We’re pleased to welcome another contributor to the project – Mike Ambs. I had the pleasure of meeting Mike at SXSW last month and he along with Amanda Walker have created an interesting new project called Pedal. In his first post Mike shares some insight into the post production process and how various web 2.0 techniques can be applied with interesting results.

By Mike Ambs:: I should be upfront in saying that I’ve never gone to school for film making or editing, short of the two times I was allowed to sit in the back of the film class at Washtenaw Community College. Despite this, I’ve been lucky enough to have spent time editing for NBC’s “dot com” department, where I learned a lot about editing workflows.
Reaching the conclusion that… they are out-dated. Very out-dated.

Coming back from our road trip last summer, we had about 120+ hours of HDV footage, several rolls of 16mm film, and hundreds of individual Mp4 clips taken with several small hand held cameras. I realize that’s probably a bit larger in scale than most people reading this post might need to worry about. But what I love about my current workflow is that it holds up on both smaller projects and larger projects (so far).

I knew the traditional way of logging and organizing would involve lots of comments and labels, and sub-clip bins. Perhaps some color-coding for interview footage, b-roll, and so on. Trying to make the most of a hierarchical order for months worth of footage seemed… a nightmare.

So, I thought of how I organize the other media in my life, most of which, lives online. And came up with the following – the workflow I’ve been using the last few months, I’m about half way through importing my HD footage and so far, in the time it takes me to type out 3 or 4 key words, I’m able to find *everything* I’m looking for no matter where it’s stored.

1. Importing: The most important change in handling footage – is using tags as the main form of organization. But before I get into that; tagging your footage would not be possible (or at least as easy) if it weren’t for Final Cut 6’s ability (with the Sony HDV import setting) to break each cut on the tape into a separate independent movie file (you can also do this in iMovie).

Also, if you were using one of the many impressive tapeless ACHDV cameras available (which is what I’d prefer to be using currently), you would, by default, be handling all your footage as individual clips.

2. Quicklook: One problem I knew I would run into was having Final Cut being tied up during the import process – it would essentially take me twice me the amount of time I had in footage to import and then later log it.

So I started thinking about organizing with 3rd party apps’, but I also didn’t want to bog down my system resources by opening file after file in QuickTime just to take a look at it, enter Apple’s new Quicklook.

By opening up my capture scratch folder, I can tap the spacebar and scrub through an entire clip in seconds. This might not work as well for editors who didn’t also shoot the footage they are working with – but in any case, it’s still fast, it doesn’t involve opening up a bunch of different files – just tap the spacebar, and instantly scrub through your clip.

3. Tagging: I tag my Flickr photos, my bookmarks on Del.icio.us, the music I love on Last.fm, basically everything. It’s how I’m used to organizing just about anything. This method works especially well in OS X; with spotlight and 3rd party app’s that take advantage of Apple’s ‘indexing’ and ‘comments’.

Although OS X has a powerful built-in search and filter for Metadata, it’s still short on an easy and visual way of applying that info. Which is where Punakea comes in – Punakea gives you several ways to tag files on your machine. You can drag one or even dozens of files to a drop box (that hides on the edge of your screen), or you open up the ‘tagger’, which obviously, lets you tag the media you’ve dropped in.

Punakea keeps track of all the tags you enter on your machine and on any external drives, so it auto-finishes your words for you. If I want to tag a few dozen clips with: Larry, Jay, Anacortes, Pacific, Ocean, and Sunset – I only really have to type “La… J… Ana… Pa… Oc… Su”.

4. Color coding: This helps distinguish between cameras visually much faster – I *do* use a naming convention that tells me the camera model, the tape number, and the clip number, for example: “z1u_t019_c” is what I would enter into the description area within FCP’s capture window, then FCP would progressively number each break, giving me: z1u_t019_c-9… z1u_t019_c-10… etc.

But each physical tape is wrapped in a colored sticky note, yellow for the Fx1 (which almost always had the HDV35 kit attached), purple for z1u (which was generally the wide), and orange for HC1 (that was used mostly in interviews). The same colors are applied to the file, so in Finder I can quickly scan through and see where the tapes end and begin.

5. Transcribing + Metadata: Bill Cammack brought up a great tip, suggesting that on top of transcribing the interviews and important conversation into script form, that by tagging the clips with, as an example, the first four words to an important sentence, I can easily search for both (the clip, and the script) with just a few keywords. Which works perfectly in Punakea’s Browser: by clicking on the tags “Larry” and “Conversations”, I can see a cloud of script-snippets between Larry and whom-ever else.

6. Searching / Browsing: What good is all this tagging without a way to find and filter this info’ just as fast as I can type it – spotlight does allow me to quickly find what I’m looking *for*… but if I’m just looking around for ideas, it doesn’t do me much good. Punakea has a ‘browser’ window, that shows me a tag-cloud for everything associated with Pedal.

Each time I choose a series of tags it narrows down the cloud.

As long as I’m detailed in my tagging, including the: who, what, where, and when – in just a few seconds I can find every clip and photo I have of, for example: “Jay Bicycling (with) Larry (in) Washington (near) Marblemount”… weather it’s HD footage, 16mm, Mp4, a Polaroid scan, or digital still.

7. Room for improvement: Sadly there is no spotlight feature in FCP, you can use ‘Find’ of course – and have it create a pop-up bin of results, but the tags aren’t search’able. So… there’s this bridge of info’, on one hand, I can find exactly what I need, or browse in a much more visual and creative way for media… but then I have to either a) re-dump that media into the timeline, or b) go search for the file I decide I want in FCP.

I’m hoping that if any editing suite is going to be an early adopter of system-wide metadata and tags, it’s going to be Apple’s Final Cut. But when that will happen and how it will be implemented is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, I plan to continue to work with both apps to speed up the overall workflow.

8. Step away from the computer: Bill, again, has this great tip to share in the comments of a workflow vlog (if you’d like to *see* what I’m blabbering on about http://blog.projectpedal.com/2007/12/week-one-my-workflow.html ) I did several weeks ago:

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 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.

I think this is a great tool – but something I will hold off on until my edit is a bit more laid out – and needs fine tuning. Getting caught up for days re-splicing and re-aranging in the timeline can get you no where some days. And this tip, of stepping back, and using a large blank wall to visualize your edit is a perfect way to switch creative gears.

Michael Ambs – I started out editing in the computer classroom after school hours in Onsted, Michigan, writing shorts and directing impromptu music videos with my friends. What started off as an innocent way to pass the time in a small town, has grown into a part of my life I hope I’m never without – I enjoy writing, filmmaking, vlogging, riding the subway, mint chocolate chip ice-cream, taking photographs, designing websites, and all other things web-geekery.

I co-created a project, tentatively titled ‘Pedal’, with Amanda Walker, which documents a young man’s long distance bicycle trip. We are currently in the editing process for the feature length film, and are also releasing a making-of short series to better explain how we made the film, what it took from us on a personal level, and to better explain the story we hope to tell in the end.

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