Chapter 16
The Final Days
You have to let go of a project one day. All too soon, others will get their greedy paws on your baby, but this is only right and proper. Sometimes, if the experience has not been quite the most enjoyable event in your life, you’ll be all too delighted to pass the wretched thing on. Here are a few thoughts on the handover process.
This chapter is divided as follows:
16.1 Handover
Whether the programme is going to a dub, grade, or online, there are a few things you have to do to make this handover process as painless as possible.
No Frills—Leave Your Locked Sequence as Dubbers Would Wish to Find It
If the programme is heading for a grade, then remove all colour corrections you have introduced in the course of the editing process. It’s much easier for graders to start from the original pictures than to readjust half-corrected pictures.
AN EDL FROM AVID…STILL USEFUL FOR THE GRADE SOMETIMES.
You might decide to keep a copy of your colour-corrected pictures at the end of the programme, to give an idea to the grade of what you and the director had in mind visually for any sequence.
The Sound Barrier—You Say OMF, I Say AAF, and We Can’t Call the Whole Thing Off!
The dub will not want all the audio media associated with your project; it just wants the bits you’ve used, along with a handle of a couple of seconds on each side of your edit points. To export this selection, someone has to prepare either OMF (open media format) or AAF (advanced authoring format) files of the timeline soundtracks for import into Pro Tools, which is the software commonly found in dubbing suites. You should consult the dubbing mixer to ascertain his or her exact requirements.
Just as I warned you about editing software constantly changing, this is just as true for software used in a dubbing suite, so check for the latest specifications. The AAF format appears to be the favourite at the moment and seems to cause fewer problems during this export process. These AAFs (about 130 MB big for every 30 minutes of average source material) are usually delivered to the dub using fast file transfer networks. You could also burn a data DVD disc and deliver the files that way.
Vision On—Dubs Need to See the Pictures as Well
Video mix-downs are also essential for a dub; after all, they have to see the pictures as well! The trouble is, with long programmes, this can result in very large files, and some older operating systems still have a problem with this. In addition, FAT32 formatted drives (USB sticks and other portable drives) have a file size limit of about 4 GB. If this is the case, your options are limited to either divide the edit down into 15-minute lumps and mix-down these sections separately, or reduce the overall quality of the mix-down itself. With either route, the resulting mix-down is exported in an AAF format.
A Very Peculiar Practice—Things for the Grade
Grades still sometimes ask for EDLs (edit decision lists). These used to be the only way of transferring your offline edit information to linear kit for conforming. We thought we’d left them well behind, but they seem to be the simplest way of giving a grade your cut points.
The grade simply imports the EDL (vision only) and instantly the cuts appear in their kit’s timeline, just as they were in your edit. From this point, it’s easy to change the grading settings on different shots and not have to search for the shot changes manually. The format for EDLs is usually a CMX 3600, which is available as an option in the EDL generating window of most editing software.
16.2 Elements That Are Worth Keeping
Take Your Pick—What Should You Keep for Next Time?
As you close the door on your edit suite for the last time on a particular project, what should you take with you? No, I’m not talking about the 55" 4k LED panel, but rather what elements of the project you should copy onto your USB stick, in the hope you might be involved with a second series?
Here are some of the elements I would want to keep.
Project X—Gather Your Project Information Together
Set up an archive folder on your USB stick, clearly named in an umbrella folder like ‘Finished Projects’. The first and most important file, or set of files, you must put there is the final version of your project. This will naturally include all the bins, the most important of which will be the ones that include the final sequences, now finished with captions and leaders. These will be very useful when a new series or episode is started, as even having a copy of the closing roller, for example, will save you typing the whole thing in again for series two.
When I used to do Parkinson every week, all I did was duplicate last week’s locked sequence and simply copy it into a new project. It didn’t matter that most of last week’s media had been deleted; the basic structure was there, including titles, clocks, and advert break stings. All I had to do was to change its name and insert the new, as yet unedited, media into the old timeline and start editing. It sounds so simple now!
Quote…Unquote—Yes, Even the Words and How They Are Writ
Sometimes, and especially if the font is unique to your project, it is useful to keep the font or fonts that were used in your programme. Given that a future series will be some months away, it will almost certainly be edited on a new (or newly cleaned out) computer, where the fonts will have gone back to the standard ones issued with a fresh Windows or Mac installation.
It’s therefore good practice to export the fonts and add then to your archive folder on your USB stick.
Keeping Up Appearances—Save, Save, Save
Although captions, rollers (I know, scrolls!), effects, and so on are stored separately within the project in numerous bins, it is sometimes of great benefit at the end of a series or programme to assemble all this generic information and copy it into a new single bin which you can more easily carry through to the next year. To differentiate it, I would call the new bin something like ‘Series 1 Bits and Pieces’. This could contain settings for effects, colour corrections, captions, clocks, rollers, credits, in fact anything that might get used again.
I know the bin itself doesn’t contain media, but captions are easily recreated at some future date.
To have all this information in one place will save you the frustration of searching around in an old project when you have long forgotten exactly where you had filed everything.
The Last Song—Save the Titles
Last, keep a copy of the titles and any generic music which could be used for a future series, as this can so easily go astray when production staff move offices and do other work in the interim.
USB sticks are of substantial size now and can easily take much of this kind of material, both sound and vision, in an uncompressed format.