TVR 365 Class Notes
Unit 2, Non-linear Editing
Non-linear editing has tremendous advantages for projects that will need to be updated, involve lots of effects or have demanding clients. There are also drawbacks, however.
For most simple projects which will be shown once (like news packages) it is slower to edit on a non-linear system. All footage, music and other elements must be digitized before they can be used. Hard drive space will be in short supply for some years, although this is getting better, especially with Firewire external drives. The new Panasonic P-2 format saves video on chips that can be read directly by non-linear editing systems, so this will eventually eliminate the digitizing process entirely.
The beauty of non-linear editing is when you have to replace a shot in the middle of a finished project with one that is considerably longer or shorter. In a linear world, the entire rest of the video will have to be re-edited or suffer a generation loss (not critical with digital formats). Complex "layering" of video and audio elements is also much easier in a non-linear session.
Digitizing
The first step after logging your footage and doing some preliminary off-line decision making with window dubs is to digitize the footage you think you may want to use. You should begin digitizing a few seconds before your intended in point, and let the clip run a few seconds after the intended out point (I use 3 seconds). These extra seconds are called handles, and allow clips to be combined through dissolves or wipes where parts of both clips are on screen simultaneously. Without handles, you may have to stop everything and re-digitize a clip to see how an effect will look. Final Cut Pro will add handles for you during digitizing from a digital deck if you select that option.
As you save each digitized clip to disk you are asked to name it. If you have a detailed script, you can use scene or shot numbers, but usually editors develop their own shorthand for describing clips effectively in a few words or abbreviations.
When organizing work for non-linear editing, be aware that most non-linear systems use film terminology. What PC users call directories and Mac users call folders, Apple calls bins. This refers to large canvas bins with clips on top to hold film in a clean environment.
The Final Cut Pro software in our lab is set up to store projects (small files telling the program to look various places for video) on a file server, allowing students to work from any workstation. The clips themselves are stored on each hard drive and are only copied when you "render" a new clip, combining several elements. These rendered clips should also be stored on the file server in your home directory on what Final Cut Pro calls the "scratch drive." When video is "played" on a non-linear system the hard drive is actually jumping around showing individual frames from various parts of the drive. It isn't really a video until it is "printed" (the Mac term) to video tape or burned to a DVD.
We have recently installed a new "media server" which is much faster and has larger capacity than the ethernet file server. The ethernet file server, however, will continue to be used for logon information, system preferences, and project files. Always set your scratch disk to be your home directory on the ethernet server (designated by a little house icon on the left of most navigation screens). The SAN disk will be used for creating DVD project files which we will explore later, and is used by students working on Camera One to digitize raw footage.
Even on the best non-linear systems with huge media drives, space for raw footage becomes a problem for longer projects. Editors working on long-form projects often digitize footage at low quality (high compression) to do a rough off-line edit, and then re-digitize just the footage actually used in the project at high quality using the automatic batch digitize feature of the Final Cut Pro software.
When digitizing footage for the Final Cut Pro software, you can choose several formats, but KU is shooting exclusively DVCPro 25 which is a slightly higher quality version of mini-DV and DV. The format you should choose for everything you are likely to edit at KU is NTSC/DV. If prompted for further information, check 29.97 frames per second (fps) and 48 KHz for audio sampling.
Department policy states that faculty members must supervise digitizing footage on the Final Cut Pro workstations, so we will confine ourselves to footage prepared for class use. If you would like additional audio or video clips or would like to digitize a special project, this may be possible. Discuss this with the instructor.
High-end NLE systems today provide many features to assist the editor. Specifically:
Some formats of digital video can be digitized at faster than real-time (4X normal speed is common).
Real-time graphics and effects are common on top-of-the-line Media Composer systems. Only the most complex graphics require rendering (a period of time for the computer to copy files different places and combine them to show you the effect). FCP can provide near real-time effects when running on a fast enough machine, but may have problems on our G-4 workstations. Render every few effects to reduce these problems.
Direct from video inputs are not available on most systems to my knowledge (until Panasonic P-2 becomes common), but faster digitizing helps work around this. Actually, Matrox offered a hybrid system that combined video tape clips with digitized clips off the hard drive. It didn't sell well, and I don't think it is available any longer.
Shot color balancing is available in Final Cut Pro 5, with Avid Media Composer featuring much more exact color correction.
Here is a good time to mention a point of confusion in computer-based video editing. The card in the computer that makes images on the computer's own monitor has been called a video card. Virtually all computers have these cards (a few do monitor video from a chip on the main board rather than a separate card), but these are NOT what we mean by video cards for video editing.
Video cards for editors are special cards that convert analog NTSC video to a digital format the computer can handle, and then convert back to NTSC when you are ready to print your project to video tape. The newer ones also support direct input of digital information (such as a digital output from a DVCPro machine) with conversion from the tape standard to the computer's standard. "Firewire" is the most common of these input formats.
Good luck and have fun. Welcome to the digital world.
Return to TVR 365 Home Page