Introduction to Video Editing

3.2 What Is Video Editing?

Video editing creates the building blocks of a story by making cuts and putting shots together, trimming your shots to just the good stuff, and then putting it all in order. In this lesson, you will learn about cuts and how to evaluate your footage for emotion, story, rhythm, and more. Video editing can mean a lot of things, but it really boils down to taking multimedia assets, graphics, video, photos, music, audio, effects, and more, and making it into something better. You're crafting raw material into something far more interesting, something watchable, something fun, something that gets someone else to feel different. In the next several lessons, you're gonna be learning how to trim footage, how to put it together with other assets, how to tweak the audio and video to correct for mistakes and create the right look for your project. Before you start, I want you to get an understanding of the thought process behind making these cuts and putting these things together in a particular way. Walter Murch is an Oscar winning sound designer and film editor. And in his book, In the Blink of an Eye, a prospective on film editing, he talks about something called the rule of six. The rule of six is a list of priorities that you can use to guide your decision making process as you edit. The first and most important is emotion, putting together a good story that gets your audience to feel the way that you want them to feel is very powerful. A nice story, without that emotional connection falls flat, but a story with a strong emotional connection makes a big Impact. How you choose to edit to promote this is going to vary depending on the project. It could be choosing to stay with an actor's face to see their expression when someone else is talking. It could be the use of illustrative cut-away shots to reinforce a particular mood. It could be slowing down or speeding up footage. It could be bringing in the music at a particular point or leaving it out altogether. There is no formula for this, and sometimes it won't be obvious, but it's something that you want to consider as you edit. Anything that you can do to get the audience to feel what you want them to feel will help the overall effectiveness of your video. The second thing on the list is story. Ask yourself, does this edit help the story move forward? All stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. If a story is not moving forward, which direction is it moving? Now, I don't know the answer to this, but I do know that if the story isn't moving forward, the audience can feel confused or even bored. These are things you don't want your audience to feel, which is why Murch says that the top two things on this list are more important than the bottom four. Emotion and story are the most important. When you are cutting your video, you are making decisions. What do you keep? What do you get rid of? You're probably aware that DVD's and Blue Rays come with special features that often include deleted scenes. Sometimes they're funny gags, or they show something really cool, or they give more detail about a character. But do you know why they're deleted? Because they didn't move the story forward, and that's the point. The third thing on the list is rhythm. You wanna make sure that you are placing the edit at a point that makes sense rhythmically. Remember, as an editor, you are in control of the story. Now, imagine if you will, someone delivers a line, and then the edit just sits there for a beat or two. Why did that happen? Ultimately, it was because the editor made that choice. How long or short a shot is gives the video a particular rhythm. This is just like in music. In music, you have very short notes and very long notes and everything in between. It's the length of these notes that creates the rhythm of a song. And in video, it's the length of the shots that creates the rhythm. Murch says, you'll find that the top three things on this list are extremely, tightly connected. Those things are emotion, story, and rhythm. And in my experience, this is 100% true. For example, that little trick that I did a second ago where I hung on that shot of me talking for far too long. The pacing of that shot slowed down the story, and it made you feel confused. The decision about the length of that shot affected the story and the emotion at the same time. A lot of times, you're going to have a natural sense about the rhythm of a particular shot or sequence, because it's going to be affecting you, and you're going to be feeling that emotion, and you're going to be interpreting that story. So you're gonna have a natural sense based on your life experience and watching TV and films for many, many years. But you do wanna be thinking about how the emotion and how the story is affected by the rhythm of your shots. Next on the list is eye-trace. Eye-trace is the idea of managing where you want the audience to look, or where you want the focus to be in the frame. This will help you to drive how you cut to the next shot. For example, if I'm looking at an object down here, the audience's eyes are going to be drawn down to this quadrant. Now, if I go to a cutaway shot of that object in the next shot, it would make sense to have the placement of that object to be in this general quadrant. Otherwise, the eye will be darting all over the screen. This may lead to an awkward rhythm, which can effect the story and emotion. Now, sometimes you're gonna be working with footage that may not have been shot with this idea of eye-trace in mind, but you still have options. As an editor, you can choose to flip the video to get the object to the right side of the frame where you may be able to crop into the shot to get the focus at a more appropriate place in the frame. Number five on the list is two-dimensional plane of screen. The idea here is to help translate the 3D world onto a 2D screen. Unless you are trying to give your audience a sense of tension, you wanna keep the placement of objects or characters consistent from shot to shot. If you, for example, set up a scene where two people are talking, you maybe have a wide shot that establishes where each character is positioned, then you move to a close up where one of the characters are talking. It makes the most sense to keep that character on the same side as the previous shot so that the audience knows that this character didn't move in relation to the other person. In a lot of ways, this idea mimics how we react in real life. If I'm talking to you, for example, and you are on my left, you're going to be turning your head to the right to talk to me. Now, if I look away for a moment, and then I look back, I'm probably going to be shocked and confused if all of the sudden, you are on the other side of me, now with your head turned to the right, because that just doesn't make sense. It's not natural. Now, in addition to keeping things consistent in terms of their positioning on the screen, you wanna consider motion as well. For example, if you have a car that's driving out of your frame and it's driving out of the right side of your frame, it's gonna make the most sense visually for the car to re-enter the frame from the other side, from the left. If the car leaves the frame from the right and then it comes back in the right, it's going to look like it's going in the opposite direction. Now, maybe this is what you want. But if it's not, you should try to cut to maintain continuity in motion. The last thing on the list is three-dimensional space of action. The idea here is to keep continuity in the positioning in the 3D realm. This is somewhat similar to the 2D playing of screen, but it takes the third dimension, which is depth into consideration. What you wanna do is try and maintain the spatial relationships between objects of interest or characters in your frame. If you have, let's say, three people talking in a conversation, you wanna make sure that you are cutting to show that the spatial relationships between those characters is maintained. What you don't want to do is cut in such a way that makes it look like one of the characters, or two of the characters, are all of the sudden in a different location, because that's gonna be visually jarring for the viewer. Murch gives each item on the list a value as a reference for it's importance. He says that it's a little tongue in cheek, but not completely. The top two are worth more than the bottom four, and the top item on the list, which is emotion, is worth more than everything else. Use these ideas to guide your cuts and your decision making as you're editing your video, and you won't go wrong. In the next lesson, you are going to learn how to mark the in and the out point in your clips and add them to the timeline.