Wow time

You’ve learned the design principles that you need to follow whilst editing your footage.

We’re now going to look at how you actually edit the footage in software.

This is the workflow that I recommend that you go through.

You can see that there are eight steps here.

Three of the steps involve something to do with music.

And those are numbered in yellow.

The remaining five steps are where you’re purely doing something with the footage alone.

And those are labelled in green.

For each of the steps I’ve also estimated what proportion of time that you’ll be spending and you can see those in the yellow boxes next to the steps.

The first step is to load all of your flight footage into the software and then select from that clips that you think might make the final grade.

There are two design principles that help us in this particular process.

One is the design principles around what content should end up in the actual final production and the other are the design principles around which should remain on the cutting room floor.

What does the rubbish that we should be cutting out such as flighter attics and so on.

The second step is for you to select the music that you are going to use to edit to.

This may be a very quick step.

If you had been doing this during the weeks before you’d be doing your flying which is something that I do.

I try to collect a library of potential tracks that could be useful for editing too.

Once you selected your music.

Step 3 is where you mark up that music.

You go into the music and you label it at all of the beat changes where you might be sequencing your clips too.

Once you’ve marked up your music you then go on to Step 4.

This is where you take all of those clips that you’d selected earlier and you colour raised them so you manipulate them so that they looked their very very best for the colour that’s within them.

This is particularly important if you’ve been shooting with a GoPro and it’s been Impro tune and it’s come out very flat.

You could do this colour grading later on in the process but I find it makes most sense to do it early on that way when you start slept down to the very very final set of clips so then I end up in your production.

You’re choosing from the tips.

Looking at their very best if I’ve done this later on I so often found in my final review that I’ve left some of my best clips onto the cutting room floor where they shouldn’t be.

So I recommend that you do your colour grading at this step for it doesn’t take much longer to do it earlier on because you’re still calibrating roughly the same number of clips each one might just be slightly longer.

Once you’ve colour graded all of those clips I then recommend that you rank order them so you put all of the best clips over to the left with the very first clip being the very best one.

And then you move the clips further over to the right where you are less and less happy with them.

This will make steps six much easier.

Step six is where you then take all of those clips and you start to sequence them to the music.

And this is where you’re going to be spending the largest proportion of your time.

Once you’ve cut all of your clips to size and you’ve sequenced it to the music they’re going to move on to some of the final steps.

This is where you’re going to add any effects into the clips.

So this will be things such as sharpening the clips up putting in transitions in between the clit where appropriate.

You could also do some retiming but that’s likely to have occurred in Steps 6.

It has retiming adjust the length of the clip you need to do that in order to make sure its sequence to the music correctly.

So Step 7 is where you add in any final effects.

Step 8 is where you put in the very final annotations on to the clip that you choose to think are appropriate to continue to entertain the audience.

Then you’re also going to finalize and publish it.

I always recommend that you sleep on it for one night.

Review it in the morning before you do publish it.

So there we have the eight steps that will be going through the editing workflow.