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Review and Edit

Lesson 13 from: Produce And Create An Impactful Interview

Abba Shapiro

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Lesson Info

13. Review and Edit

Next Lesson: Q&A

Lesson Info

Review and Edit

- [Male] So now we're ready to review the interview. And there's a lot of ways to attack this, and we're going to look at a few of them. The first thing I might do is just open up and start listening to the clips and finding the takes that I like and cleaning it up, and creating something called a sub-clip, which is breaking this interview up into sound bites that I like, that I can get to very quickly. So let me go ahead, I'm going to bring this full screen. I'm going to turn this into a list, in the lower left-hand corner I can switch from an icon view to a list view. It'll just make it a little bit easier for me to see what I'm working with here. And if you recall, I put everything from this Main Interview point, I'm going to jump right in there, and then I can go look at my primary camera. And let's take a look and take a listen. - [Female] All of the type of the fabrics that you - Now if you recall, we didn't have really clean audio with this. And I do want to work with some clean...

audio just so I don't go crazy, and there's a nice feature in Premiere where I can go ahead and I can select the camera, and then that clean audio clip. And I'll right-click on this, and I'm going to do something called merge clips. It's going to create a new clip that I can work with, with the clean audio, and one of the options once it merges it together is to remove the audio from the original AV clip. So now I have clean audio and good video all as a single clip. And again, we haven't modified anything on the computer, it's just how Premiere perceives these two clips. So I want to name that as "Primary good audio." And I can work with this for the rest of the edit. I'm going to hit OK. There it is, Primary good audio. If I double-click on this it looks just like a clip, I can go ahead and open this up, and… - …and how to sew with something… - Now I can really hear and understand what she's saying and what she's talking about. And I'm going to go through and start marking areas and create something called a subclip, and that's pretty easy to do. I'm going to go find the first point, scrubbing through. And I'm going to mark an endpoint here. Tell us a little bit about… And it's okay if it's a little fat, I have a little extra space. - So this new book is called "Wise Craft Quilts." And, it's a called, it's "A Guide to Turning Beloved Fabrics into Meaningful Patchwork." And this book comes out in March. - So I may want to cut out "This book comes out in March," because what if I don't post this until April? I don't want to date it. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to just mark an out point. Again, leave a little bit of space. I don't have to be really doing a fine cut here, I'll do that in the timeline. But then with the in and out point marked, you can create a subclip. Now the keyboard shortcut is CMD + U on a Mac, or I can go up here and type in subclip, and you can see that Make a Subclip is directly under the clip window, Make a subclip, and you can see the keyboard shortcut. As soon as I select that, it actually will give me this dialog box. I can give it a name. Now if I don't give it a name it's just going to use the name of the original clip, and add one, two, three, four. But I may do a couple things, I may type a few words of what she's saying so it's a quick reference. I may have jotted down and taken notes and just say, "This is the first clip," and I know if I look at my piece of paper, clip number one says the following. So we're going to call this new book, and I'm going to say OK. And you'll see down here that a new clip has been created, and it doesn't look exactly like the other ones, it actually has like little brackets on either side. That implies that that is a subclip. And if you notice, the name is new book, it gives me a reference. Now, if I wanted to open this up, if I double-click on it just like any other clip, it brings that clip in but only from that one, small section. As a matter fact, you will see. Tell me a little bit about this new book that you have. - So this new book is called "Wise Craft Quilts." And it's called, it's "A Guide to Turning Beloved Fabrics into Meaningful Patchwork." And... - So I'll probably cut out at that point, but I've created this clip, and I want you to see what happened, when I bring this into a sequence, and let's go ahead and make a brand new sequence, CMD + N is the keyboard shortcut. We're going to use the default that we learned about in the previous class, "Adobe Premiere Pro Video Editing, The Complete Guide," we talk a lot about creating sequences. And we defined that one of the best default ones to use is the DSLR presets. So I'm going to go ahead, go to Digital SLR, choose 1080p, 1080p/30. And hit OK, that's going to be my new sequence. And we'll change it from Sequence 01 to Main Interview. And with that opened up, I can start dragging the clips in. And so I'm going to drag in new book. Now remember, this is a subclip, so it's only that one little chunk. So this is great, I can start creating subclips of every sound bite I like and taking notes, and that's exactly what I would do. You see we have a pop up that the clip doesn't quite match, that's okay, I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to keep the existing settings. And you'll notice something surprising has happened. I'm not that surprised because I set myself up for this, we shot this using a camera that recorded 4K ultra-high definition. So when I bring it in to a 1080p timeline, it's way bigger than the space I have. And I did this intentionally, because I want to be able to perhaps reframe it, or even use the same camera as two cameras going from a wide to a close up. So I'm going to go ahead and take this shot and right-click on it. And when I right-click, I can say Set to Frame Size, and now it will fit in perfectly. But