There are so many questions I am unsure where to begin to explain the kind of post situation I suddenly found myself inlast week. I am not a great "gorilla editor," in style or practice, unless I am familiar with the material I'm working with, and there are not more than about 300 clips. Two weeks previously, I was handed two commercial spots - One 60 seconds, and the other was 15 seconds in duration. There were approximately 3,500 clips amounting to around 450 GBs of Ultra HD 4K footage shot on location in the Great Western Canadian Wilderness. The problem with this footage is none of it came with anything other than ZXY70054, ZKY70068, ZKY8956, as the clip identier tags from the cameras. Some with audio, some without audio, and about 3/4 of the footage was shot at 23.976p and the remainder was shot at 59.94p ! I was not notified at the time of accepting this job that the source clips were shot at different rates, nor was any form of script, or a TC reference cutting list delivered along with this footage. I was sent what I was told in the beginning was a full dialogue voice over cutting line outline description, which I successfully used Avid Phrase Find to locate matching available source clips with. I must say I am greatly impressed with the Phrase Find feature in MC

What turned my project into an absolute nightmare was finding out at a later point in the edit this dialogue cut list was incomplete, and thus, I had no further reference to what these clips were ! There was no identifying annotation tag on each clip to indicate what it was other than the obscure camera clip recording tags which came out of the cameras that shot them ! There was no extra dialogue shot with the clips to which I could apply Avid Phrase Find to locate the rest of the clips with either ! 

Furthermore, I was added as a collaborative editor with another editor, who was working at a different location on a different editing platform than I was (Adobe Premiere running on Windows OS). I don't know Adobe Premiere, and the other editor did not know Media Composer, or MAC OS which is what I work on ! The incomplete dialogue cut list I received only covered the first 20 seconds of a 60 second edit, leaving me to go on an endless Easter Egg Hunt for appropriate clips to complete the remaining 40 seconds of the edit. What was predicted as a three day job (Which is based on what I normally quote on a TV spot such as what I was handed) turned into a 13 day cut ! I finally had to go through every clip and every bin and label these clips so they could be referenced. In this way, I could use my "Control F" find tool in MC to locate the clips I needed, as well as to somewhat familiarize myself with the footage, and make some clip selection choice to further my edit as I went forward.

**To begin with, I would like to ask the more learned editors on this forum what they would have done in my situation, in order to speed up the edit into a normal working time frame ?**

Is there any way to work with non-annotated, raw, unreferenced clips, which an editor is unfamiliar with, without having to go through the tedious process of logging all the footage to make it searchable with the search tool ?

Please advise for future reference.

Laptopeditor

Mark Job:

Is there any way to work with non-annotated, raw, unreferenced clips, which an editor is unfamiliar with, without having to go through the tedious process of logging all the footage to make it searchable with the search tool ?

Not that I know of. Someone needs to log the footage prior to editing or you wind up in the situation you described.

In answer to 'what would you have done in this situation' I'd have made sure somebody was hired to organize all the footage before I took the gig. If I'd somehow wound up with 300-odd unlogged clips, I'd have had a conversation with the producer about how much it was going to cost and how long it was going to take me to dig through it and properly log it before I could begin editing, and whether or not they still wanted to continue with me doing it, or to hire a production assistant to do it.

camoscato:

Not that I know of. Someone needs to log the footage prior to editing or you wind up in the situation you described.

Hi Comoscato:

                       Yeah, that's what I thought. The problem is that "Gorilla Editing" has really worked its way into many freelancer's workflows. When I work in a collaborative situation, then I prefer to work with TC Window dubs whereby the TC is referencing where the client wants changes to be made on the timeline, and a detailed cut list which shows either dialogue cut lines or annotations on clip tags, or source clip TC in and outs. I've never seen the footage before. I do not know what camera coded clip ZXY7005 references, so I can't reference any clip desired without some sort of reference.

Laptopeditor

I was just thinking about AI. What if Avid put in an AI Algorithm which can look at all the unreferenced clips and suggest an edit ? What if the AI edit is really good ? What would they need Editors for anymore ?

Laptopeditor

Man, this makes me feel more over-worked and under-appreciated than I realized.

Dealing with jobs like this has been my day-to-day for as long as I can remember. Granted, I'm a staff editor in a small market now, and perhaps getting hired as a freelance editor with an initial understanding that turns out to be misguided at best but misled at worst is an entirely different animal -- especially when it comes to the agreed-upon 'contract.'

But even when I worked exclusively on national commercials in NYC produced fully by agencies and with giant budgets, I STILL would find myself from time-to-time on jobs that were shot completely documentary style with no scripts, no writers, and MOUNTAINS of footage that needed to be gone through to invent the story, even on jobs shot on film.

I had assistants back then, sure, and they could lend a hand in ingesting and organizing, but it was still up to me to go and learn the footage if I wasn't given a roadmap. And something like Phrase Find or near instant transcriptions wasn't even a twinkle in an editor's eye.

