15 Film School Tips in 20 Minutes

This Wednesday morning I’ll be giving at talk at the Final Cut Pro Users Group Superbooth at the NAB Convention in Las Vegas (booth #SL10129 in the South Hall) in which I’m going to very quickly give a number of quick tips that I’ve picked up teaching at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

There’s no way that I can really go over all of them here.  And, besides, then you wouldn’t come to Las Vegas to see me, would you? In fact, some of them aren’t even editing tips, but filmmaking tips in general.  But I thought I could drop a few of them on you so you could get a flavor of some of the basic editing tips that you may or may not already know.

L-Cuts, L-Cuts, L-Cuts

This first one is so obvious to me that it floors me that almost no beginning editors ever do it. Simply put:

Never make a picture cut at the same frame as your audio cut unless you want to emphasize that moment.

The corollary to that is:

When you make a picture cut at a different frame than your sound cut it smoothes out the edit.

Let’s take a look at what that means on a timeline:

 

Notice how the picture edit from 3G-3 happens a bit before the audio edit does. What I always try and do is extend the outgoing piece of audio (3G-3 in this case) as long as possible, starting the incoming audio (3D-5) at its first modulation — the place where the first noise/dialogue/sound effect/etc. on that clip begins.  This smooths out the edit so that any difference in the background ambinence will be much less noticeable. This isn’t going to cover plane-bys or car sounds that cut suddenly in or out, but it will help disguise general background — such as differences in wind or air or distant traffic or crowds. Because the person’s line of dialogue (in 3D-5 here) will begin at the exact same frame as the change in the background tone the audience is not going to notice that change very much. If you had edited the audio at the picture edit point all that would have changed would have been the background tone.  So they would have noticed that.

And that, my friends, will make the cut more noticeable. So, if you don’t want your picture edits to jump out at the audience, stagger the picture and sound edits.

To repeat what I said at the start — this is so helpful that it amazes me when I see editor’s timelines that every nearly every picture and audio edit at the same place. Believe me, I know where this comes from — it’s slightly harder to refine edits when the picture and sound are staggered. But this L-cutting helps the audinece relax so much more that it is worth every additional second in the editing process. You’ll get away with a lot this way.

Cut On Action

 This second tip comes from the same place — how we can help the audience not to notice the fact that we are making a picture edit. And it goes like this:

Cut on movement. Cut at the beginning of a character’s movement.

Simple statement but it covers a multitude of evils. It is axiomatic that as soon as you give an actor a cigarette or glass of some liquid that it will be nearly impossible for him/her to match their exact hand positions from take to take and set-up to set-up. The whiskey glass may be in the left hand in the wide shot and then appears in the right in the closeup.

 

But, if you cut to the closeup right as he flicks his hair back, or as he points to the window, or as another character moves his/her hand — our eye is going to be distracted from the glass and (lo and behold) the cut will roll by unnoticed.

There are other reasons to cut on action. In the example above, from Terminator 2, the T-1000’s truck smashes through the bridge into the L.A. River. What you notice if you slowly frame advance the edit, is that the editors (Conrad Buff, Mark Goldblatt and Richard Harris )actually overlapped the action at the cut. The truck smashes through the bridge in a close shot, moves a bit into the air and then, in the cut to the low angle wide shot above, actually moves back a few frames. This overlapping of the action produces a much more dynamic and energetic cut than if the editors had strictly match cut.

Which leads to a third and, for today, final tip.

Matching Action Is Vastly Overrated

 I once re-edited a film that the director asked me improve because she was unhappy with the first edit. As I reviewed the dailies I discovered that the original editor, while being very thorough about making perfect match cuts (if an actor had a glass of whiskey raised half way up in the closeup, he’d make sure that it was also half way up in the wider matching shot) completely missed character defining moments which were often 10 or 20 frames after or before the pieces that he had used.

The technical editing was great, but he had missed all of the humanity.

Once I restored the actorly edits, no one noticed the mismatches because they were following the story and the characters.

And let that be your last lesson of the day!

================ NAB =======================

So, as I mentioned above, I am going to speaking at NAB.  I’m going to be in several places and I’d love to see you there.  For a list of my talks, you can go to my blog Hollyn-wood,  I’ll also be twittering from there.  You can follow me on twitter.  My handle is schnittman and you get to me through my Twitter page. There’s going to be a party that Avid is throwing, as well as the infamous FCPUG Supermeet.

It looks like it’s going to be tons of fun, so I hope to see each and every one of you there.

Well, all of you except the person who I’ve got walking my dog while I’m out of town.  Okay?