What strategy to edit a huge messy project ?

Hi everyone,

I come to you guys because I have LITTLE EXPERIENCE in editing and I am getting a bit overwhelmed by the HUGE PROJECT I’m working on…

My explanation is quite big and I have many questions so I hope some of you will have enough time and patience to help me. PLEASE, I will be very thankful. I really believe I can create a beautiful film if I don’t get crazy before that !

Basically I have been traveling across Australia for a year and a half and I have been filming all of it and did over 100 interviews. The thing is that I didn't chose any direction/topic before to start filming. I wanted to chose it depending on what the people would tell me. During the interviews, my main question was : "What do you think about Australia?" and from there started a conversation. So i end up now with lot of different talks about lot of different subjects from lot of different kind of people. For instance I have Aboriginals, Long time Australians, Short time Australians, immigrant, bag packers ect. They talk about many things like : Cultural diversity, Racism, Life, Work, Capitalism ect.

SO my big question is : WHAT IS THE BEST STRATEGY TO EDIT ALL THIS?

I know the first thing to do would be to write the story but it looks like there will be many small stories and I want also a big final movie. For that reason, I decided to make SMALL VIDEOS FIRST, like episodes and THEN A BIG MOVIE which would be a portrait of Australia trough the diversity of its people and their vision of life.

To try to do that, this is what I did so far :

Few months/weeks ago :

- I imported all my media in FCP X. I have ONLY ONE EVENT call “Australia Footage”.
>>>>> Is that a good idea ? (the thing is I really need everything in the same Library as later for the big movie I will need a bit of everything) If its not good, would creating lot of new events take much more space on my hard drive and make the computer run slower ?
- I have watched everything and selected "favorites" and “rejected".(I went from a total of 140 hours to 50 hours of everything BUT “rejected” including 7 hours of “favorites”).
- I 've tried to put keywords but I did that before to have an idea of my little stories so they are not very relevant.
- I’ve also written down everything that is said in the interviews. First I have done it by character on Word and then by subjects on CeltX. It helped me a lot to organise my thoughts about the final results but its still not clear.

Few days ago :

- Finally back in France and all settle ready to work I've started putting down some things on the time line. This is how I did it :
1. I chose a section in my footage that could be independent. For instance : all the videos about "John the truck driver"
2. I did a keyword for that section "John Truck driver" just so I would have only those videos in the browser when I select the keyword.
>>> Is that a good idea or should I create an other event ?
4. I created a new (and first) project called "John Truck Driver"
3. I went from first video til last and put sections I liked one by one in the timeline and tried to organise it per subjects like : introduction of john, john talking about capitalism, john talking about being a truck driver in Australia ect. but I became a bit messy as I ended up with lot of clip I wanted to use but didn’t know how to classify them.

So NOW I have a Project call "john the truck driver" and in that project, on the timeline I have few "groups of clips" separated by a gap and each representing a different subject and at the end lot of lonely clip that don’t fit in any particular subject.

THE THING IS there is the story about the Truck Driver but also later there will be the story about Australia and I’m not sure yet what I will use so it make it difficult…

4. I plan to do that for all my main characters that I have filmed enough to create a small story OR/AND subjects that I have enough footage to create a small video like “Bagpacking in Australia” for instance…

5.After all that I’m hoping that by the time I finish all those small project I will know my footage well enough to have the big movie in my mind…

So basicly, in addition to my small questions above, the main one is : What do you think about my organisation and how could I improve it ? I feel like its gonna be messy and I might get lost very quickly…

Also, if you know any tutorial or books about the general method of editing for those kind of project I would be very happy to know about it !

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOU HELP.
I hope to read you soon.

Arthur.

Salut Arthur, and welcome to the forum.

Quite an interesting project you have there! Let's deal with your questions one by one.

- I imported all my media in FCP X. I have ONLY ONE EVENT call “Australia Footage”.
>>>>> Is that a good idea ?

You could have created different Events based on shooting day or whatever, but keeping everything inside the same Event has a major advantage: you can create single keyword collections and smart collections for any clip in your Library and you can search for clips across your entire Library. Something you (unfortunately) cannot do when you have different Events. So yes, I would consider this a good idea, especially as you will be taking clips from anywhere in your Library to create the stories.

I did a keyword for that section "John Truck driver" just so I would have only those videos in the browser when I select the keyword.
>>> Is that a good idea or should I create an other event ?

Nope, that's a very good idea. Keyword Collections are very powerful, you don't need separate Events for this. And what's more: you can assign multiple keywords to the same clip. You can have a keyword collection for each character, plus have different keyword collections for subjects your characters are talking about.

It would of course be best if you had a rough idea of what individual stories you are going to tell and how you will build your main movie. When you know this you can skim through your footage and assign specific keywords to every clip based on the projects you want to make.

But you also can continue to organize first, and while organizing you will get a better idea of the topics you will be able to create. Creating temporary Projects for every possible subject is a good idea, it will give you an overview of the clips you can use and of the different topics you could create.

Just remember, with this kind of huge projects there is a golden rule called "kill your darlings": be very strict in your selections and don't fall in love with your characters or your pictures. Just keep the very best interviews and images you can use to tell a good and concise story, and throw away the rest. This will make your life and your edit a LOT easier

- Ronny

ArthurCool wrote: ....WHAT IS THE BEST STRATEGY TO EDIT ALL THIS?...

There are two different layers to your editing: (1) The creative layer -- conceptually how you want to tell the story, and (2) The implementation layer -- the underlying mechanics of using FCP organizational features to achieve your goal. The below focuses on #2.

Even though you are already familiar with FCP X, it might be good to review the available organizational tools and methods. There are many good sources for this; below are a few:

Warp speed keywording:


Fast Editing with the keyboard:


Basic rating workflow:


Used Media Range Improvements:


Power of the Timeline Index:


Smarter Smart Collections:


Here is a complete narrated step-by-step walk through of an actual production edit on FCP X, with emphasis on pre-edit organization. Note he was using FCP X 10.0.8, which is before the new library scheme. However 99% of what he says applies to the current version:

fcpxposure.com/video-editing-with-fcpx-at-the-aipp-2013/

Hi Joema, sorry for the late reply, something went wrong and I just saw your reply now. Thank you so much.
All the best. Arthur.