Filming Tips:

Hello everyone, hope you had a great weekend? So sorry I couldn't post this yesterday, I was really busy moving from one city to the other. I know I promised to organise a school in Nigeria this year but I had to postpone it due to my journey, I hope I am forgiven? I don't know when it will come up, I will like to be sure before I make any promise of training.

If you have a system which is not that strong to handle heavy camera codecs like dnxhd and proress, you may be frustrated trying to edit the movie or any project you are working on. I will come back to this.

What software is best for you as a movie editor? I have no specific answer to this, because great movies has been edited on barely known softwares before. But basically, Avid Media Composer has been used much more than any other softwares on Hollywood blockbusters. Avid works like a serious machine that permit serious networking on big projects. Adobe is popular in TV broadcast while Final cut pro X or 7 are also being used on feature films. I will say you should stick to whatever software you are comfortable with. I have trained my guys and ladies in Horeb Digital Network Ltd how to use all these softwares, so if there is any project and you want a specific software for your post, they are capable. My favourite software for editing at present is Adobe premier because it allows a lot of flexibilities and I can easily go from the timeline to after effect, photoshop, illustrator files can also be brought in natively instead of going in and out. I also love to edit on final cut and davinci resolve, but I hardly edit on avid, because Avid is a really complicated software, if you make a mistake towards the end of your editing, you may regret even editing on it at the first place.

If you have a system not strong enough, you may just edit in a lower quality, like in premier, you can go to the project monitor and change it to 1/4 and you do the same in source monitor. If you do this and you still find your video dragging, then I will suggest you download Davinci Resolve software free version (though only high graphic cards can run it), you open your project in resolve, create your bins base on the number of folders you have in your hard drive, press command A or control A on each open bin, right click and scroll to click - create a timeline with the selected clips, then give it a name. Look down on the screen and click the deliver page, go through the settings on your left to pick a smaller file format like h.264 codec in 720 by 576, look up on your left and ensure that you press individual clip, then the file name should be left in source file name. With this you can choose where to export the proxy, no matter how slow your system is, it should edit the proxy files smoothly, when you finish all your basic editing, you can go to export and export each of the time lines as a final cut xml file, then you take the file and import it in resolve through xml or avid aaf import, make sure it's the same project you used for the proxies, it will bring a box asking you whether to bring in the source videos, reply no, then it will give you your timeline in full resolution as edited. This process is called round tripping. This is the process to use when you are editing raw. I have never edited a job shot on celluloid before, so I can't teach what I don't know. Though I hope to have that opportunity in Hollywood, God knows He can trust me with the knowledge because thousands will learn it from me, the more I know, the more I teach. So if you are in Hollywood and you are reading this, get me on board.

If you meet a cinematographer like Ed Lachman, he will tell you that film that is celluloid is better than digital, whereas Peter Jackson will disagree. Raw film format is the closest to celluloid but to me, raw is cheaper and much more flexible. According to some findings, celluloid highest dynamic range is 12.5 and resolution is not more than 2.5k while lots of high end digital cameras has more than 13 stops of dynamic range and the resolution can be as high as 4k or more. If you then shoot in raw format you will have enough data to work with in post production just like that of celluloid.

Like I told you last week about data storage, I think the best thing is to keep your digitally shot films into tapes like that of celluloid because of the durability. Sorry for the length of this, I hope I will be able to start loading videos soon.

Feel free to share and repost, if you have missed any of my past post please go to Christian film institute page and like our page, you can also visit xtianmovie.blogspot.com

Thanks for your time. Till next week Monday when I will be coming your way again, keep your God given dreams alive and remain blessed.