Video editing otherwise known as post or post-production is part art, part science.

They say a film is shaped 3 times. Once with the writer (treatment), the director (coaching the talent to draw out the right performance), and finally in the video editing suite.

Just saying a word with a different intonation can make the sentence mean completely different things.
With video editing leaving soundbites or scenes out and adding a different music track (music bed) or soundscape (background ambiance) Can completely change the tone, and the feel and dramatically impact viewer engagement.

In short, video editing is not as simple as learning the software and making a few cuts. The art of storytelling and knowing how the story will make the target audience feel, the rise and fall of emotions, and when to inject humour or a call to action is a skill that takes some time to master.

THE PROJECT

Once we are in the studio all the footage and audio is backed up to our cloud. We then start a fresh project bringing all the files in.
We then select the best takes or performances, typically there would be at least 5 takes per scene.

THE ROUGH CUT

Building the rough cut on the timeline is a very rewarding process. We get to see the idea, the vision that was laid out in the creative treatment come to life.

FIRST REVIEW

Once we are sure we have the best takes or parts of takes laid out and trimmed to perfection we sit back and review the video in-house. Does the story make sense? What am I feeling through different parts of the story? Does it hit the brief and solve the clients key problem? If not why and how can we fix it? Graphics and sound fx is usually the answer.

GRAPHICS

In most cases we will add motion graphics to visually underpin the messaging. Graphics help the audience both understand and retain information.

MUSIC AND SFX

Music and sound fx will help the audience “feel” the messaging.
It’s important in this short attention span world we live in that we create scroll stopping videos, scroll stopping videos, scroll sto… you get the point.

MASTERING AUDIO

On film day we try and get the cleanest and loudest audio recording possible.
Whether we’re using lapel mics or shotgun microphones we try an ensure the room or location is as quiet as possible and the recording volume is as high as possible without clipping (distorting)
This is because once you get the audio into post-production it makes the whole job so much easier. Having to repair badly recorded audio is a whole other story, I won’t get into that here. For the most part we run the audio through a mastering process and it sounds great.

COLOUR GRADING

Just like with audio, if our images are crisp and correctly exposed when we’re shooting it makes the whole grading process so much easier.
Colour grading is actually a specialised field in its own right, there is so much to it and again it rides the fine line between art and science. Each video goes through two color grades.
The first grade is a quick grade just ti get it looking good before exporting the video and uploading it for the client review.

CLIENT REVIEW

This is a very important part of the process, we use a world class review platform called frame.io.
Frame.io is intuitive and allows the client to comment along the timeline of the video as well as draw or make arrows where they would like things changed or moved.

SIGNOFF

Once we have made any changes required we re-export the video and deliver to the client for signoff.

FINAL GRADE

If there are no further changes we do the final colour grade using scopes and render according to best broadcasting standards if being used on TV. The final video is then exported and delivered.