Do you listen to music while you edit?

[WestSt]

Yeah, just editing, nothing fancy.

How do you keep it from getting boring and tedious? Do you take breaks? Snack constantly? How do you structure your time to be most efficient (and not distracted) if you have an extremely large amount of work to do?

I don't know how documentary editors, for instance, stay sane. It must take months of work and very long days.

Wow, am I glad I'm a hobbyist, and not a pro. I enjoy every step of the edit, CC, adding audio, text, and effects so much, I never get bored. Just sitting there with an enthusiastic smile on my face, all the way.

Only boring task is encoding/exporting and rendering. THEN, I grab a snack or whatever.

Edit: And also, because I don't do this all day, every day, I'm lucky enough that I can grab a beer or four, every time ;-)

 

[MovieCutter]

That's very impressive. Do you just mark good stuff as you go along, then figure out how it goes together in the remaining hour? Do you try to structure your time in advance when you're freelancing unsupervised and don't have restrictions like that? The lack of structure seems to be what's doing me in.

I have various workflows for various types of projects. For this one, given the quick turnaround, I was given all of the footage on either XDCAM disc or a CF card, which can turn out to be a couple dozen individual clips as opposed to one long one. I'll drop all of those into one timeline in order by timecode. I'll put a timecode reader filter on all the clips, that way my producer can see where we are easily on the overhead HD monitor. Then I'll just use in and out points in the sequence, copy that bits I need, paste them into another sequence and build as we go. I suppose I could nest the "raw" sequence and do the same in the Viewer to the Canvas as well, but I like the longer string out of the timeline...that's just how I work, other editors I'm sure have other workflows.

So it depends on the project. Over time you'll learn different tips and tricks and shortcuts to make your projects go quicker and smoother. I've been using FCP since I was 16 (now 27) and I still don't know every shortcut. Now that I'll be moving to Premiere for the most part, I get to figure it out all over again...yay...

Edit: And also, because I don't do this all day, every day, I'm lucky enough that I can grab a beer or four, every time ;-)

Who says we don't grab a beer or four?

I actually got this as a thank you from a client the other day for doing a simple 4 minute slideshow for her kid's school...no joke. And the company I freelance for regularly has beer in the office on Fridays after 3.

 

[Boisv]

It gets kind of boring. Do you? And do you advise listening to music? Hard to judge performance when the music is overpowering the dialogue is my one concern.

If what I'm doing doesn't require sound, then I always have either music playing or a movie on. So this would be when I'm color correcting, making titles, working on special fx, etc.

When I'm cutting, or mixing audio, my laptop has my full attention.

 

[WRP]

Who says we don't grab a beer or four?

I actually got this as a thank you from a client the other day for doing a simple 4 minute slideshow for her kid's school...no joke. And the company I freelance for regularly has beer in the office on Fridays after 3.

I used to work in a place that had a keg-orator in the office. And we were sponsored by Red Bull so we would get 8 cases a month so that and a little jager in the freezer next the jack and we were happy campers.

It didn't help immediately on the next floor below us was a bar we had internal access to with pizza slices and tall boys to go.

Now I have to keep my own stash in my suite at this new place...

 

[puckhead193]

judging from tonight, I know my least favorite sport softball... enough said

edit - well its a toss up between softball or tennis