated into a side/side stereoscopic image and sent out to a 3D monitor via HDMI.

After many questions answered by Bob Russo about workflow, he said one thing that stuck to me. That if Avid really wanted to take a leap forward they needed to “own” stereoscopic 3D editing. (at this time we were working on 4.0, which had pretty sophisticated 3D tools, but you needed those 3rd party software tools to really make it happen.) Well, after tonight, I can say that Avid must have listened because they have taken a big leap forward in working with stereoscopic material.

Having not worked with the software yet and due to time constraints in the demo I don’t have an in-depth dissertation on the upgrades, but I can tell you the key points. You can mux left and right streams right in Avid. You can adjust and key-frame convergence right in Avid(#awesome!) You can do source material color-correction on one stream in a stereoscopic clip to compensate for color shifts in a two camera beam splitting 3D camera rig. Any and all Avid FX are stereoscopic aware and will compensate the images if you were to do a simple PIP or anything really. AND (this one is really big) there is a built in tool to change legacy 2D footage into 3D. Now, it was somewhat hard to tell how well the 2D to 3D feature worked (we had paper anaglyph glasses) but the fact you could in theory cut in legacy 2D footage onto the same timeline is something that should be pretty appealing. I won’t sit here and think that the end results of 2D acquired material is going to be anything like true stereoscopic 3D, but at least you will get something right out of the box.

So did Avid do what Bob said and “own” stereoscopic 3D editing? Hopefully soon I will be able to test it out and do a comparison to my original project, but lets just say if they don’t already own it with 6.0, they are definitely leasing with an option to buy. (Note: all the above features are in addition to the already built-in stereoscopic tools available since 4.0, being able to pick side/side, over/under, left eye only monitoring, etc.)

Avid Marketplace

I’ll make this brief since I am not totally sold on this concept, but Avid has partnered with Thought Equity and created an in software marketplace to buy stock footage. The over arching concept is genius really, a way to think of it is having an iTunes app right in your editing software, but with video footage instead of music. It integrates right into the Avid and links via AMA with downloaded watermarked comps. After you have done your edit, you can then create a stock footage report that tells you what shots you have used and the ins and outs of your selects. That report can then be sent back to Thought Equity and they then process your order. Sounds great, right? Well, there are some road bumps you have to go over. You may or may not have to deal with a representative on rights usage (depending on the clips you have used) and it isn’t certain how long a clip could take. Basically if you use all royalty free material it is more or less instantaneous, if not, then you may have some red tape on how long it is before you get your footage. The overall great thing here is you can access it right from the Avid software or you can access it through the web if you are a producer. If you want to have all your watermarked footage get replaced automatically, it does appear you have to download the high rez clips on your Avid workstation through the software. All though once you do that, there literally is a button that say “replace all stock footage” so no more match framing re-imports of bought clips. You can also purchase audio packages as well as audio and video plug-ins from the interface.

5.1 and 7.1 Surround Sound

The next great new feature is 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound audio capabilities. They work just like the new stereo tracks feature Avid released in 5.0, just now you can pick either 5.1 or 7.1 if you are given a surround track from say a Pro Tools mix session. You will still need a 5.1 or 7.1 speaker and hardware setup in order to hear it, but the Avid will be able to edit those right into the timeline. If you don’t have a surround setup the Avid will “automagically” play it out in stereo. (“Automagically” may be my new catch phrase. Thanks 3rd presenter who said it, hopefully someone will read this who was there and can tell me your name.) And it isn’t just import, you can actually make 5.1 or 7.1 surround mixes in your Avid edit session. My initial thought on this is why…anytime you were doing a surround mix it would go to a post audio designer 99% of the time, right? But, all the tools and pans and fun surround sound stuff gets transferred in an AAF file to Pro Tools, so I can see the validity in being able to do some of that while in the editing process.