I'm ready for my next cut, if I want it to be a close up from the same camera. Let's go ahead, go back to our primary camera that we were working with, with the good audio. And here's a little trick, if you don't want to dig down and find it, if you go to the little stack of papers here, some people call this a hamburger, it's a big hamburger, I can actually see all of the previous clips I used, and I'm going to go down and just quickly grab Primary camera - good audio, and keep going through, and start creating more and more subclips. I'm only going to do a couple more now because you don't need to watch me create a dozen subclips to start editing, but it will give you an idea one way to attack editing an interview. So I'll go through, and I'll find another sound bite I like. - For seasoned quilt makers that are... - And I remember that I asked her the same question again much later. So I'm going to cheat, I'm going to go ahead and find that. And if you need to run through and find things, a lot of times instead of looking at the video, I can go ahead and switch with this little button down here, looking at my video to my audio wave form. So I'll click on this button down here, I have my audio wave forms. And what's really cool here is I can see when I was asking questions so I can quickly jump to different sound bites. You've got to tell me by the time we hit the fourth... - This book is for everybody. - Okay, . - Okay. - And go ahead. - This book is really for beginners. - So I got that really nice, tight sound bite that I was trying to get earlier. And I can either do it by looking here and just picking the wave form, I can use the plus key to zoom in. The other thing I can do is set my play head at this point, switch back to video, mark an endpoint, and it's going to be the exact same place. - This book is really for beginners who would like to learn more about quilt making, and seasoned quilters who have fabrics that they don't know what to do with and are looking for new design ideas. - Great little sound bite, mark the in, mark the out, CMD + U, create the subclip. This is about the book, hit ENTER. There is my new subclip. I probably do all my subclips first, I usually don't subclip and then bring them in. But for educational purposes, I'm kind of jumping the gun here. And I'll bring that into my timeline. - This book comes out in March. This book is really… It's called, it's "A Guide to Turning Beloved Fabrics into Meaningful Patchwork." - Into meaningful patchwork. So that's my out point, I'm going to probably cut out at this point, probably go back a few frames, get rid of the breathe. Completely cut out the end. One of things we learned, that if you use the Q key, you can cut everything to the left of the play head. If you use the W key you can cut everything to the right. I'll hit the W key, it cuts off the very end. Let's go to the beginning of the next clip. - This book is really… - And let's see how it feels. - …Fabrics into Meaningful Patchwork. This book is… - So I don't want the… So I can zoom in, and just bring that little pop out. - This book is… - So again, Q, W, hit the Q key, takes off the beginning. - …Patchwork. This book is… - So you notice that I once again have this big, blown up image because I shot in 4K. Well, I want to leverage this. I can go in, and I'm just double-clicking on the window instead of shrinking it down to fit. I'm just repositioning it so I can go from a wide shot… - …Patchwork. This book is… - …to a close up. Let's watch that one more time. - …Fabrics into Meaningful Patchwork. This book is really… - So if you didn't expect the cut, you may not see that cut, obviously we know it's there, so you see there's a head shift. But this could be a good opportunity to use B-roll or cutaway which could either be the book that we shot, we shot a close up of her hands holding the book, and I could put this on the second layer as B-roll. I could put the reaction shot of me nodding if I don't feel that the cut is smooth enough. But keep in mind that you need to watch your cuts objectively because your audience doesn't know the cut's coming, and you may know it because you're looking at the timeline, and it may be more jarring to you. So sometimes you don't need to cover that up with B-roll. And I would continue to go through and cut and clip and find and tell my story by listening and playing and reordering. Now the key thing when cutting an interview is, less is more. So generally, I start off with a much longer, and I start slicing and dicing and seeing what I can remove that really tells the story without giving extra information. Because that's one thing we're fearful of, "Oh, this is an important thing that she said, what is she going to say if I cut it out?" You need to tell a specific story, you want to tell it succinctly, so you want to remove anything extra, and then remove a little bit more. That really is the best way to attack cutting down an interview. So I'm going to lay one more clip down on the timeline, and then we're going to actually put in some B-roll, maybe some music, try to smooth this out a little bit just to give you an idea of what we're going to create. So let me go ahead and zoom back a little bit. I'm going to hit the minus key, leave me some space. Let's hear what she says and see if we can find a good out point. - Like to learn more about quilt making and seasoned quilters who have fabrics that they don't know what to do with and are looking for new design ideas. - Nice out point. Let's see what she talks about next in this clip. - …ideas. - Excellent. That was great... So here's one more trick. Sometimes I like to do all my subclips in the source window, but there are times when it might be easier to do it in my timeline. So I'm going to go ahead and mark an endpoint where the play head is, where I'm asking a question. And I'll just take this all the way to the end. And I'm going to throw this entire clip into my sequence, into my timeline. And I do this for a specific reason, let's bring this full screen, so there is my sequence, and I can go ahead and make the