The first was with the actual clips themselves. The way that Sony cameras work, which I forgot about until I was about to start editing, is by having a specific folder structure with data outside the main footage files that contain important information. Without these folder structures and files with data on them it makes it impossible to log and transfer on FinalCut or any other program. Throughout the whole production of Puppet Playtime the video files only were copied.
The next problem comes with the video files themselves, MTS files are very temperamental. They need to be converted if they are to be edited. Normally a log and transfer would accomplish this, but since that could not work, another method needed to be done. There are components out there that allow you to edit MTS files directly, but that bogs down your computer and makes editing take at least thirty times longer to edit and the more complex the edit, the more difficult it will be as the editing program will get bogged down. So I needed to convert all the footage through After Effects into edit friendly proxy files. This process took about thirty minutes to set up, I started converting and a short 42 hours later I was able to start editing.
The next problem came with the organization. All of the video and the audio from the first four shoot days were organized with regards to the days they were shot on. The video for the next four shoots were able to be organized as well since it has the date it was created in the metadata. The audio on the other hand did not. They were in two different folders and since the date was not set on the audio device, it was difficult to figure out which audio went to which day.
Third problem, scene numbers. Not only were a lot of scenes not slated with the scene number in it, but the most updated version of the script I had was lacking scene numbers. This in combination of changing scenes on the fly at shoots I was unable to attend made it tricky to piece the whole thing together. Was it really difficult? No, but it did not make editing simple.
Forth problem, slatting, or not slating. Almost none of the scenes were slated with an actual slate, just the first three I believe. It's really good the first and third scene were actually slated because there was no camera audio. Had there been no slate it would have been damn near impossible to sync the audio to video. On other days they just slated by snapping their fingers, which is fine since I prefer syncing audio to audio, but it was only on camera a few times. With regards to being able to use the high quality audio, or any at all we were really close to experiencing the full effect of Murphy's Law. Another thing that was annoying is when they were slating the slate would be out of focus and sometimes they did not actually wait for the camera to start recording before slating.
One specific problem that occurred was the green screen scenes that had Canon in them had audio from where the background footage was taken. Since those files came to us right before the deadline, there was nothing we could do to save them, so for this version we had to leave them out of the video.
Cinematography, was another issue for me. There were times where shots were rendered useless just because of the shot choice. One that comes to mind is in the dressing room and the mirror reflected the microphone pretty much the whole time. That ruined that side and made the other angle less appealing to cut back from. Other times one angle of dialogue was completely ignored and there were only two different angles of dialogue, a straight on wide/two shot and then a medium closeup on one of them. Another thing that was a hugh peeve to me and made it difficult to choose the best take was anytime the camera panned or tilted because it was jerky. On the first day of shooting I addressed my concern to the DP about panning with the tripod locked and how not only will it look like crap, but it will damage the locks on the tripod. Knowing that this tripod is similar to mine and that it has a fluid drag system that allows for smooth shots and can almost even lock the tripod just by increasing the friction, I spoke up. This clearly was disregarded in future shoots.
I cannot remember if I brought this up in a previous entry or not, but the time was not too kind to the editors either. Since there was such a late start to production this means less time for editing at the end, which is where "save jobs" flourish. Save jobs are when the technical skill in production is lacking and it can still come out looking pretty good, as I'm sure you know. Since we are all full time students, and I specifically had another editing class, it made finding time to edit hard. This was the last project I had for the semester of all of my classes as far as deadlines are concerned, so it had to be saved for last. This added even more stress to the already stressful job of a quick turn around.
That being said I think this project turned out pretty well, and will be better once we fix the interview problems. The writer scene is really funny and I'm glad the final product was pretty funny. I would say I deserve an A-/A for a few reasons. The biggest one is that I am probably one of two/maybe three people that would have been able to get the project edited since there were so many hoops to jump through. When I was on set, especially for the writing room scene, I tried to make sure things would be well for editing down the line, but things still slipped through the cracks. I took turns at different parts of production from casting, to storyboards, to production design, to directing, audio, and a lot of editing. I had my hands in a lot of parts of production and the only part I didn't really do was writing the script and planning the shoot dates.
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