This looks like a whole new level of editing compared to the dinky two minute movies we used to make :)

11:54 AM, December 18, 2007

Very cool. Will need a lot of this as I embark on my own documentary project on surviving childhood sexual abuse.

6:47 AM, December 19, 2007

@Nick: Dinky? :) Our videos rocked.

@Jan: Thanks :) Oh wow, that's a serious subject - I can see that being a very emotional project.

11:12 AM, December 19, 2007

That's really cool. I hadn't heard of Punakea (I bet it's pronounced "poo-nah-KEE-ah").

For a really big documentary project I did in 2000 I had a bunch of oral history interviews - we're talking hours of footage for each person - plus gigs and gigs worth of 16mm transfers from 1970s news reels. Plus historical photos and scans of objects from people's personal collections.

I needed ways to keep track of not only what tape something was on, but also (in the case of historical footage) the original date it was shot, the date on the can, and other info from the can (examples: "Big News," "B-Reel," etc.). I also needed to know if the original footage had audio or not. And a good description of each clip. Sometimes I needed actual transcripts as well - so we would know whether we could let historical footage explain a concept, or whether we had to narrate it ourselves.

There was no program around like Punakea.

With the historical footage, I ended up creating a spreadsheet laid out exactly like Final Cut's clip info: clip name, media start, media end, reel ... and I used Final Cut's extra fields to add: Date on Can, Can Info, # (a cross-reference number to my initial log notes from viewing reels on a film chain) ... then I included: Audio, Description, and Transcript.

I used a spreadsheet program to set this up, because I had some assistance logging the tapes. The historians would watch my DV footage and enter the media start and end times of pieces they wanted to use in the documentary. They also filled in the description field with the names of who was speaking, if known, and provided some context. Then I (or a helper) would go through that segment and fill in the actual transcript of the dialog (but of course that could be added later).

Once all that was ready, I just exported the spreadsheet as a tab-delimited text file and imported it into Final Cut. I actually used it to capture only the footage I needed. It was awesome, because I could provide printouts of the spreadsheet to the historians for review, and I could also use it or Final Cut (Command+F) to locate exact lines of dialog or words in the description.

You could make your description field your tags and do this all within Final Cut. But I'm going to have to check out Punakea and see if it's easier or adds another layer of difficulty.

I appreciate seeing your workflow. A lot of people don't categorize and tag their footage, but it's so, so, so worth doing. It saves so much time in the edit.

I'll see if I can record some of my process on video - it would be easier to understand if I show you instead of trying to describe it in text. But it will take a few days for me to get to the right media drives and computer.

11:56 AM, December 19, 2007

@Humming Crow: Hey :) Thanks so much for the response - and for the help with the pronunciation.

That sounds like a pretty tightly run workflow :) I wish I had some more people helping me log and import this... it would speed up a process I'm sure is going to take me weeks.

See, I've never imported a text file into Final Cut like that, that sounds very helpful.

Yea, please do a video of this - it sounds like you've had a lot more experience with this stuff :)

Again, thanks for taking the time to explain your workflow :)

11:58 PM, December 19, 2007

Hi Mike!
this video series and this workflow video is very interesting. you could even build a wiki around editing big projects (on FCP).
I was reading the comments (humming crow), and thinking out loud, i thought of a crazy idea:

In your particular project you could also think about putting your raw clips in some small format and size for people to pick them up and describe them, you would create a big participated archive. could be interesting.
But I don't know if there enough people ready to participate that can justify this effort.

I am not offering any knowledge because i am starting to work with FCP and didn't made any big project at all, but i will be trying to learn and participate on this discussion.

Good luck for your project!

Rgds,
ZN
http://despauterio.net

9:49 AM, December 20, 2007

@Ze Nuno: Thanks :) I could definitely use a wiki on fine tuning the workflow for this kind of project...

Hmm... I really love the idea of participated archiving, but :) sadly, I think not many people would have the time or patience to do such a thing... but I'll think about it.

I'm excited that I'm actually helping someone else with FCP, that's gotta be a first for me :) But yes, please keep the discussion going, it's great.

3:11 PM, December 20, 2007

hey mike, thanks for sharing your workflow. i had headaches on my last project that only had 19 hours of footage, but it was 19 hours me both me, and a bunch of kids between 7-13 years old. i did a good job labeling the tapes during production, but logging and capturing was ridiculous. because of my ultra-limited hard drive space, i ended up manually logging all the tapes on paper, and capturing only what i thought would be a good fit for the final 10-12 minute piece. not at all efficient, and i came away knowing i needed to develop a better system.

i plan to film on-going documentary pieces when i move to new orleans in march, so i'm looking for a system that will work effectively whether it's 19 hours of footage or 200 hours, so i'll be following this closely.

on another note, i'll probably be picking your brain soonish about your production process.

5:55 PM, December 20, 2007

@Leslie: No problem :) yea, working with limited hard-drive space is a mess, everything gets second guessed and over-evaluated :P

I'm jealous - New Orleans is... I can't think of the right word I'm looking for. Steve & Zadi, from Epic-FU, took a trip there and just drove around with their camera out the window... it was very moving.

Yea, I'm hoping this process holds up with a huge number of files... it seems to be so far. It would be even more amazing if Punakea had 'CoverFlow' built right into it... maybe I'll write the developers.

As for picking my brain :) anytime! I can't say I have anything of use rattling around up there... but I'd be happy to *try* and help! :P

9:54 PM, December 20, 2007

ok, Well... That's basically revolutionary, AFAIC. Great find and application of that program, Punakea.

