vid101 principles of video editing - · pdf fileprinciples of video editing syllabus...

VID101Principles of Video Editing

SYLLABUS

Prerequisites

Lab Section

Schedule

None

Lab (VID101L; 24 hours) is a mandatory component of this course.

Lecture ordinarily meets for three, eight-hour blocks.This course is offered year-round, normally many times per term.

Editing underpins the entire postproduction process, and Principles of Editing, a cornerstone of the GDVI video program, provides an intensive technical introduction to the tools and techniques of the modern editor. By the end of the course, students will develop outstanding technical skills through lecture, and begin to develop their editing eye through extensive lab and practical work.

Instructor

Current primary lecturers on this course are Jeff Fortune and John Lynn. Their instruction will be supplemented by relevant guest lecturers from within the industry as availability permits.

Assessment

Final grades will be determined as follows:

" •" [20%] Each lab unit will be graded on a completion basis." •" [60%] Each unit will conclude with a practical exercise, as detailed below." •" [20%] An integrative final exam will be due at the end of the last lecture section.

Grades will be assigned according to the standard GDVI scale:

" •" 90%+ " A" •" 80%-89% " B" •" 70%-79% " C" •" 60%-69% " D" •" <60% " Failing

VID101 Principles of Editing Fortune/Lynn

22 © GeniusDV Institute 2010

Exercises submitted late will be penalized at the rate of 10% per calendar day. While this course strongly encourages collaborative work, plagiarism is both counterproductive and contrary to the professional ethics embodied in GDVI’s institutional policies. Please feel free to work collabora-tively on labs and daily exercises, but practicals and the final should reflect your individual work.

Labs

Labs allow students to apply their lecture-based skills in a less-prescribed environment than lec-ture proper, with the support of their peers and the course’s lab assistant. During each lecture section, the lead instructor will set a battery of short exercises for lab. During lab time, students are expected to work independently and in small groups to complete those exercises.

The goal of lab is to stimulate collaborative learning and a degree of free thinking -- both of which will prove valuable in the student’s professional career. Although labs are graded on a comple-tion basis, lab assistants will have the latitude to award a “complete” grade to students who, hav-ing made a good-faith effort to complete the labs during lab time, cannot finish the battery of lab exercises.

Practical Exercises

After each unit of the curriculum, students are required to complete an independent project demonstrating their understanding of the skills and techniques from that unit. Each of these pro-jects should ordinarily reflect a minimum of three hours’ work, which will count toward the lab hours for this course. Students may complete these projects in or out of the lab, and they may feel free to call on the lab assistant’s advice. Practicals for this course are assessed subjectively at the discretion of the instructor, with equal weight assessed to the project’s aesthetic appeal, technical soundness, and appropriate application of the unit’s techniques.

Final Examination

Students will complete a written final examination at the end of lecture for this course, which will ordinarily fall before the student completes her labwork. The examination will review represen-tative topics from the entire course. If the examination reveals any weak areas in the student’s understanding, the lab assistant will gently emphasize the corresponding exercises during lab time.

Equipment

VID101 is rooted in hands-on pedagogy, so students will be expected to make extensive use of the course software during lecture and as they complete labs and practicals. The hardware of the standard GeniusDV Editing Platform will adequately support the needs of this course. Enrolled


© GeniusDV Institute 2010 23

students will also have access to the GDVI Labs and the Media Repository during fixed hours outside of lecture, allowing them to complete all coursework either onsite or offsite.

Software

Lab computers will be equipped with current versions of major professional video editing packages. Initially, this software will comprise Avid Media Composer and Apple Final Cut Pro. Students’ choice of GeniusDV Editing Platform will adequately equip them with at least one of these suites of software to complete exercise sets offsite.

Course Outline

Lecture № Summary Lab Assignments

Unit 1: Effective EditingUnit 1: Effective EditingUnit 1: Effective Editing

1Introduction

Fresh editors, self-trained editors, and linear-trained editors all bring with them different sets of preconceptions about the post-production process. In this lecture, we’ll clarify a bird’s-eye view of the modern process, and bring everyone up to speed on modern editing terminology. This course will serve as most students’ in-troduction to the GDVI curriculum -- so we’ll also take the oppor-tunity to review Institute policy and course logistics.

TBD

2Setting Up for Editing

Throughout the course, we’ll stress that efficient editing habits not only let you work faster, but free you to spend more of your time in the edit suite thinking creatively. An efficient workflow begins before you make your first cut, and even before you open your edit-ing software: in this lecture, we’ll configure factory-standard sys-tems to support the editing process, discuss useful hardware pe-ripheral options, and lay the groundwork to support optimal media management from ingest through to final output.




3

NLE Concepts

All nonlinear editing suites connect editors to their work through a common set of core metaphors. The most obvious of these meta-phors are visual: we’ll immediately tour the interface of our NLE. Less obvious, though, are the functional metaphors: what exactly are you assembling as you edit? What is the nature of the different kinds of “pieces” that you’re assembling? Where do they come from? How can you manipulate them? How do all of these meta-phors relate to one another? Put another way, we’ll take a formal look at what we’re learning to do, before we dive into how we plan to accomplish it.

