how to edit AVCHD

how to edit AVCHD
It’s not easy to edit footage from the new breed of memory card camcorders – even those editing packages which can edit AVCHD do so very badly. Playback is slow and jerky and editing is a nightmare. It’s like stepping back 10 years to the old PCs that could barely handle DV.

There’s a set of solutions, but they all really involve re-compressing your footage in a friendlier format. The best I’ve found is neo scene.

It costs $130 but works fine. It also increases the colour range of your images (which has no effect until you start applying colour correction, when you’ll discover you can alter the image over a wider range without loosing detail).

The downside is disk space. My 70gb of footage (a lot to start with) now takes up 360gb, so I’ve had to buy a new hard drive just to edit it. No big deal, but worth remembering. It took 2 days to process all the footage, turning it from unfriendly avchd files to more playable avis.


Cutting
With that done, I load my footage into Premiere, and get going. It’s not bad. My 8gb quad core PC can play back the 1920x1080 footage pretty smoothly (although scrubbing is a bit crap, which is a problem). It also takes about 4 minutes to load up due to the 8 hours of footage I’ve loaded in.

A new kind of editing
Up to now, my documentaries have been talking heads based with a bit of computer animation and stock footage thrown in. I’ve been able to research the subjects in advance and I’ve got an idea in my head before I started to edit how the story would be told.

I’ve also been cutting around the interviews, so bringing out the important moments of them has been the first stage in my edit.


This new doc is something different. This time I’ve been following people round and basically filming what they do. The story is something I’ve got a vague idea about, but it’s all going to come together now.

What’s more, there are two distinct parts to the doc – the first being the fossil show we attended and the second being the dig we went onto afterwards. In some ways they’re different films, but I think I see a way of bringing them together… at least I hope I do.

First steps
Ok, so I’ve got 8 hours of footage – a few scraps of interview, lots of shots of people walking around and looking at things and hitting things with hammers.

How do I start?

Well, I could just plough in and start picking out bits of the footage I like. But that would mean I was completely lead by the footage I’d got – I don’t think that’s entirely right because there’s always underlying stories that need to be pulled out and aren’t immediately obvious from the footage.

For example, I know that two of my main characters got very excited on the last day at the show because they heard a rumour that some illegal Brazillian fossils were being offered. They went off to look for them, but found nothing.

So “in the can” I’ve got lots of shots of people pointing, and walking about, followed by them getting in a car and driving off. There’s a story there, but without some work it’s not told naturally by the footage.

On the other hand, I can’t write the story and then cut the clips around it because that would be ignoring the truth of what really happened.

What I’ve decided to do is make a list of the main strands of the story as I noted them when I was filming, and create a Premiere timeline for each one. I then make another timeline for each day of filming and dump all the footage from that day into it.

I work through each day of footage, and cut and paste any shots that are relevant to each story strand into that strand’s timeline (some clips appear in several strands).

From there, things are a bit more manageable. Each strand now contains between 5 and 30 minutes of footage, and I can work with it in chunks, cutting it down to shots I can use and arranging rough sequences. Each strand is organised into scenes so I can cut between the different stories thoughout the documentary.

Where the interviews and snatched dialogue don’t tell the story, I’m adding title screens with notes to myself about possible voiceover scripting. None of these will feature in the finished programme, but they’ll mean when I come to write the script I’ll know what I’m doing.

That’s the theory.

I’ve got some way into it now, and have the fossil show segment pretty well covered. I’ve still got to tackle the dig itself, and I have a feeling that will be a big harder. There’s only really three strands of story to this I think so the chunks will be bigger and harder to manage…. But we’ll see.


Mailout
The mailout has been done – 2000 museums contacted about my animation work. More specifically, given them a link to my article on commissioning video documentaries (specifically 3d animated ones) for museum displays.

I was a bit nervous. Even though I’m aiming to provide them with something they can use, there’s always a worry that if you approach someone without asking first, they might feel you’re spamming them.

Out of the two thousand emails, I got probably 200 returned as invalid addresses for one reason or another (that’s to be expected). I also got a few people emailing saying they were the wrong person to talk to, but that they’d passed my details onto the right person.

In addition, I got several positive responses from people saying thanks for the pointer to the article, and that they’d keep it in mind for when they were next building a display that might need animation.

Number of complaints: zero.
Number of actual jobs given to me as a result: zero.

I’m actually quite positive about this. All in all, the mailout cost me about £80 (for the list of names) and I think there may be a few people considering using my work who will get back to me later. I’m not sure I’ll get anything, but it’s pretty positive.

Next mailout
So I’m planning to do more mailouts. This one was quite “soft”. In other words, I wasn’t saying “buy this” I was saying “here’s some information about how 3d animation works in your industry – if you can use it, great – and you can always get in touch if you like.”

The next mailout will be a little more defined. I’m going to approach aquariums with an idea for a video display featuring extinct or deep sea fish. In this one, I’m going to talk very specifically about prices and ideas – giving people an offer they can choose to go for instantly if they want to.

And the next one…
I’m then going to talk to corporate video producers giving them a very specific low cost post production offer – i.e. that if they send me a video, I’ll apply a set of effects to give it a set choice of classy “looks” at a set cost per minute. Something they can easily get their heads around and use without feeling they’re making a big investment…

I’m very new to all this promotional stuff, so I’m just trying out ideas right now.

We’ll see what the results are.


Responses
Responses to my google advertising continues to be mixed. I’m getting 10-20 contact emails a week, but very few actual serious offers of work. Most of those I am getting are quite local too – which is odd. There’s no more reason for someone who works nearby to use my work than someone in (say) mexico, but for some reason, people are more likely to contact me if they live nearby.

I’m not desperate for work – I still have this trilobite documentary which will keep me busy for a while, and if I pursue it, there are magazine articles waiting to be written. However, it’s a little worrying that putting as much effort (and cash) as I am into advertising doesn’t seem to be paying off right now.

Be a shark

Still, I am in a bussinessy mood right now, so I’m coming up with lots of strategies to get my work in front of people. Although I still don’t like the whole “meet and greet” thing – I’m not considering going out in person with a portfolio right now. It just feels like a waste of time… and not one I feel comfortable with…

I am getting mailing lists done. I’m advertising in trade journals (like the Knowledge – the UK’s most important contacts book for TV). I’m also getting links from other sites to my website. I’ve got several one-a-month emails in mind to send out to people in different industries who might use my work…. So maybe this will help me buck the ressession.

I feel I’m in a good position to make things work despite the economic climate because as I’m one person with a wide range of arty skills, I can be as flexible as I need to in order to take advantage of whatever comes my way.

One thing I really got from making my film about the evoloution of sharks was that in times of crisis (i.e. the extinction of the dinosaurs) the specialists died out very quickly (or risked doing so) because as the environment changed, they found themselves without a niche they could exploit.

The generalists – those with a wide range of abilities and those who could change instantly from one source of nourishment to another (i.e. the sharks) actually did rather well – because without the competition, they were able to adjust to the new environment and exploit whatever new niches appeared.

Anyway, I’m taking publicity a lot more seriously now, and casting my net wide for different types of work.

Documentary publicity
I’m also considering hiring someone to send my documentaries off to festivals. I haven’t got time to do it myself, and I’ve so far avoided doing this. However, it might be worthwhile now getting onto the whole documentary making bandwagon…

Hmm… one to ponder.