Second Cut Almost Done

I spent a very good chunk of our vacation working on refining the edit for Treasure Hunt.  Replacing almost all the camera audio, tightening up some scenes and even rejiggering a couple.  But I’ve retained the perennial problem with the signing scene (though got some excellent suggestions from a friend yesterday) and am quite vexed at the unnecessary complexity surrounding credits.

Every movie ever made requires end credits, at an absolute minimum, and the vast majority will also require begin credits.  Why this isn’t a simple matter of adding in the text and selecting from a handful of default themes is beyond me, but it appears, after a number of hours of research, that that’s exactly the case.  And seemingly not just in the editor I chose, but this is common across editors.  Sure seems like an unmet need to me!

Anyway, as usual I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to, but I do think another week or so and I should have the second cut wrapped up.  Even after I’ve dealt with the singing scene and wrestled with the credits, I still have to watch the thing at least several times.  And it’s an hour long.  And find and fix any issues with the editor (I learned, for instance, when sticking in the opening credit place holder, that the user interface element that moves all the other clips up and down the timeline isn’t 100% perfect, necessitating manually repositioning of dozens of clips).

But I do feel it’s coming along.  With the new suggestions for editing the singing scene I believe I can finally get past this mental block and put it in shape for another review.  I expect to get back at least a handful of comments on the new version, so will have to carefully evaluate them and decide what to do, but my expectation is I’ll just be doing some final polishing.  Thus, my plan is to have the final cut wrapped up by the end of January.  There still remains the potential for color correction, though I feel I’ve addressed a number of those issues once I learned to adjust the brightness of each clip, as well as music.  Those issues may take another few weeks (or more), but I feel good that I’ll have the show wrapped up in the Feb/Mar timeframe.  Of course, there still exists the need to produce the extras and the behind-the-scenes, but I’m sure I’ll obsess less about the production values there.  Besides, I’ve come quite far as an editor in the last few months and don’t expect to take as long to get the same amount of work done.

Thank you all for your patience!  I do believe the light ahead isn’t an oncoming train, but the end of the tunnel 😉

Author: mitusents

Biochemist, MBA, then programmer. Now novelist, screenplay writer and hopefully director. What a strange trip it's been.