The footage is coming in now. So far only the interviews and b-roll, but a good chunk. My producer played the role of Assistant Editor for this part. He rented a deck and borrowed a high end color correcting LCD monitor mainly to look at the quality of the footage. In doing so, he thought that he’d kill two birds with one stone and capture some of the footage. He was so taken by the sharp, crisp, beautiful image that he ended up capturing all the footage. God bless the tech loving producer. And he knew what he was doing. He used the 720p24 preset and all the footage was brought in at 23.98 fps.
And being such a “hands on” producer with over 20 years experience (maybe more, but I won’t age him any further) he knows the basics of organization.
The script we have is locked. That is, it was written and re-written until the producer and network were happy with it. Typically with this type of script we only capture the interview bytes used in the script. But just in case we might need another sound byte, and because we are renting a deck for the captures, we captured the full interview tapes as well. We have the space, so why not?

Anyway, here is my basic organization:

First thing I did was break up the show into two separate projects, as this is a two hour (90 min in real time) show. I do this as to make the projects into more manageable sizes. The smaller the project, the less memory it takes and the faster things work.

As you can see I have bins for all the current cuts, and bins for all the previous cuts. Whenever I make changes to a cut, from the Radio edit (assembling the narration and interview bytes in order) to a rough cut, I duplicate the sequence and work from the duplicate. I will then take the previous cut and put it in the Previous Cuts bin. So when I am working on a cut, and want to recut a section, I make a duplicate and stow it away…because many many times I have said to myself “hey, the way I cut it two weeks ago works better than the way I currently have it.” Or if we cut something out and now want it back, we go to a previous cut. That has saved time more times than I can count on both hands.

Besides by CUTS bins, I organize things by B-Roll, Interview subject (then by sound byte), Host standups, stills, imported graphics, music, sound effects, whathaveyou. Organizing things like this makes looking for things very easy and very fast…VERY important for an efficient workflow.

This is how I organize my b-roll and interview selects:

When Music and SFX are imported, they will have their own bins and so on.

I also will create a project to store ONLY the final sequence for output…less things to bog down output.

I will be tackling the Radio edit in mid-December and get it all laid out so that we can plan for the re-creation shots. Recreations will be shot in January, and then I will start digging into the cut.

OH…and we are really hoping to get our hands on two HVX-200 DVCPRO HD cameras as soon as they come out, to be our B and C cameras for the battle recreations. We will shoot some test footage, do a quick test edit and upconvert and output to D5 for the engineers at the network to test. I’ll keep you updated as to the results.