Editing When It's Your Second or Third Job

Filmmaking may be your passion.  It may be the most important thing in your life aside from eating and breathing, but if you're getting tips from me, there's a good chance that it's not the thing paying all, or even most, of your bills.  That eating thing you need to do requires  you to have another job, so filmmaking sometimes takes a back seat to (gasp) RESPONSIBILITY.

Well, I'm currently editing a movie that it's taking me a year to finish up the shooting on. Read some other of my blogs and you'll see the myriad of excuses, causes, reasons and whatnot that has gotten me to this point.  But all of this has taught some things about organizing my time, now that it's mostly under my control again, and I'm going to pass these little tricks on to  you.

Know what requires the computer's time, but not yours.

In digital editing there are tasks that require very little of  your time, but a fair amount of the computer's time.  For example, transferring footage from CF or SD cards to  your computer's hard drives. The larger the cards you shoot with, the longer it will take to transfer your footage and back it up to a second source.  This time can be spent doing other things, but  you will want to keep a semi-clear head so that you know you've moved and backed up every shot you may ever want before you format that card.  I miss tapes in this regard because the transferring of footage from a digital tape to a hard drive was an opportunity to trim footage and not capture all of the "garbage".  Sometimes you wouldn't even bother transferring takes that had no value in the movie and no comedic value for outtakes, plus you got to name them during the process.  Also, the tape itself acted as the "back up" unless you planned to erase it to shoot on it again, which I never did.

So, what was the downside?  You couldn't always leave the computer alone while the footage moved over.  Batch captures were a thing, but they didn't always work very well and you lost other benefits, such as unique names for each clip.

I transferred the footage for Jack vs Lanterns long ago, but currently I'm importing files to a project and it's going to need to "conform the audio".   That takes awhile, so I'm writing this blog.

Renders are another good time to step away and get something else done, although shorter scenes may only leave you room to go to the restroom.

Always back up your work, but maybe do it efficiently.
Okay, a hard drive crash can ruin any editors day.  RAID systems help and backing up all of your settings, your computer, etc, etc.  Some of these things take a lot of time and others take a good amount of money.  Two things not every indie movie maker has.  For cloud editors this may seem moot, but I would suggest backing up your cloud based work to a hard drive in your possession, when possible, because any single location can become a problem.

Here's an old trick that won't allow you to salvage every project, but will at least make your day suck less should a drive crash.  At the end of your scene edit or  your day of editing, export all of your final cuts to a different hard drive.  So, here's how this works.  You just edited scenes 23, 27 and 29.  You export them to drop into the larger movie project timeline.  Instead of exporting them to the same drive you're working on, you export them to a different hard drive.  Preferably external.

Now, if the drive you're editing on crashes, you do lose the projects for 23, 27, and 29, but the final cuts  you had are still there, sitting on another drive.  And vice verse.  If you lose the exports,  you can always export them again because the edited projects are safe on a separate hard drive.

Take advantage of the digital copy of your script.

I don't care what software you used to write  your script, it will come in handy during editing.  I used to edit either from memory (for shorts) or from a paper script.  This edit, I'm mostly using my digital copy of a revised version of the shooting script.  For one thing, I have no  desk real estate to give to a binder with 98 pages in it.  I'll still refer to my notes now and then, but I don't have the script next to me all the time.

For another, all this time later and how we shot a bit rushed, it can sometimes be tough to figure out on the face of it which scene the footage I'm about to edit is from.  Sure, I may have shouted out the number and it should be on my slate, but cuts, recuts, rewrites, etc, moves pages and scene number around.  If I can't find a scene by number, with the digital script, nearly any keyword will allow me to find it in a minute or two. (Usually less.)  It also makes it quicker to skip around to all of the scenes shot in one location or on one set. "INT. LAB" was my search term for 3 days of editing.

Use multiple smaller projects.

It can take awhile to load a project with a lot of clips, audio, special F/X layers, etc.  Breaking your movie down into smaller projects makes each one easier to load and easier to manage.

Some will make sense to compile into one project.  For example, all of those Lab scenes were a single project.  It let me import the backgrounds to be keyed in once and I could also reference the lighting and chroma key settings from previous timelines for the next scene very easily.  

Plan breaks.

One of the biggest problems with time managing your passion is knowing when to stop.  Your other job, your spouse, your kids or pets will all need  you to have some energy left for them.  Plan interruptions that will make you stop every few hours, especially if you're tackling a very big edit.

Whether it be dinner, walking the dog, or just some down time before bed, decide before  you start editing about when you'll stop and why.  Set an alarm if you have to in order remind yourself.  Also, being your own boss on this project, know that you can ignore that alarm if you're really in a groove, but try not to abuse that privilege.

Happy editing!