Over the weekend I became totally overwhelmed attempting to restart the momentum on editing my flick. It seemed everywhere I looked I found more and more sound files. Almost all with the same meaningless name (e.g., MONO-<some number>.wav). I was sure I had duplicates, as there were several times I was too rushed to ensure I only copied the new files off the storage media and just copied everything, but I didn’t think they were of this magnitude. That really bit me on the ass!
Being a programmer professionally, I eventually decided to write a series of scripts to help me find and locate the replicas. That took a number of hours, but eventually I was able to find the original collection of 530 audio files and match them up with the written records I got from the sound guy. I now feel 99% confident I have all the sound files.
Of course, the ones I have all have the meaningless names, so my next effort is to find out which ones the sound guy has already gone through to rename with the appropriate information. I know he hasn’t got them all, because the second scene isn’t in his renamed collection. One of the primary reasons I stalled so quickly when I finally started editing.
So the weekend wasn’t a 100% failure on my part, just, say, 99.9% failure. Hopefully this week will be different and I can get momentum to move into next week, when we’re on vacation, and still achieve my goal of having the next version done by the end of the year.
I’ve been communicating with an experienced editor and he’s agreed to give it a once-over once I’ve recut it. He’ll then let me know if he can help out in such a way to fit within my budget (which, frankly, is nigh on zero at this point). It’ll be a little tricky getting him all the data files and I might go with sneakernet rather than attempt to upload it somehow. Hopefully we can come to an accommodation and he can at least do the color correcting, to ensure the night scenes all look like night.
