#471 – Things I've learned lately.

Things you don't want to miss in this issue:

• Lessons from cutting a feature documentary
• Solving annoying Adobe Premiere Pro problems
• A 15-year-old video, enhanced to 1080p.
• A useful notes app for editors

Lessons I should have learned faster

I've been working on a feature doc over the past couple of months. It's actually been great, the Director and Producer are a j o y to work with – and I really mean that.

But there are a few simple things I wish I'd figured out sooner that would have helped us hit our ambition deadline in better shape.

Even though I wrote about all this, I didn't put it into action as effectively as I should have. Heck, Jan even told me what to do here!

Practice > Theory.

#1 – On a bigger project, schedules matter more, not less

Most of the time, I'm working on smaller projects with faster turnarounds. In these scenarios, it's much easier to calibrate between where you are and where you need to be.

If you only have three days to deliver something and you've not hit a first cut by the end of day 1 or the morning of day 2, you know you're behind.

On a bigger project, even though you might have more time (and therefore assume more flexibility), having a post-schedule mapped across the weeks you have to work in becomes crucial.

Otherwise, it's too easy to get lost in the woods for the trees.

I'm late to the party here, I know, but I should have:

• Emblazoned the (once far away) end deadline on my mind.
• Work backwards to establish milestones.
• Set daily/weekly mini-deadlines to track progress.
• Kept everyone on the same page vis-à-vis ambition vs reality.

#2 – Measure twice, cut once.

“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?”

— Jesus, Luke 14:28

It turned out there was around 63 hours of footage in the project, as they were still shooting while I was cutting.

With a targeted runtime of 90 minutes, that translates to a shooting ratio of 42:1 or just shy of 2.4% used/unused material.

If I had done this math earlier in the process, that might have helped us temper our expectations of the planned 7-week edit.

Or at least establish more realistic milestones.

#3 – “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”

So much footage, so little time.

It would have been nice to have had time to watch everything before diving into the real cutting. But alas, life is not perfect.

I had built a structured timeline trying to get ‘the right people, saying the right things, in the right order,’ but when it came to fleshing out that skeleton by putting meat on the bones, I was behind the curve.

This meant I had to stop and go back to pull selects from many hours of B-roll, which felt like it was slowing us down just when we needed to go faster, but there is no other way to do it.

Also, I think I had (yet more) unrealistic expectations about how many finished minutes of the documentary I could complete each day, given that some scenes were being built from scratch, whilst others just needed some artful illustration and tightening.

This also made it easy to over-promise and under-deliver. Yeesh.

Anyway, opening up my mind and spilling my guts on paper there. Mostly everything went fine. I'll let you know when there's something to see.

As aforementioned, the producer and director have been very gracious.

For which I am grateful!