The Art of Documentary-Style Video Editing
After spending over a decade running an agency that began primarily as a video production company, I have crafted hundreds of videos of all kinds, and in doing so certain essential tactics have stood out that are of key importance.
I have trained these tactics to at least a dozen editors over my time, some of which left the company to run their own post-production houses from the knowledge learned.
Here is a breakdown of my top 5 essentials when crafting post-production.
Editing is like sculpting, you begin with a vague and messy blob, then chisel away at it piece by piece.
I sometimes joke when telling editors to begin a cut by telling them that they just need to gather a bunch of shit together in the timeline and then pretty much start molding that glob of messy shots into an organized story that makes sense.
This blob approach allows you not to have to revisit your bin of shots because your sequence is filled with globs stacked as vertically high as you need them, each color-coded and often even coded using markers in the timeline.
Stack your scenes vertically so you can see everything.
You can call me a madman or you can call me brilliant, but for me when editing any story I want the best possible shots and I want to be able to see how those shots fit into the shots around them. To do this I prefer stacking my timeline vertically with globs of shots, color-coded and grouped by scene. If you have 10 takes for one scene you might only use two shots or you might use a sequence of seven shots, depending on what the narrative is. This is why it's important for me to be able to see all of my options above my narrative track. It's for this reason that I actually prefer having vertical monitors so I can see up to 60 tracks at once all with thumbnail previews. I then have the bottommost tracks as the ones that are enabled while every track above it that's being auditioned for the final cut is disabled.
This specific technique is probably most unique to me and most game-changing for the editors that I train often people don't give themselves much wiggle room to change their Edit once they start building a cut, but cuts are dynamic and sometimes you need to go back and see your options so rather than keeping your options in your bin or your Production folder it's so much faster and cohesive to simply scroll up to see what options are available by looking at the blob of shots in your timeline in the tracks above.
Don't overlook your music and don't be afraid to enhance or tweak it.
When crafting videos it's easy to take a great story and ruin it with poor music. These days you can find music for next to nothing but often that music is soulless. Interestingly enough, I have found that the higher the budget I have for music in my videos the better the video turns out which does make perfect sense. I think it's rare but totally possible for people to find great music at a very low cost, but sometimes it takes an entire day of listening to about 60 different songs before you can find the one that really strikes the tone that you need.
Beginning and ending matter
When selecting a song, it's important to pay close attention to the intro and the outro of the music. Often I will find songs in which they just kind of end abruptly and then it's a shame if you were to spend an entire week editing a video to that song only to find out that the ending doesn't have the nice bowtie on it that you would like. The bowtie that I'm talking about is usually a single note hit on the one measure sustained and gradually fading away. If you do get stuck with a song that abruptly ends on the fourth measure, you might be able to save it by taking the intro and reversing it or by having something like a symbol crash at the end or you could literally pull out your music software and create a piano note that matches the same key to create that final note. Rather than doing all this work, it's best to simply find a song that has a strong ending beat because the ending beat is probably the most important part of your entire video.
Expect and plan for happy mistakes
When editing video it's often the case in which it seems like A portion of the edit is up to sheer luck and acts of God when happy mistakes happen and the timing of the music happens to go perfectly with the timing of your scene. This is rare and usually the other way around is the work in which you have a scene and you might have to chop and splice in every time and even rate stretch your music to fit the pacing of your scene. When looking at a rough cut, it's sometimes helpful to have 10 different songs in your timeline and to audition each one taking special note of when the song builds or eases tension to see if it fits the story at hand. Obviously the supplies to documentary style content as opposed to something like a music video or something like a high-budget film that would have a Composer doing most of the timing..
Timing is EVERYTHING and shot complexity informs timing.
Lets say we have two shots, one is a close-up of someone's face and one is a wide panning shot of many people. Which shot ought to be shorter and which shot ought to be longer?
It comes down to BRAIN RETENTION.
My brain can retain the information of the close-up of the face a lot faster than it can retain the wide shot of many people, therefore when editing simpler shots to retain can be on screen for a shorter amount of frames than complex shots that have a lot more information and story in them.
Every shot should be not too long and not too fast for the brain to retain
This may sound a bit confusing but when editing any story, it's important to watch each shot over and over and over again and ask yourself. Am I seeing this shot for too long or am I seeing this shot for too short of time? When watching a rough cut sometimes you can be looking at a shot and it's quite simple of a shot and your brain gets to a point in which it's ready for the next shot and if the next shot doesn't happen, then you're wasting your audience this time. This is why if you have simple shots they can be a lot faster and you don't want them to linger.
Now the same thing goes with the opposite in which it's easy for editors to have a shot too quick in which your brain can't retain the information on the screen. This often happens with shots that are moving or wider or just have a lot of story in them if I'm watching an edit in which there's a shot, but I'm not quite sure I had enough time to see and comprehend everything in the shot, and that means the editor hasn't given me enough time to retain the information and the shot needs to be longer.
Video editing requires a multitude of skills the content of each shot being important, but also the pacing of each shot being essential to create a flow of information that is not too fast or slow for your audience to retain.
Organize your timeline with labeled markers and color
When editing docu-style videos it's important to know that you don't have psychic capabilities and the ability to look at an audio waveform and know exactly what that waveform is talking about. This is why it's important before you even start putting shots over your narrative that you label and color code your timeline so that you know what narrative goes where this way you can drag the shots that matter into the narrative that they fit into without having to guess where that is by looking at Random waveforms on the timeline.
