Documentary Fine Cut

As soon as we finished our rough cut, we went away and came back the next day to go over what we had created with fresh eyes so we could take another look at it and see what needed to be changed. The main things we picked up on was that there was no title sequence and the sound design was quite poor, making the edit obvious and jarring in places. The levels that the sound was recorded at in different interviews was also a big problem as the sound fluctuated around quite a lot when moving from place to place. There was no or little atmosphere in the sound as well, especially in the outside interviews, so we needed to correct that as well. To help us speed up the process of editing all these small things we decided to customise our keyboard commands, especially the add edit key as we needed it to chop up specific parts of the sound.

Customising keyboard short-cuts to help us edit faster.

After we set up those we began with the list of things that needed to be done.

Adding a title sequence in.

Using the audio mixer to turn down the levels on loud footage.

After a bit of online research, we found out that you could keyframe audio by enabling 'Clip Gain' and 'Volume' on the audio fast menu which proved very useful when fading out music and atmos under interviews.

Setting up audio keyframing.

Using audio keyframing to fade in and out over interviews.

Selecting multiple keyframes at once to raise atmos during cut-aways.

After quite a while of fine tuning both audio and visual, we finished our fine cut and we were very pleased with our progress and attention to detail, whilst still getting our heads around using Media Composer.

Finished fine cut.