The massive video editing extravaganza! – 50 tips! Part 7

Heading onwards to tips 31 to 35!

31. Using multiple video and audio tracks. Tracks stack. Simple. Adding tracks is usually simple, and you can have a lot of them. With video tracks, the top one is the one that is seen. If it has an alpha channel or a chromakey effect, then you can see some bits below. Also using picture-in-picture effect allows the tracks underneath to be visible. Audio tracks act differently though. All audio tracks play at the same time, although they can be muted or turned on to solo allowing easy manipulation between tracks.

The Final Cut Pro timeline, one of many NLE programs that can do multiple video tracks

32. Syncing up video and audio. Most of the time audio and video will already be in sync. If you’re capturing the audio separately though, you will need to sync them up in post. Depending on how you filmed this depends on how difficult this would be. What do I mean? Well, it is possible to hook up an audio recording device up to a camera to sync up time codes. Syncing up timecodes means it’s fairly easy to sync it in post production, simply match the timecodes of the video and audio. If the timecodes don’t match, you can still match up the sound and audio using the clapperboard, combining the two the first frame the clapperboard closes with the sound.

33. Smoothing. Any form of smoothing destroys information. In essence, you’ll lose detail. Whether it’s a blur, pixelisation, de-grain smoothing, etc… If you need to do it, just be careful not to destroy too much detail, lest you make the picture more cartoon like.

34. Legal Colours. Monitors and TVs display things differently. Though it’s not always a problem with modern TVs, certainly older monitors will display colours differently. It’s why some suites have proper monitors, to allow us to see what the footage would be like viewing it on a regular television. Most of the time there’s some setting on editing suites to limit the colours to those that are legal on TV’s thus taking out potential problems later on. Nice!

AVID's safe colour limiter effect

35. Absolutes. When adjusting colour, be aware of the absolutes. Adjusting the colours can sometimes mean crushing the range a bit. What does this do? Well, instead of having smooth tones, you get patches of the same tones. This can happen with all colours as well as black and white. The least you have to adjust the colours, the better.