Here's one instance where DV really shinesthe ability to automatically transfer selected video clips to your computer. In a few moments you're going to create a list of video clips, tell Premiere to transfer them, and then take the dog for a walk while Premiere handles the chores. Nice. Before you grab the leash, I want to run through some scene-selection tips and naming conventions.
Your task now is to critically review your tape(s) and weed out the chaff while retaining the grain. You want to transfer only the best sound bites, the coolest scenes, and the highest-quality natural sound. If you did more than one take of a scene, find the one that works best. If you videotaped that soccer championship game, select all the goals, great plays, and enthusiastic crowd reactions , skipping most of the up-and-down-the-field ball handling. Selecting Sound BitesMy view is that the video producer or writer can do a much better job telling the story than the folks you interview for the story. It's your job to distill factual information and create a coherent , cohesive story. So it's best to use interview sound bites not to state facts but to present emotions, feelings, and opinions . You should be the one to say, "At the bottom of the ninth, the bases were loaded, with two outs." Let the batter, who is recalling this dramatic moment say, "My legs felt like jelly ." Even in a corporate backgrounder, employees should be the ones stating how enthusiastic they are about a new product. Your job is to say what that product does. In general keep sound bites short. Let them be punctuation marks, not paragraphs.
Listening for Effective Natural SoundAs you review your raw footage, you should keep your ears tuned for brief instances of dramatic sound: a wire cutter clipping a piano wire (one of the most memorable for mesee the editing sidebar in Hour 5), the crack of a baseball bat, a gurgling brook, a hawk screeching. You'll want to transfer these as separate clips even though you may also transfer a long clip of the soaring hawk with that sound somewhere in it. Why? Later, when you edit in that soaring hawk, you easily can find and edit in the screech "nat-sound" (which means natural sound in TV news parlance) to give the image more punch. Logging Tapes and Using Consistent Naming ConventionsNow the winnowing down begins. Figure 3.14 shows the same Logging page you used to manually capture clips. Now you are going to log several video clips so Premiere can transfer them all at once later. Figure 3.14. The now-familiar Logging page. This time you need to add a reel name .
Task: Log Your Video ClipsTo log your video clips, follow these steps:
Using Video Clip Naming ConventionsThink through how you're going to name your clips. You may end up with dozens of clips, and if you don't give them descriptive names , it'll slow down editing. You might use a naming convention for sound bites such as Bite-1 , Bite-2 , etc. Adding a brief descriptive comment such as Bite 1 Laughs will help. With natural sound you could say Nat 1 Hawk screech .
With all other scenes (that is, besides natural sound and sound bites), you can drop the prefixes and just give them consistent yet descriptive names: Goal-3 , Crowd React -2 Applause , Hawk Soaring-4 , and Interview cutaway-1 reverse .
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