How to do a rough cut

Work is going well on cutting down the interviews for my interstellar travel documentary. There’s a lot of good material in my 7 tapes of interviews, but cutting them down is quite a job.

Basically what I’ve done (using Premiere Pro) is to take each interview and create a sequence (timeline) for it. I’ve then roughly cut out anything I think might be worth using and placed clips on different video tracks depending on how keen I am on using whatever’s said. That way I can see at a glance what’s good bad or indifferent on the timeline.

After that – and it takes a couple of hours for each interview – I create another set of sequences. These correspond to the different themes I’m covering in the documentary I simply re-examine the good clips from each interview and copy and paste them into the themed sequences arranging them in a rough order as I do it.

This leaves me with about 10 minutes of footage in total on each of the themes of the programme. I can then sort out who says what best and start deleting clips from the themed sequences – safe in the knowledge that if I need them, they’re all still there in the interview sequences and I can just paste them back in.

By now, the programme is beginning to take shape. I can start thinking about what narration I’ll need, what cut-aways and how I can tell the story using stock footage, other sequences and animation – but that’s a job for another day.

This way, within a few days I’ve gone from 8 hours of footage to a reasonably shaped programme where I can begin to shape and mould the project with more clarity and confidence.

Hottness of irons
I find you need a mixture of distance and familiarity with your material to get a good edit. I need to be familiar enough to know which bits of each interview I might need – so I cut the interviews down and copy the best bits across in the same day. But I need to be distant enough to see each themed segment as a story – so I leave organizing the segments for a couple of days so I can go back to them with a fresh eye.

Premiere Problems
Having captured all my work with Premiere I’ve run into a problem. The package seems to loose sync on most of my interviews. Suddenly the picture will jump and the sound will stutter and everything after that will need to be re-synced (it’ll be out by a couple of seconds). It’s a real pain.

I’ve also recently found that Premiere’s introducing lots of what looks like tape dropout – segments where the picture goes blocky and everything gets mashed up.

However, the tape is fine – it’s not dropout – it’s Premiere. When I re-capture the interview in another package (I’ve used Avid Liquid) – it’s fine. I can then import the footage back into Premier for the edit. Far from ideal, but it’s a work-around.