video bigger and make the audio bigger. And the nice thing here is I can see where I'm asking questions, because there's a break. So sometimes I'll throw a whole interview into my timeline and just cut out all the junk, and now I have a nice string to of all the good sound bites to work with. So I could go down here. I know she's going to start talking at this point. - So the name of the book is… - So again, we do that whole Q, W thing, Q cuts out the beginning. Go to the end. - ...in some way in quilt projects. - I'm going to cut that, CMD + K. Play again. Could you tell me a little bit about some of these… Me asking a question. She stumbles. There's my point, Q, cut out the beginning. So I'm using just a few keyboard shortcuts, and very quickly… - A lot of people have… - Can cut this down. So I know she's talking for a while, I'm going to just jump. There's my question. CMD + K slices it, goes to the next comment. It looks pretty short, I don't know if that's going to be useful. - World quilt domination is what I'm hoping for. - Well, it may not work in the body of it, but you never know what you're going to use. So I'm going to go ahead, and I'm going to keep that, hit the Q key, move to the end of that, again CMD + K. You can see you can do this very quickly. There we have another sound bit, hit Q, and she probably finishes that up right here. - …projects that I do. - And I think I can just cut off everything at the tail, the W key. Now, I can take advantage of this and create subclips directly out of these clips in my timeline. Let's go back and look at the entire interface. If I select a group right here, this is one of the sound bites. Okay, if I play this you'll hear what she says. - A lot of people have questions about quilting with things like… - So questions about quilting. With the clip selected in the timeline, if I hit CMD + U, it actually will allow me to make a subclip out of that and put that subclip into my primary folder. So this is questions about quilt making, QM. When I hit OK, I now have this great, new subclip that I can bring in. So here's the trick, you can throw the entire interview into your timeline, take out all that extra stuff. Now you have separate soundbites. And then once you have it cut down, select any one of those or each one of them, hit CMD + U, create a subclip, label it, and now you're developing all of your subclips over into your bin, and you can create a new sequence and start dragging in the ones you want. So it's two ways to attack creating subclips, but the idea is once they're created you now have something manageable that you can work with. Let's quickly go ahead and throw in some B-roll and show you how we can smooth things out in our edit. So we have three different types of B-roll to work with, we have close ups of her hands holding things. We have the images that she gave us, if she's talking about something such as a graphic of the book. And if the interviewer is being shown, we have the reverse angle of me nodding my head. All of these are very useful ways to cover up an edit point. So I'm going to go ahead and shrink this down so that it's a little more manageable. The SHIFT + plus and SHIFT + minus keys, quick keyboard shortcuts so you can make things a little smaller. And let's go ahead and cover up our very first edit of the book. - This book is really… - So I don't need to have her hold her hand up there, I'm going to use the graphic, it'll be kind of nice, it'll be quick, I'm running and gunning. So I have something called Blair media, I'm going to bring it full screen. These are all the images, this is the perfect opportunity to switch to the icon view because I can actually see my images very quickly. There is my book cover, and I can drag it and bring it in as a cutaway. And you'll notice when the graphic comes in it comes in huge, because it's a one-to-one pixel ratio. I'll right-click on this, I will choose Set to Frame Size. It now brings it down to something that's a little more manageable. And if I play this, you see there's a little bit of a challenge going on here. We can see behind her or we can see behind the book. Her so, I could if I wanted to move this up a level and put some black underneath it, or if I needed to I could just drag it down to the main line, and now is just over black. If I want this to be a little bit smaller, I can double-click on and select it, bring it down a little bit smaller, maybe give it a little bit of rotation for style, and move it over. I could put it there. Here is another trick that I could do. If I didn't want to bring it down, I could go ahead, and I'm going to just show you for an example, this is the case where my framing would be important, I could go ahead and bring this up over here. I'm going to go ahead and shrink this down, set the frame size. And now I can actually bring something in and leverage a picture in picture, which might work in some cases. The idea here is, I want to give you options, things you can think about to smooth out cutting an interview. Another option that we had talked about was the B-roll. I'm going to go ahead and move this book back to where it was, just do a few undos. Here on this next edit, we have this good here, I want to nice and tight, right-click, Set to Frame Size. So we go from that to the wide again. When cutting always cut on action, and that way people don't notice the move. - They don't know what to do with it or looking for any design ideas. So the name of the book is Wise Craft… - Obviously this is not continuous, but it gives you the idea of that, if I was going to cut to this I would cut to it on a move because our eyes are drawn to the book. The other option we did have was the reverse angle. And what I want to find is me as the reverse angle. So we could cut to this reverse angle here, and I could drop that on. And what I want to do is, I'm just basically nodding and she's talking, her head's moving. So I can mark an in point, and out point I'm going to arbitrarily. I'll throw it on the second track. And so she's talking. - And are looking for design ideas. So the name of the book