In my world now cutting small-market commercials, corporate, documentaries and even web, and with run-and-gun digital acquisition crews, the trend of productions just dumping giant amounts of camera card material with little to no information has, unfortunately, only gotten worse -- and yeah, the footage frequently is any number of flavors of raster, frame-rate, what have you. And given so many organizations work in Premiere, being able to switch between the two (and now Resolve) is a prerequisite.

What I feel I can impart is this:

Organize and work off of sequences!

1) If your machine is not up to the task of working with just linking to the camera files, you can run them all through Resolve to make proxies, and either link to those, or prepare them for the Avid mxf Media Management. You can also make proxies directly in Avid, but of course, there are things to watch out for with differing rasters/rates.

2) Once you have all the clips in Avid, sort them by an appropriate means (name, timecode, etc.) and create sequences. If TOD timecode was used, you can Auto sequence the clips to make a timeline where clips are laid out according to their timecode. TOD sequences will greatly aid in syncing audio if the audio was jam-synced, but also clue you in on what was shot and when.

3) Using these giant master sequences, you can make sub sequences to further organize, or find coincidence clips to aid in making sync'd multicams (if that's how you like to work).

4) You can bounce window-burned sequences if there's dialog to send to a transcription service so that you can not only search/find dialogue or have a writer/producer make a paper edit, but also to aid in tracking down takes/audio using the timecode derived from the transcription, tracked via the sequence you exported. I suppose Phrase-Find could help you here, if you were so inclined, but having a transcription is a bit more shareable outside of Avid, and, honestly, more easy to use. 

Before transcription services (which are fast and cheap nowadays, and, unfortunately for you, fully built-in in Premiere and Resolve), I would use markers in AVID to make short-hand notes on what was being said, then I'd pull up the marker window of that giant sequence with markers, and go through and pull out selects based on my marker notes. Then I'd widdle the story or rearrange from there.

Also, I know I'm MASSIVELY in the minority here, but I ALWAYS work with linked material in Avid (as opposed to managed .mxf). You can argue with me all you want, but if you're going to be sharing sequences back-n-forth with someone in Premiere, it's a lot better, if only more doable.

Perhaps there's still a bunch of you out there -- certainly in scripted work -- that get stuff organized, prepped, and all laid-out so a creative editor can just sit down and work when not knowing all the material, but my world at least isn't at all like that. 

j

Jason Sedmak Senior Video Editor, Postmodern Company 303-535-0755  |  postmodernco.com  |  [email protected] 2710 Walnut Street, Denver, CO 80205

Hi Jason,

Re:

"Also, I know I'm MASSIVELY in the minority here, but I ALWAYS work with linked material in Avid (as opposed to managed .mxf). You can argue with me all you want, but if you're going to be sharing sequences back-n-forth with someone in Premiere, it's a lot better, if only more doable."

Was it possible for Mark's Premiere-only collaborator, using the same camera files, to create a Premiere Sequence with back to back clips, log & add Markers, Export an AAF (or just an .xml or .txt File) which could be imported properly into an Avid Sequence set up identically? What would that workfow look like?

Telegram!:

Re:

Was it possible for Mark's Premiere-only collaborator, using the same camera files, to create a Premiere Sequence with back to back clips, log & add Markers, Export an AAF (or just an .xml or .txt File) which could be imported properly into an Avid Sequence set up identically? What would that workfow look like?

Yes, using linked files on both systems, and an AAF. Not sure about Premiere markers, and audio can sometimes not automatically link, just depends on lotsa things.

j

Oh OK,

So the question is what can a Premiere editor do to assist an MC lead editor? Perhaps every clip or sequence of clips could get auto-transcribed with added notes by the Premiere editor... and that file could get Script-attached or ScriptSync'd inside MC?  Depends on Mark's MC version, I guess.

Telegram!:

Oh OK,

So the question is what can a Premiere editor do to assist an MC lead editor? Perhaps every clip or sequence of clips could get auto-transcribed with added notes by the Premiere editor... and that file could get Script-attached or ScriptSync'd inside MC?  Depends on Mark's MC version, I guess.

If one is wanting to have a workflow where a Premiere editor is assisting an Avid editor, then that is not something I'd recommend if it's meant to be a continual back-n-forth sort of thing. I'm just saying it's doable to move one project built in one and transpose it to the other... I wouldn't make a habit of going back 'n forth for sure.

There can be lots of things that just don't translate (like clips with alphas, i.e.,), but yes, I suppose a person could build up and organize sequences and sync audio to second-system for moving over into Avid using Premiere or vic-versa. Don't see why that person could also auto-trascribe in Premiere and export those as documents (don't quote me on that one, but I know Resolve can do that). As far as transcribing for Script-sync? You got me there, I suppose it's possible to use the Premiere transcription in some way to get a leg up on Script Sync, but I'd bet you'd be the first to try it!

j

I don't use Premiere, but I found this re: Prem Markers to Avid:

https://en.editingtools.io/guides/convert-pr-marker-to-amc-marker