Professional Practice: Placement Day 3
Today was an insight into what an Edit Assistant does for a programme. I went down to their edit suits and met Dan who is an Edit Assistant for First Dates. I was lucky enough to be allowed to sit in with him while he edited the sync together for each date and learn how to use AVID, an editing software I hadn't been introduced to before.
For the First Dates shoot, it was a 54 camera rig, however only 10 of those can record at a time. This footage is stored into 'bins' and each 'bin' contains all of the sequences for each date. With each 'bin' there are microphones located to different ISO tracks. These are colour coded for each contributor to make editing it all together a lot easier. In order to know who each contributor was, a document was created stating their name, a picture, what time their date started and ended and what ISO track their mic is on.
Dan let me have a go at syncing a date together. To start with, you have to find the visuals of their date. This is the time they enter to the time they leave. You then need to select their audio tracks, referring to the document for each contributor and input these onto the sequence. You then sync for each hour they are there for. This was a really good experience as it opened my eyes as to how different sound syncing is for TV compared to what we have done at uni. It is a lot more organised and is actually a job role to allocate each contributor's mic to an ISO track and organise it all on a document. Dan said that it has taken a long time to get to that level of organisation for First Dates and it isn't like that for every programme. He said it definitely makes his job a lot easier having all the tools he needs with him though and hopes other programmes will follow this lead. Unfortunately I have no pictures to evidence what I have done as the programme had obviously not been aired and was therefore confidential.
Finally, it's important to consolidate or transcode each camera card to the standard 50mb for editing. Consolidate simply means copy and pasting what is already there. On the other hand, transcode means changing the format to something else. The way Dan explained this to me was; A go pro is formatted automatically to H.264 which is standard for export however this needs to be transcoded to 50mb which is standard for editing.
Overall this was a really fantastic day in the edit suit and I learnt so much from Dan. I would definitely consider learning more about AVID software as it is very popular within the industry and I believe that by learning it before I leave university will give me a step up when applying for jobs in editing.
For the First Dates shoot, it was a 54 camera rig, however only 10 of those can record at a time. This footage is stored into 'bins' and each 'bin' contains all of the sequences for each date. With each 'bin' there are microphones located to different ISO tracks. These are colour coded for each contributor to make editing it all together a lot easier. In order to know who each contributor was, a document was created stating their name, a picture, what time their date started and ended and what ISO track their mic is on.
Dan let me have a go at syncing a date together. To start with, you have to find the visuals of their date. This is the time they enter to the time they leave. You then need to select their audio tracks, referring to the document for each contributor and input these onto the sequence. You then sync for each hour they are there for. This was a really good experience as it opened my eyes as to how different sound syncing is for TV compared to what we have done at uni. It is a lot more organised and is actually a job role to allocate each contributor's mic to an ISO track and organise it all on a document. Dan said that it has taken a long time to get to that level of organisation for First Dates and it isn't like that for every programme. He said it definitely makes his job a lot easier having all the tools he needs with him though and hopes other programmes will follow this lead. Unfortunately I have no pictures to evidence what I have done as the programme had obviously not been aired and was therefore confidential.
Finally, it's important to consolidate or transcode each camera card to the standard 50mb for editing. Consolidate simply means copy and pasting what is already there. On the other hand, transcode means changing the format to something else. The way Dan explained this to me was; A go pro is formatted automatically to H.264 which is standard for export however this needs to be transcoded to 50mb which is standard for editing.
Overall this was a really fantastic day in the edit suit and I learnt so much from Dan. I would definitely consider learning more about AVID software as it is very popular within the industry and I believe that by learning it before I leave university will give me a step up when applying for jobs in editing.
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