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Being replaceable as an editor isn’t necessarily something everyone is comfortable with.
This is especially the case if the industry is very competitive where you are
and there are far more editors than jobs available.
However, after many years of being on 24/7 troubleshooting duty and being unable to take leave or even fall sick,
it becomes very important to be able to handover your duties for your own sanity and personal life.
Sometimes, you realize that the world doesn’t fall apart because you’re not there and that’s a good thing.
Prepare a handover brief
This is a sample brief I prepared before I took 2 weeks off to get married.
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dhjkwk8t_16qv4xzg8
Google Docs is a pretty good tool for this, but you can use Zoho, Powerpoint or Keynote.
Creating Episodic Templates easily
If you can spare the time, read my article on the beauty of standardized filenaming before you proceed with this section.
Having these standardized filenames becomes very useful when you deal with an episodic series.
As each episode progresses, some creative decisions may be taken that will be maintained throughout the remainder of the series.
It is best to have these sequences saved so they are easily repeatable throughout the duration of the series.
These creative decisions thus have to be updated into a template project so all future episodes follow this standard.
But it’s a pain to have to make changes to your current episode while updating a template project to reflect these changes in the future.
If your project has all its filenames in this format, it’s simple to just hit cmd-f in the timeline, type “mytvshow-S03E04″, click find all.
All media specific to that episode will be highlighted. The other media which is generic (will remain the same week to week) remains unselected.
You can then “make offline” (shift-d) the clips and have a new template to start the next episode.
The reason I make the clips offline instead of deleting them is so that they retain motion, distort, crop, filters, etc
so you do not have to repetitively adjust the new files you are inserting to match a graphic doughnut, 16:9 box, etc.
It is much simpler to use “paste content” to replace the offline file with the current episode’s file.
Tune in to my next article to find out more about the power of the “find” function in FCP’s Browser,Effects Palette and Timeline.
Music
Make loops of your music and mark the points that cut together with markers.
This way, you can have a hard ‘in’ on the music, loop it as long as required, and cut out with a hard ‘out’ when the segment ends.
Sure beats fading it out.
There are some music libraries that give you short loopable files of their longer tracks. I never use them.
It’s generally better to take their long track and make that loopable in some way
so there is a progression and change in the music particularly if it will be on for long.
This depends a little on your sense of music timing and knowing how to count beats, but it sounds infinitely better.
Full Frame Graphic Transitions
When you have graphics transitions, use markers to indicate the points at which they are full frame so you can align your cut points to them.
Track Consistency
Be consistent with what you put on your video and audio tracks.
My full frame graphic transitions are always on the topmost track V8 or V9
unless they are meant to be within graphic doughnuts in which case they are on V5.
My main footage/B Roll is always on V1 unless it is cropped/keyed and has a background in which case it’ll be on V4.
With this track consistency, it makes it easier to do tasks throughout a sequence like
- running general ‘one light’ color corrections
- adding flicker filter to graphic files with fine lines
- adding broadcast safe only to shot footage which has not been legalized
In general, it makes it easier for the editor taking over to understand where things should go,
and he’ll put things in the right place so it won’t confuse you
when you have to take over the job when you get back.
Speed up project opening and saving
Make a seperate project for generic elements so your episode project only contains media from that episode and is thus smaller, easier to manage, and less likely to be affected by corrupt media.
Anticipate Problems
If your machine has been unstable or if the power trips in your office often,
let whoever takes over know so he/she can take measures to safeguard against any loss of data/work.
Example
I had problems with FCP v6.0.2 saving corrupted project files that gave the “this file is too new for this version of Final Cut Pro” error.
This error occurred in the same machine it was created in and even the autosave vault files gave the same error.
The project file could not be opened in 4 other machines.
I had to roll back through a day and a half of auto saves before I found one that was valid and could be opened.
My autosaves are 5 minutes apart and there weren’t big changes or large amounts of media imported in between.
Thus, I surmised that it was version 6.0.2 error as this had not occured in the previous few weeks I had worked on the project
and had only begun after a company mandated application upgrade. This problem has since been fixed in V6.0.3.
Fortunately, I had the v6.0.1 version of FCP in my portable hard disk.
I will talk more about the contents of this hard disk in a future article “FCP Toolkit“
I have these versions of FCP v5, 5.1, 5.1.2, 5.1.4, 6.0.1, 6.0.2 on my harddisk,
so that I can ‘downgrade’ the version of FCP I use anywhere if ever necessary, as it was in this circumstance.
I left a copy of the v6.0.1 application for the editor taking over me to use
by dragging the project file into the app file to open the project
using v6.0.2 instead and avoiding the corrupt project error.