4

The Three-Point Edit

Every project is composed of edits, and every edit -- linear or non-linear -- requires a minimum of three points to make sense. In the minimal case, two points indicate the duration of the edit, and one additional point synchronizes the media to be edited between source and destination. We’ll dwell at some length on the intrica-cies of the basic three-point edit, and introduce the edits which rely on the three-point technique in our NLE. We’ll outline a number of techniques to place your three points and get your sequence roughed together quickly.

5Additional Edits

Modern NLEs offer you several types of edit that “cheat” to save you time. Some make smart guesses to save you the trouble of set-ting some of your points, others let you set more points to accom-plish many things with one edit, and all of them are appropriate to specific, common tasks in the editing process.

Unit 2: NLE TechniquesUnit 2: NLE TechniquesUnit 2: NLE Techniques

6Working in the Timeline

Your main window into your sequence is your timeline. We’ll re-view the details of the timeline interface, discuss the many settings that affect your view of the timeline, and explore techniques to effi-ciently navigate and manipulate clips there. Finally, we’ll touch on situations and techniques where you’ll need to get your clips “out” of your timeline and back to your source control interface or “Viewer.”




7Transitions

Most of your edits in most of your projects will be straight cuts or dissolves, so we’ll start by discussing cuts and dissolves as pacing and mood techniques. We’ll then introduce the vast array of transi-tions that ship with your NLE, and highlight transitions appropri-ate to different styles. Then, we’ll set you free to get your inevitable transition fever out of your system: this is one of those techniques where less is more.

8Keyframing

All of the popular NLEs use a keyframing metaphor to accomplish animation. In modern packages, this animation capability tends to be stunningly broad: you can animate nearly anything that you can change from within the NLE itself, from clips’ positions to color corrections. We’ll introduce the concept of keyframing, use it in a few applied situations, then refine our animations using interpola-tion controls.

9

Filters

Filters systematically modify the image that they affect. Some are more utilitarian, like camera shake removers, keys, and color space transformations; others are more artistic, like automatic vignettes and distortions; even more, like color correction and exposure controls, have both practical and creative uses. We’ll introduce the nuts and bolts of applying filters to your work, then work through a number of individual filters as we mimic popular styles. We’ll learn to store commonly-used filters (and stacks of filters) as presets, both on the project level and globally. Finally, we’ll extend Lecture 7’s discussion of keyframing to animate features of our filters.

10

Ingesting

Up to this point, we’ve taken for granted that our footage is already “in the computer.” The process of actually getting the footage there is a bit of a minefield: with an ever-increasing number of HD codecs and recording formats on the production side, the most efficient pathway to an editing-friendly format is sometimes hard to find. We’ll talk about HD ingest through tape and tapeless means, we’ll motivate the value of intermediate codecs like Apple’s ProRes and Avid’s DNxHD, and we’ll weigh the merits of editing in your camera’s native codec. We’ll also spend some time on workflows to ingest legacy footage from DV, Betacam, VHS, and DVD. Finally, we’ll walk through a number of techniques to quickly tag, time, and organize your clips upon ingest. Time permitting, we’ll briefly overview proxy-based workflows that are popular for studios work-ing with film, 2K, 4K, and RED footage, although we recognize this will be primarily an academic exercise for most students.




Unit 3: Advanced TechniquesUnit 3: Advanced TechniquesUnit 3: Advanced Techniques

11

Compositing

Filters allow an editor a great deal of artistic control, but they tend to act on the whole image. Compositing techniques allow post professionals to selectively affect and combine parts of one or more images at the same time. While sophisticated compositing is more appropriate to motion graphics and compositing packages like Motion, Shake, After Effects, or Combustion, all modern NLEs offer a more-than-adequate array of compositing capabilities for quick, common needs like rudimentary green- or blue-screen shots, “picture-in-picture” composites, titling, and simple masks.

12Color Correction

As with compositing, dedicated color correction packages like Apple’s Color are more appropriate for heavy-duty, precise, high-volume color grading. Yet for basic tasks -- correcting a shot’s white balance, for example, or restoring a few particularly egre-gious shots -- your NLE’s coloring capabilities may be quite ade-quate. We’ll establish the tasks of the colorist, introduce the color grading layout of our NLE, and learn to read scopes. Then, we’ll cover techniques to solve common color problems.

13Audio

Once again, sophisticated audio manipulation is best suited to software like Soundtrack Pro, Logic, or Protools, but your NLE is more than capable of handling the vast majority of common audio tasks. We’ll review enveloping, mixing, and recording external audio in your NLE.

14Titling

This specific compositing task comes along at least once a project, so modern NLEs include image-generation tools that are specifi-cally geared towards titling. We’ll look briefly at our NLE’s native basic text tools, then go into some depth with built-in advanced titling tools like Avid’s Marquee and Final Cut’s LiveType.

15Review and Look Forward

We’ll recap the entire editing workflow, from ingest to finished project, and look at how each of the advanced topics in the diploma curriculum will fit into the basic editing process that we’ve estab-lished.



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