Pre-Production and Post-Production examples

[Lazymonkeygod]

One thing I can't seem to find anywhere online is pre and post production videos. It would be extremely helpful if there was someone who'd be willing to offer tutorials showing pre and post production videos to show how their workflow goes. That would greatly help people like me who's starting out.

[Bpotter908]

Was there a specific piece of information you were hoping to learn or did you just want a general video about the video editing process?

[Lazymonkeygod]

Was there a specific piece of information you were hoping to learn or did you just want a general video about the video editing process?

I guess what I want to see is the whole process of going through raw footage and turning it into something amazing. I know it's a long process but it would be nice to have a breakdown of the whole process in separate videos or something. Areas that I want to see is how does one choose what section of the raw to include in the final product, how they color grade it, and how they piece it all together. It would also be very interesting to offer raw clips to differ ppl and see how each of them will approach these raw videos and turn them into their own unique video.

[Bpotter908]

I don't think I'd want to screen capture an editing session to answer that, But I would be happy to write this text for you :P

What section of raw in final product?
I use 5 rules when choosing shots.

- Make sure the picture is good.
Camera is steady? Shot in focus? Lighting ok?

- Audio is good.
No distortion, buzzing, really loud background noise, although in some cases you have no choice but to use footage with some interference if you have 2 choices and one has noise and ones does not, go with the one without noise.

- Does the shot flow with what came before and what will come after?
This is down to artistic license depending on the video you are making, For example if the video is of a wedding ceremony, you don't have a shot of the couple leaving the church and then suddenly cut to them starting the ceremony. You have a shot of the bride walking up and then, the start of ceremony. So whatever the content is, it needs to flow right.

- Is the message communicated?
If I'm selling a car, why would the video focus on a DFS sofa and then suddenly we have a Ford Logo with the price of the car at the end? It's the same with people talking, most non professional speakers will say a lot of waffle due to nerves and little of the needed content. You often have to be brutal with such moments and cut cut cut.

- What I put in, the client needs to be happy with!
Get to know the client, find out what his/her goal for the video is, grab the vision they have and have that in the back of your head as you are chopping shots.

Colour Grading
Where possible, I try to make sure when I am filming that each shot is consistent with the last one with the camera's on board white balance and colour tools, I either adjust the hue of the image slightly or I brighten up the mids slightly for most videos but it depends on the art. As for what tool to use, In Final Cut I use a tool called "colour corrector" and there will be other such tools in other editors.

How to piece it together?
It depends on what video you are making, It's different most times depending on client requirements, style of video, ect.

A few rules that are mostly true whatever genre of video you are making is:

- Context Shots
Use wide shots of buildings, venues, locations to give context to where you are or what you are doing. Then use close shots or mid shots to give the detail in the scene and when you move to a new scene, go to wide to show people where you have moved to. I've seen this pattern in wedding videos:

Outside the Bride's house, inside the house, close up on bride, outside the church, wide shot inside the church, ect.

- 1-2 Types of transition and stick with it.
Either use hard-cuts or use fades, or at the most use both of them, but NEVER go crazy happy on FX. Even professional music videos use different transitions sparingly.

- Audio and Music
Make sure the audio of speech and music is balanced out, There is nothing worse than listening to the opening music of a video, then suddenly the talking head starts to speak at double the volume of the sound track and blows your head off with surprise! So work your way through the video whilst using the editors built in level meter and watch for consistency in volume when shots change.

- Cutaways
When filming, you should have some cutaways to jump to, These shots should give information or look like great eye-candy, you can use these shots to make the video more exciting or to cover up the fact that you have stopped someone talking halfway through a sentence and you can restart them talking at the time you want them to speak. Make sure you film lots of footage for you to use just in case!

That's how I approach my work-flow, I'm sure others here have their own styles of doing it, let's see what they say

[Lazymonkeygod]

Thank you for the thorough walk through of your workflow, Bpotter. I think I just need to see the whole process gone through once. I've read all about the process, but never had a chance to see it done professionally yet. It would be nice to be able to see that just to get an idea of how someone handles it. In other words I enjoy the "makings of a movie" kind of tutorials where they show you the tricks behind the scene.

[Bpotter908]

Unless you find a specific resource that someone has created, you won't find one that covers the entire process properly. The closest I ever saw from a professional movie doing that making of the film was "when editing we do this" Not "I capture the footage using x y z then I import it into this software, ect"

Also, You could watch a one sided video OR you could find a professional, ask to sit in and just watch them work with the chance to maybe ask a few questions here and there which would be far better watching them work than just a youtube video IMO.

[Lazymonkeygod]

It would be awesome to be able to sit with a pro and watch them work for just a day. But most of the impressive videos I see online are from people far away. Some of the locals are not as impressive as the ones online.

[Bpotter908]

Would you mind giving me an example of one of the impressive online videos?

[Lazymonkeygod]

One that I really liked and looked simple and straight forward is .

By simple I mean there's no fancy dolly or cranes. I'm very interested in seeing the raw clips to see what he actually captured. The color looks awesome. Magic bullet look?

[Bpotter908]

Right, I can stop panicking! I was afraid you were going to post something from a U2 Concert or some other high profile event.

I wonder if he used a Canon 5D for this video...For £2000 you get an incredible video camera that produces images that look stunning.

Anyway, back on topic! I'd suggest that you quite nicely get in touch with that editor on Vimeo, say to him that you saw the video and you were deeply impressed by the quality of the images and colour processing, You can ask him how he got it to look so incredible or what camera he used and if he's nice, he just might end up telling you! Or if he is not, he won't tell you. Either way, you could get to the answer right away with nothing to lose, or you can ask us lot who will guess at how he made it.

Why not give it a go?