That is it for now, the meeting ran late and I wanted to get all this down before I forgot. I am sure I forgot something and I am sure there are plenty of misspellings and grammar errors but it is late, I’ll get to them tomorrow. Here are some pictures from the Avid headquarters, they got some great hardware there, and yes, I am talking about the Academy Awards and Emmys…(you didn’t think I would write all this and not get one little FCP dig at the end, did you 🙂 )

Academy Awards

Emmys

Editing Tip of the Week – Keep it Simple

January 15, 2012 · by bcleggtv

Earlier this week I asked my Twitter editing friends what they would like to hear about next on barryclegg.com, and I got some good suggestions. They ranged from how to make more money without heavy lifting, H.264 codecs, secret Avid tricks all the way to things never to say to editor (with my favorite being “I don’t like the music” or “it needs to ‘feel’ more.”)

The subject of this post actually came to me last night around the 2nd quarter of the Patriots vs. Broncos divisional playoff game. I think the score at this point was 78-0, but I may be overestimating on that score memory. It came in the form of a Twitter response from Steve Audette, former Frontline editor at WGBH in Boston who now works on Nova. We were discussing titles in Avid Media Composer and Symphony and how they can sometimes get corrupt. I asked Steve if he used the regular Avid Title Tool or if he used Marquee. He informed me that he used the Avid Title Tool along with this statement, “Keep it Simple.” Side note, Avid Marquee has not been developed since 2001 and is, in my opinion, a software that needs a massive overhaul or a quick burial.

If you ever get the chance to see Steve talk at either a Rule pub night or Boston Avid User Group meeting please do so, he always gives a great presentation on all things editing, but specifically about the philosophies of editing. One specific concept that both Steve and I share is that editing is telling stories, and you should never let anything get in the way of telling a good one. While I can’t speak on his exact behalf, I think maybe what Steve was saying was why get bogged down making titles that, most likely, don’t add anything to your story. Couple years back I was working with a junior editor who spent the better half of a day making a lower third REALLY spiffy and visually interesting. While I applauded their efforts (the lower third was quite visually appealing) it didn’t add anything to the overall story and it was a half day lost to fine tuning and shaping the story at hand. For me, unless there is some specific brand look, feel and/or font, I go with white Arial fonts for lower thirds, usually with a drop shadow for better reading on screen. My philosophy is that if there is time and the story is in a good place, we can always go back and manipulate lower thirds.

During any edit, specifically ones that involve heavy compositing, I always find myself asking “is this going to be easy to change if I need to” or “will it take me more time to explain it to someone else than just do it myself?” When I find myself in situations where the answers are “no and yes” respectively, I then try and simplify it. There are still many times where it just is not possible to simplify or make more efficient, but I think there is always a time to TRY and do it.

Sometimes it is a scenario of being able to manage your efforts with the time you have. On days I find multiple deliverables due at the end of the day I try and ask to get a synopsis of everything that I need to do so I can spend x amount of time of video 1, x amount of time on video 2, etc. It can be real frustrating to reach the end of your edit session and then hear “oh, we got this one more thing we have to do” and think “man, I could have managed this time much better if I had just known this needed to be done.”

I want to take this moment to also thank those who helped in making suggestions, and hopefully I will get more from all of you out there.

Steve Audette, WBGH Nova Avid Editor. You can follow him on Twitter @stevecutsdoc

Steve Andrada, DP in the Boston area I got to work with a couple years ago. He is also an Avid Editor and all-around great guy. You can follow him on Twitter @steveandrada and visit his website www.andradaproductions.com

Joanna June, Final Cut Pro editor who I just finished a 3 week event project with. Joanna is the hardest working woman in post. You can follow her on Twitter @coffeebooksbeer and read her website www.coffeebooksandbeer.com

Benjamin Eckstein is a Boston based DP who also edits on Final Cut Pro, but I think his heart is behind the viewfinder. You can follow him on Twitter @benjeckstein or visit his website www.benjamineckstein.com

So the question is, how do you keep things simple?

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