Since you were able to capture with automatic scene detection, the files ended up (as you said) separate on your drive. This is one of the reasons I never thought of doing something like this. I just started using HDV, and I'm *DEFINITELY* adding this to any future workflows. I wouldn't have used scene detection before, because I'd rather "set it and forget it" and capture the entire 60-minute tape. I mentally log footage by scrolling through it in fast-forward, so barring a workflow like you bring up here, I'd rather have one six files with a bunch of scenes in each than have like 120 different files, where I have to click on each one to figure out what's in it.

Granted, I do shorter form work, like hour-long, 30-minute or 5-minute videos that have maybe 16:1 shooting ratio (maybe 8 hour-long tapes for a 30-minute video), not including multicamera shoots, because the different angles are going to be grouped together anyway. Also, I get footage that's mainly in perhaps 5 locations, tops... not "wherever we happen to be in the country", so scanning 140 hours of tape and committing them to memory isn't optimum. :D

There are only two things I would add to your current workflow. One comes from broadcast television editing, and one comes from documentary producer Ultan Guilfoyle, whom I was lucky to work with on a project that required his style of organization.

The tip from televison is to add references to the dialogue in a clip. Your system's working very well, but I suspect that when you get to 140 tapes of who knows how many individual scenes, there are going to be a whole lot of clips that fit the exact same tags. This leaves you still having to go through each one of them to find what you want. I suggest that either in the tags or that other program you showed (my preference would be in the tags, but that would leave you with A LOT of random tags), you enter as a single tag the first four words of dialogue from anything you'd like to remember and come back to. For instance, if this paragraph was in the clip, and you wanted to reference it in the future, you would make a tag called "the tip from television".

This is useful for logging, because if you have a transcript of the dialogue on the tapes, you can use these specialized tags to quickly pinpoint footage instead of finding the "batch" of clips that MIGHT contain the dialogue you're looking for. It's also useful if you happen to remember something someone said, because the tags that come along with it will be clues to the surrounding footage and so will the actual file name, since they will have been captured in order by "scene detection".

The tip from Ultan, which really blew my mind in its simplicity is very similar to what you're doing with Punakea, going outside the program to increase your efficiency and productivity. What he did as we were working on a project was he kept scribbling on stickies and placing them on the wall in the order of our cut. Each stickie had reference words to the dialogue on them as well as the reference ID of the clip that I had in the timeline. I noticed you have a nice long wall right next to you that's perfectly clean and useful for this application.

I thought what he was doing was very funny (and useless)... until he started rearranging our edit in spit seconds by merely removing a stickie and switching it with another one so the flow of the dialogue changed. We were able to arrange the edit *on*the*wall* MUCH faster than I would have been able to rearrange the edit on the machine, play it down and undo it if we didn't like it. I was completely amazed at something so simple making us so incredibly efficient, and when we were done, all I had to do was match up the reference IDs of the clips to the order they were now arranged in on the wall.

As far as your FCP question, there's no functionality that comes close to tagging with Punakea. What you can do, (and I've added this to my list for upcoming editing screencasts) is use the columns to type each time, over and over, the words associated with any particular clip (bike, woods, river, goodbye...) and once you've done that for all of your clips, go to your drop-down menu and select [edit] and then [find] and type the word you're looking for in the box in the lower right-hand corner. After that, press [find all], and you'll get a 'bin' with a listing of the files that match that word.

The problem with that is that it only searches one column at a time, so in order to find something tagged in several different columns, such as "name" and "description", after typing in your search word, you need to click [more], then type in another word, then click [more] then type in a third word...... You see how this takes way more time than your tagging technique, but that's how you would do it in FCP... ASSUMING the scenes were broken up individually, and ASSUMING that you took the time to type the word "bike" into 2,900 individual scenes.

8:39 AM, January 22, 2008

Good post and thanks for the tip on Punakea.

The editor, Walter Murch, has been using an extensive work processes that includes some of what you do: color coding. It seems that Walter tags with colors -- he puts on colored index cards significant shots he sees, then putting them up on a board. He can then look at the board and get a visual sense of the shot flow from the color of the index cards. He also keeps a extensive spreadsheet categorizing the shots. He's talked about his process -- mostly in Q&A -- I don't know if it's documented anywhere, though.

11:16 AM, January 22, 2008

Bill: Love the suggestions - we've been thinking about the transcript problem, and at the moment, I just tag everything with "conversation" or "interview" for reference later. But I really like the first 4 words idea - and if I had a breakdown in script form for piecing things together, that would work quite well :)

Also, I love the sticky note idea, and I love sticky notes in general, so that's a double-plus. It seems a great way to rearrange, like you said, but also a quick visual of your progress. The bigger the mess of sticky notes becomes the closer I am to finishing the film :)

I'll be doing another vlog soon on my workflow and the tips people have suggested - this is going in for sure.

2:40 PM, January 23, 2008

@Enric: Yea, I like that too - the color coding helps for which camera was used, but if I took you and Bill's tips together, having one color sticky note for "interviews", and another for "landscape", et cetera - I could even more quickly see how things needed to come together :)

These are great people - thanks so much for being involved in this process.

2:43 PM, January 23, 2008

I agree with Enric. Here's a great Walter Murch article where you can see some of his setup.

8:43 AM, January 24, 2008

Awesome - thanks for the link, I'm gonna read this today - that guy has a pretty amazing looking set-up there :P

1:39 PM, January 26, 2008