Speaker 1: Editing is a particularly interesting process. After long days of shooting, you're finally placing down the building blocks for your film and you can begin to see how it all flows. But with a lot of things to complete, including the picture lock, sound edit, music and colour grading, it can sometimes feel like a mammoth task, especially when working with a lot of footage and sometimes with multiple post-production collaborators. So today we're going to share with you some things we've learned along the way which will help you have a smooth workflow and divide and conquer your post-production elements. Welcome to the film look. If you're looking for some stylish transitions for your next video, check out Stanza by Rocketstock. You'll be cutting from scene to scene like a pro with this bold pack of 200 plus video transitions. Link is in the description below. Everyone's post-production workflow is a little bit different. Today we're going to share ours, but we'd love to know what you guys do too. So if you've got any useful post-production advice, drop them in the comments below. First things first, let's map out the whole post-production process. We'll be covering organise and sync, first picture assembly, initial feedback, re-edits, picture lock, sound, music, VFX, colour, quality control, device testing and 99% feedback stage, last minute changes and finally the export. You can see that this isn't a linear process as it is stackable in places. This is to accommodate multiple artists working at the same time. But we will get into that once we reach these stages. Let's get the boring one out of the way, organise and sync. Have you ever been working on a film and suddenly you agreed with a message telling you, you can't find a bunch of footage? Or did you think that because it's only a short film, you don't need to put anything in folders to then discover you regret the complex mess you've now made? Getting organised before you edit will help prevent any of these headaches from actually happening. We've actually covered organise and sync in a previous episode. So if you want to see our short film folder structure, footage offload procedure and AV sync workflow, you can follow the card up in the corner and find a link in the description. One more thing we'd like to add to organise and sync is labelling usable takes. On our recent short film, The Asylum Groove, the second AC, Mr Adam Orby, took note of every take from the shoot and noted down bad takes, good takes and great takes, including if there were any particular things to look out for. During organise and sync, we followed Adam's notes and labelled each take using different colours, red being unusable, orange as emergency spares, blue are good takes and green are the best takes. Next up, we have the first picture assembly. If post-production was compared to building a house, this would be laying the bricks. The first assembly is there to build a foundation on the timeline. Take your footage, cut yourself an edit and get it to a watchable standard. But don't start working on colour grading or VFX just yet, as you may end up working on shots which will be cut short or cut altogether during the next editing stage. You can spend as long as you like on the first assembly, but just remember that the next stage is going to be feedback, so you don't need to work on frame-to-frame details just yet and be open to people's interpretations of the cut. If you are looking for creative advice on editing, check out the channel This Guy Edits. He's got plenty of educational and entertaining videos all about how powerful editing choices can be for your films. I've put his channel down in the description below. If there was one mistake made by us zero-budget filmmakers, it's not letting people see the edit before we upload. This is the next crucial stage in post-production, initial feedback. During the editing process for a short film, there may be some things which you don't notice, and when you're looking at the footage for a long time, you start to become edit-blind. You start to anticipate the cuts, and the edit no longer feeds you new information, which means you're no longer watching the film from an audience perspective. Find your filmmaker friends, sit them down, buy them a coffee, and ask them to review your edit. Find a mix between people who know the story, such as the crew who helped work on the film, but also try to find some filmmakers who know very little about the project, so they can give you an accurate first impression of the film. And if you really need to, you can ask your family and friends, but just let them know that this isn't a finished product, and you should be asking them specific questions to gauge their feedback, because they might not know what to say until you ask them. Next up, we have re-edits. The first thing you should do once you have a list of feedback is step away from the edit. Step away for a few days and come back with fresh eyes and a fresh perspective. When you come back, watch the current draft of the film and make some notes, then compare these notes to the feedback you were given, and start to work on the next draft of the edit. A lot of the time, you will be given technical feedback. This could be cut shorter, this shot was jarring, the montage was a little too quick. This is feedback you can use to help give the audience a better viewing experience. You might also get feedback from a storytelling perspective. I didn't understand why this character did this. The character's motivations are unclear. Why was he mopping? This is feedback which is harder to fix in the edit, but if you have enough coverage, you might be able to solve it by extending the length of a shot, or placing that insert back in. If you can't solve it in the edit and it becomes a massive detriment to your story, please consider shooting some retakes. We actually had this issue with our show at the Asylum Groove. There's a moment when the character trips over a bucket and hits the floor. We had coverage of the fall, but no takes where we see our actor Chris actually make contact with the ground, which made the edit, originally, very jarring. So we scheduled a day to return to the location and shoot it. Without it, it just looked weird, so shooting those pickups were worth the extra time and effort. The feedback you get will be very subjective. Sometimes it's invaluable, or sometimes it's just a matter of different taste. But this is your fill, and it's your decision. If you wholeheartedly believe that the cut works the way it is, then it's your decision to keep it. But if multiple people point out the same thing, consider changing it up. This leads us to the picture lock. At some point, you will have to make the decision that you can't do any more to the edit. A picture lock is a promise not to change the edit. This is so departments such as sound design, music, VFX, and colour grading can begin to work. I do say departments. I imagine most of you, and that's us included, are just a bunch of people trying to make cool films. But these are departments, so let's stick with that. All of these departments will need a finished picture to work with. And by locking the picture, it means each department is working from the same source, which means when they are finished, they can simply plonk their work onto the edit. Yes, you can edit after a picture lock, but this does mean making changes to the sound, music, VFX, and colour grade, which we will be covering in our next video. So if you haven't already, consider subscribing. You can do that by hitting the orange lens cap right there. Stay tuned, and remember to achieve one cut at a time.