This week, the A/V squad took our raw footage and transformed them into rough cuts of our final video. This was my first experience with Adobe products including Premiere and Photoshop.
We are recording voice-over material and the final video is on the way; check in next week for it.
Having experience with Final Cut, iMovie, etc. in the past, it wasn’t a surprise that – like shooting – editing takes a lot of time. Yet my lesson learned is to always over-shoot re-shoot footage. Shit happens and you may need it. Thank god for our B-Roll!
For video editing there seems to be a step-wise diminishing margin of return for your effort (aka time) put towards the editing, as illustrated by this conceptual graph:
There is also a trade-off between the two operations: shooting and editing. From one point of view, a shot, frame, or byte that is missing from raw footage can cost you hours of editing to manage. On the other hand, that extra shot may have been impossible or prohibitive to collect; and in some cases editing is more efficient to easily and quickly manipulate and enhance material, extending beyond its initial value.
For future projects it will be important to weigh the effort-now versus effort-later tradeoff in “real time” as the shooting step is happening.