I’m back on board with Final Cut Pro in hopes of finishing up Sam’s wedding footage and passing it off to her at Christmas. We’ll see if that actually happens or not. The past year has not been kind to getting it off the plate with buying a house, selling a house, moving to a new house.
Not so secretly is the fact that the footage is taking up a honking large portion of my hard drive and it’s due time to get it outta here!!!
Last night I tried to figure out where I left off…I’m not too badly off. I have the entire wedding ceremony cut and the audio worked out. I don’t think there are many (if any) opportunities to add transitions, titles etc. during the actual ceremony…do I really need to label “Exchange of the Rings” before it happens? Doubtful.
That kind of thing will happen during the reception. The reception footage is cut between Camera A and B and now I have to go back and choose the best audio from each. This is not entirely hard as Vero’s camera must have had a better speaker as it seems to be the better quality pull of audio. The one tricky thing to look at is when we are getting close to the PA system as the sound distorts. I haven’t run into an instance where BOTH audio tracks are borked, but you never know what I’ll run into with 3 hours of footage to sift through.
My ideal product will be two-fold. 1: A compilation of ALL footage from the reception (all three hours) with Camera A and B footage cut in. I will then adjust the audio so that when people are watching this beast of three hours, they will not have to adjust their speakers all the time.
2: An edit which would trim the reception down to 1/1.5 hours along with titles, fades, funny things. This will be the grueling part, but also the more fun part. I’m also thinking of cutting a lot of Bruce’s band playing but have it as a separate feature on the DVD…almost like a bonus ‘bootleg footage of the band playing’ in case someone wants to simply watch those items. I’m sure if I was well versed in DVD authoring, I could figure out a way to simply have the entire 3 hours on the DVD but then have different playbacks which would be something like “Watch Full Thing” “Watch Edit” “Watch Only The Band Footage” etc. But alas, I don’t even want to get into that monstrosity (actually, now that I think of it, it may not be overly hard as long as I properly label chapters) at this point.
It was good to get back into it last night. It’s interesting…when I first filmed the thing I was very against cutting anything out. But Vero kept telling me I would make a horrible editor…now that I’ve been away from the footage for awhile I have this itch to cut out a lot of stuff (people meandering around, band playing) and leave the highlights. Besides, we’ll always have the full three hour cut with nothing cut out that people can watch if they so choose.
iplaying: The Few – The Gracious Few