Avid Editing Workshop 4 - Professional Toolkit

This editing workshop was very different to before. Instead of being taught a set of skills she let us just get on with editing a piece together using clips provided by her. The clips she gave us were for a Court Room Drama scene. There were a variety of shots to choose from and she didn't give us an idea of how she wanted us to do it or how the story even went. We were just aloud to get on with it however we wanted which was very fun as we hadn't had much of a chance to do this yet. I also felt like this was a much truer test of my Avid knowledge and skills because I was using the tools myself how I needed and wanted to.

I began by setting my Avid Project up using the Nexus to do so. This was easy as I already knew what settings I wanted as we had done this many times before. I then simply started watching all the clips through so that I could work out what the story line was and which clips worked better for certain characters and lines said etc. Once I had an idea in my head of how the story should play out I then began assembling them. I did this by marking In and Out points in my source window on the clips and then tried lining up the end of each clip with the beginning of the next as best as I could till I ended up with a rough cut:

Once I had a rough cut together I then started making it much more precise in terms of continuity from one clip to another. I did this by putting the Caps Lock on (so I could here the sound ) and jumping though each clip on my timeline frame by frame listening and watching very closely to see where one preciously needed to end and the other being. I then used the trim tool to pull the slips slightly shorter or longer depending on this. I realised during doing this that the reason it was becoming hard for me to trim clips or make them longer is because all my clips were on the same track. I should have checkerboarded them so that this would be a lot quicker and simply so I went back and did this:

This then sped up the process of trimming and lengthening clips a lot quicker. Once I had made it match up as much as I possibly could I then moved on to deal with the voice volumes on the clips as this was really effecting the continuity. On some close ups there voices were a lot louder as opposed to on the long shots when they were much quieter. I decided to fix this by using the Audio Levels Mixer:

This meant bringing down the shots which were very loud to an appropriate level and then increasing those that were hard to hear. Ideally I was trying to make the volume constant through out and also sit between -20db and -12db. This took quite a long time to do but was very much worth it by the time I was done because it did make so much difference to the continuity and the flow of the piece.

Overall I was very happy with my ability to use Avid myself and I feel like I ended up with a very successful edit that flowed well. The only downside was that it took me a long time to do but I feel like this is juts because I am not as use to using Avid yet as I am on Premier Pro but the more I practice the better I will get hopefully!