Video Editing Workflow for Filmmakers

In this chapter, let's take the opportunity to address what I believe is the most important factor in ensuring that you are able to be as creative as possible during the post-production phase of your film: maintaining a clean and well organized folder structure.

The most daunting task that I experience as an editor isn’t actually editing the film, it is the task of managing the massive amounts of footage that I have to ingest BEFORE I even start editing.  

Note:  This course strongly encourages you to use your own footage from a film that you are currently working on because this will be the most effective way to reinforce the workflow in your mind.  However, if you would prefer to use someone else's material to practice with, this chapter has a link to some open source raw footage. 

So, the next step after you organize all of your footage is to do what I call "Trim the fat".  

After you’ve omitted everything that you 100 percent know has no place being in the movie and you are left with usable footage, the next step is to go through what you have and find the best takes, moments, insert, cutaways and performances.

In an earlier chapter, I attempted to make the case for abandoning the old school method of opening each clip one at a time, setting in and out points, etc.    I called it the pig trough method.  Now I am going to demonstrate to you why I think it comes in handy.

So, in the last chapter I was talking about the benefits of making your rough assembly be good enough to show people regardless of the fact that it is just a rough cut.  The best way to ensure this is to do a temporary sound mix really quickly as you make your rough assembly edit.  

Now it’s time to prepare your project for the fun part:  Creating an assembly edit of the entire film.  

Depending on your film and your personal perspective,  this might be one of the most important elements of the post production process of your film.  If you get this right, you will be able to make a film that you are proud of.  

So, you’ve put all of your scenes in the right order, you’ve gone over the entire film with a fine-toothed comb, you’ve refined the edit over and over again, you’ve made compromises based on the needs of the client, the studio, the producer.   You’ve even ordered a re-shoot of certain scenes and re-inserted them into the film at the exact point that they are needed. The film is as good as you feel it is ever going to get.  So now you’ve locked picture and it’s time to get ready for the sound design.

Now let’s start adding to the realism of the scene by adding SFX and foley.

Whereas I believe that sound fx and foley can be used to add both realism AND emotion to a scene, I think that most of you will agree that even though in certain cases music can add realism to some scenes, generally speaking music is added to the sound design primarily to cue the viewer on how you would like them to feel.  Music generally conveys emotion.

So now your film is completed and you  want to get it out to the world.  Before you even start shooting you should decide which format you would like the film to be exported as.