scrapesky said:
i am a beginner FanEditor. i am trying to learn the tricks of the trade. i learn a little every day by asking you guys questions and reading tutorials. one day i will build one of my own. just want to get to know what i am doing first.
if i wanted to delete the scene, how would i go about that? i have FCP,FCE,Adobe CS4, may, many other programs. im just trying to clip scenes without a notice of a splice or cut. any suggestions?
If you have FCP and have successfully ripped your movie, deleting footage is easy and can be learned in a matter of minutes. Making it seamless, that's the art and requires a lot of trial and error.
I'll try and give you a quick spin-up, but I'd recommend googling tutorials on FCP, focus on the 'blade' or cutting tool, and how to insert a cross-fade and wipes. Those are you biggest friends, learn them and love them
I'll point out the process I use and some of the pitfalls on the artistic side assuming you learn how to use the blade and crossfades via google. In general terms there are two parts to your edit; Audio and visual. How you treat these two elements will determine how noticeable or seamless your edits will be. Ultimately practice, experimentation and patience will be your best teacher.
Before you start, I recommend unlinking the audio and visual if they are linked together. This makes editing a lot easier and opens up possibilities in achieving edits that can't be done by simply lifting entire scenes, but be careful in how you move elements around so that you don't get your audio out of synch (I also recommend increasing the number of 'undoes' that FPC will allow, I have mine set to 100). To link/unlink them click on them in the timeline, if they both light up they are linked. Hold the command key and then L. This will unlink them. To relink them, select both components (command and click both), then command + L again.
The Technical aspect of cutting a scene
Step 1) Move your play head to the beginning of the scene, then zoom your timeline (Command and + key) so that you can see individual frames and can see the play head jump to each one as you use the left and right arrow keys.
Step 2) Switch to the blade tool (shortcut is to press the B key once to get the single blade, twice to get the double blade) The double blade allows you to cut both audio and visual at the same point with one click, single blade is used to cut each track individually.
Step 3) Move the play head to the exact location of the beginning of the cut (if it's right at a camera change, you want the last visual frame of the previous scene at a minimum, but it's a good idea to go a few frames before that) and click your blade tool, you'll see the cut mark appear in the tracks in the timeline. Then move your playhead to the end of the sequence you want gone and repeat the process (again, go a few frames past that point to ensure eliminating all frames)
Step 4) Once you've done this, switch your tool back to arrow (Press the A key), and I also recommend zooming out (command and - key) your timeline view enough so that you can see the full segment to be deleted.
Step 5 Click on the components and delete them. With them completely gone, you can right-click in the space between and select close gap (note this will only work if you've deleted audio and video. If you've cut your audio independently and at a different point, the close gap will only line the furthest point of each section, you'll need to move them manually to line up).
This gets you basically a rough cut. Visually it will just move from one frame into the next, as long as you've selected the appropriate cut points, it right it will work fine (depending on what you're doing you may want to use a wipe or dissolve to transition between the two scenes. The type of scene you're working with will define which is appropriate).
The art here is picking the right frames to start and end the cut with so that the content makes sense (no continuity errors, and particularly important be sure that that you're not cutting a reaction shot and coming back to the same scene before, this will make the scene look like it jumps because the actors will have moved slightly, (there are advanced tricks to compensate for that)
But the visual edits tend to be the easier ones IMO, what makes/breaks an edit tends to be the audio. First and foremost, cross-fading is your friend, it blends x number of frames to avoid a jarring change of one scene to the next. With the arrow tool, move just over the new junction-point between the sound clips and right click (this can be tricky to line up just right), select crossfade (I use the 3, not the 0 for most). Once this is done, it's then a good idea to offeset it's location a few frames so it doesn't happen exactly at the same point of the edit, this helps blend the edit so we don't pick up on it. You can move the merge point forwards and backwards (again a google search will help with the technical aspect) but from an artistic standpoint, this makes or breaks your edit and only practice will teach you. Sometimes you want to push that edit 5 or 6 sometimes 10 frames ahead of the edit, sometimes you want to pull it way behind, depending on how your music/sound effects are blending.
In my personal experience, I found it best to break the audio into Center, Left, Right and Surround Left and Surround Right, (with center as a two-track component) 6 total tracks. This is a whole other ball of wax to accomplish but this allows far greater freedom in moving your sound around. Typically voice is on your center which allows you to blend it independently of music. This varies from movie to movie and scene to scene as voice sometimes crops up in the other channels. Again, experimentation is the key.
My personal trick is to use a crossfade to blend the L/R and SL/SR at the same point, and then actually leave a frame or two of silence on the center track, and apply cross fade to each end of the center audio so that the preceding clip is fading out and then the new clip fades in (this avoids sudden or jarring stops/starts, but can't always be done, for instance if you're cutting right at a dialog point) . I also fuss with the number of frames the crossfade lasts.
A final note on how FPC works. It is important to remember that when you're 'cutting' clips in the timeline, you're not actually cutting or altering the file. The timeline represents what will happen with the file when you export it. FPC doesn't actually do anything until you export, that's when it builds the single video and audio files based on the instructions or blueprints that you create via the timeline. This is important to know because once you splice the timeline, you can then treat each segment independent of each other, you can drag the end of the clip left or right to shorten or extend it. This is possible because the timeline is almost like a window, you're just making it bigger and smaller, revealing more or less of the clip. In theory, you could take the movie, split it in the middle, move the 2nd half up into the 2nd video track, and then expand it back to the beginning, or the lower one to the ending. I hope that makes sense, but if you can grasp that, it will make your editing a lot easier. Sound files of course work the same way.
That's an awful lot to throw at you, feel free to PM me for any clarifications
Hope this helps.
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