is "Wise…" - See, her head's moving. She wasn't talking about the book and I'm listening, and that's a good cutaway. - …Craft Quilt." - So if it was something humorous maybe I can make this a little bit longer. - So the name of the book is "Wise Craft Quilts. A Guide to Turning Beloved Fabrics…" - And don't get me talking. So we'll go ahead and trim that down. But you see the advantage of if you're going to show the interviewer, use that to your leverage, always record that over the shoulder of her talking, and I shouldn't have been talking but we did have a conversation. - The book is "Wise Craft Quilts." - There is my little smile, select the clip, hit the W key, trim off the end. And there we have a nice B-roll cutaway. So I would just continue to make the audio cut do a narration or a voice set, because it's her story, and then find the B-roll to smooth out those edits, whether I'm using cutaways, reverse angles of me, things she's talking about, things that she's holding, or even using a Morph cut which allows me to cut an edit point smoothly. And I'm going to go ahead and do this, add a little bit of music, and we'll come back and play it, and you can see how I finish up this edit. I do want to point out, we did use multiple cameras, and I can leverage this, I can create a multi-camera clip, and still go through and slice and dice, and then bring those separate multi-cam segments in, and switch between angles. So what I would do is I take all of my clips, and let me bring this full screen. I have my main Interview, I simply duplicated a bunch of these clips, and threw them into a folder called Main Interview. And I'm going to grab these elements here. So we have the primary camera with our good audio. I have my pocket camera, I have camera two, the wide shot, and I have my clean audio if I wanted to bring that in. You see some of my subclips are put into this folder, I would right-click it, and I will create a multi-camera clip source sequence. I will check my defaults. What I usually like to do is make sure that it's going to be the right size to match my sequence, so in this case for a sequence preset, DSL 1080p/30. The reason I am selecting this sequence instead of having it being made automatically is because I'm working with media that's different frame sizes. I have that ultra-high definition media, and I don't want everything to be really small except for that one clip. So with that done, I'm going to go ahead and say OK, create a multi-cam clip. It's going to do its magic, we'll listen to the audio in one moment, it'll be ready for us to look at. Let's load that into the viewer, there's my multi-cam clip. So I'm ready to work with this. I could go ahead, and I could shrink that corner or I can leave it full and reposition that. But I can work with this exactly the same way that I worked with the other clips. I could go ahead and throw it into a sequence, go ahead cut out the fat, mark in and out points, edit, and then select any of those, and make subclips if I wanted to, but it's the same procedure. And then once I've cut it down I can now treat that as a multi camera clip and start switching or choose the angle that I want. But the nice thing is, it gets everything in sync, and I can go through, and I can use the magic of multiple cameras and the magic of Premiere to shorten the time it takes to cut together this interview. So now we have basically the bare bone structure of the story that we want to tell. The next steps of course we bring in lower thirds, put in the title, bring in the music, see how that smooths things out. Let's see if it tells the story that I want. I'll determine if I need maybe something extra that she talked about that I didn't get as B-roll, maybe I need to build a graphic. And then I'd watch it from beginning to end and see if it tells the story that I want. Hopefully I don't need to add any additional information, but if I do and it might be in the context of a much larger program, I can often have the narrator do that, or I could work in a way to segue into something if I have an abrupt cut, sometimes it's a dipping to black and coming back up, sometimes it's a title card as a transition with some B-roll, or just even a music sting to go from one section to the next section. But usually the last thing I do is I watch it and I watch it with somebody else who hasn't seen any of the interview, and see if they follow along, and see if they get bored. And then if I need to, I cut it down again, and I try to clarify things. So there you have it, the strategy of not only shooting an interview and what you need to do in regards to set up and working with a talent, but also bring it into your non-linear editing program, making some decisions, refining it, reviewing it, and really reviewing, refining, reviewing, refining just like you would any editing project so you can get the perfect story in the right amount of time. So from the beginning to end, those are the techniques that will help you create the interview that you want.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Rough Cut of Blair Stocker Interview
Location Considerations

Ratings and Reviews

artmaltman
 

I found this course very helpful and I recommend it. I picked up a lot of tips, and frankly this course made me realize that putting more preparation into client interactions AND using a more sophisticated production pays off in higher quality video. I wish he had gone into more detail on microphones and camera gear but I can pick that up on review sites.

Jess Connor
 

At first, I felt like the class was difficult to get into during the "live" instruction but quickly found after the first few classes that the information was extremely valuable. Maybe it was just me- maybe it just wasn't my style at first. I absolutely would recommend this class to anyone interested in learning interview or basic film skills. It's brilliant!

Geo Wright
 

Abba was great at explaining why you would do a specific thing in an interview and also the editing as well. Well worth watching.

Student Work

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