Ten days into the new year and I haven’t posted yet, I do apologise.
I’ve been deep into editing Greetings and now I’m starting to make reasonable progress. I’ve just about finished the first ‘scene’ which is actually by far the longest – nearly nine pages of script. I say ‘scene’ it’s actually an extended montage of scenes setting the up the location and character relationships.
I’ve tried to do as good a job as possible on it (short of grading it), replacing virtually every piece of dialogue with the audio recorded on the DAT player. I still don’t quite understand why it’s so bad on the camera – I thought there would be the occasional buzz on the track from where the camera was positioned too close to a light, but nearly every track seems to have additional reverb or distortion that isn’t there on the DAT. Most odd.
I’ve also managed to find an extra sixty seconds of footage compared to the previous cut which makes for a much less frenetic viewing experience which should please Ken.
It’s interesting trying to get into the story, especially into the mind of Ken, to understand what he wrote and how he directed the actors. I struggled with a few shots until I realised that actions that seemed to show people, especially the female lead, acting out of character were in fact perfectly setting up the conflict for later on. I guess it’s all part of the process of getting the story under my skin.
I’m really liking Final Cut Pro as well, and now I’m finding all the neat shortcuts, my productivity is increasing exponentially (though I still think the edit will take until the end of February at the earliest).
I don’t think FCP is better than Avid yet, but I don’t think it’s any worse. They are quite different beasts. I think I’ll appreciate FCP more once I get further through the workflow and I need to shoot off over to Soundtrack Pro and Shake.
I’ll cobble my thoughts together and do a comparison of the two in a future post…