Suite and Sour
Our first editing induction was a lecture, due to Covid we were all spaced out two meters apart in a large studio. We sat for two hours at a time as wave after wave of information was thrown at us. Thank goodness for note books! After a whole day of that I was ready for a break. We were promised the following weeks would be more hands on as we would have access to the editing suites. We could finally put everything we had been taught into practice. While this sounded great it wasn’t really an induction. We arrived and were sent to our editing suites and left for two hours with no guidance or real direction. Via a group chat we located our film and audio from a previous induction and began editing them together. Mine was awful.
How many sound files?
Fast forward another week and we are back in the editing suites doing another “induction” this time in syncing audio. Knowing where our footage and audio would be stored, we went right to work, only to realise there was no footage or audio to be seen. A mix up had meant it had all been left on the cameras and recording devices, thankfully the SD cards hadn’t been formatted yet. After an hour of messing with last weeks work we were informed yesterdays efforts were now available to use.
With an hour left I grabbed my note book and flipped back through my notes looking for information on audio syncing. I found it fairly quickly and attempted to do as I had written “select both film and audio, right click….” At this point I hit a brick wall, the Mac's mouse had no right click. A quick google and I discovered pressing Ctrl performed the same function as right clicking. So with everything now in place I attempted to sync the audio. I was rewarded with a pop up message saying this had failed as the audio tracks didn’t match. I was left scratching my head for a good 20 minutes or so before finally realising we had done multiple video takes and only one audio as we hadn’t pressed record. I quickly changed videos “right clicked” and amazingly it worked and I was left with a perfectly synced piece of video and audio. With my audio and video now synced I looked at my watch and was surprised to see our induction was over.
Today concluded our last AV induction for the semester, I can only hope my notes will be enough to get me through the year. Fingers crossed I wrote it all down correctly.