Reviewing Day One

So I have been watching the footage I got from October 18 on my movie. I got the sound files from The Engineer, and it turns out that Windows Movie Maker, which I'm using for the initial cut until I can track down a usable Non-Linear Editor for some color correction and better sound editing feature, doesn't allow the use of the files that he created. Adobe Soundbooth will open them, but not save them as wav files for Moviemaker to use.

I've found I can save them as MP3's, but that creates yet another problem. Turns out those compressed sound files also compress the time at a rate of less than a quarter second per minute. Not significant for a music file you play on your iPod, but when you're trying to align the sound to your uncompressed video, it makes a huge difference. The Engineer turned around and was able to resave the files as wav files, so I was able to retain the uncompressed sound for aligning it to the 3 1/2 hours of footage I got from my 15 hours of shooting on the 18th.

I'm praying I can cut most of this together to be some kind of coherent movie, but it's a little daunting at this point, especially all the pauses and "line" requests during the cuts. I was a little "Ed Wood-ish" in my shooting style in that most takes only have one take to them, so if something doesn't work, I have to cut away to another take to cover the mistake. I'm hoping I don't have to do it too often.

I did get ahold of one amusing story from the shoot, though. The Engineer had set up the sound for an outdoor shot, and placed his laptop (that was recording the sound) on the hood of his truck. Well, he moved a little too far away from it or something, and that's how you get a Mac to crash. It hit the ground and popped several catches on the case, besides shutting it clean off (yeah, that sound file didn't come through, though I did get the crash on the camera's sound). He snapped it back together, turned it back on, and proved just how sturdy that Mac was. It worked fine the rest of the day and still does.

Of course, from that same scene, I discovered my amateurish blocking of the scene. Scene 33. It was such a mess that the footage I got is completely unusable. I cut together a hasty version of it to see if it would even remotely work since not only was the blocking a mess, but the lighting was awful as well in several takes. Yeah, it'll be something we'll have to redo this coming Saturday.

The only other question mark we have to work out before I can start editing is how to extract the soundtrack once the film is done. So far we haven't figured out how to get an uncompressed audio track out of the movie file. So at this point, nothing is edited. Have to figure that out before I can cut on it.