Greetings,
I've been spending the last few days in high definition HD editing hell. Mind you, I'm not complaining about working in HD, it's good for my career and it is a hell of a lot of fun. The problem is, that I'm having to reinvent the wheel so to speak. What I mean by this is that much of what I am interested in doing for this little documentary is unexplored territory for me. Not that I haven't done something similar in SD (standard definition), it's like I think I've said before, the interface is different, the terminology is different, and now this isn't a complaint, except I wish I had more time to experiment with it, is that the HD editor gives you a lot of freedom, which if not put into perspective, can be overwhelming.
To give you an example of what I'm talking about, there are certain areas in the documentary that need some form of narrative explanation, an example of this is when Christina discusses the notion of tribal enrollment. For most people, this notion might be foreign, so I decided that I needed to find a point in her narrative when she brings this up, plus a few other concepts, like blood quantum, and trust relationships that I'm sure will need a short explanation to keep the viewer up to speed with what's happening. The notion of freeze framing was brought up by a professor friend of mine (David Silver) that I wanted to watch the documentary because he's not familiar with all of the concepts brought up and I needed someone who could watch it and give me feedback on what needs explanation. Anyway, David brought up the notion of perhaps using freeze frames, and the movie, "Lock, stock, and two smoking barrels" came to mind. Sure, there are a lot of films that have used freeze frames, in fact, "Office Space" has one scene that really works, but I am digressing and I figured that it has the potential to be a good device to take a step back from the narrative without being too distracting.
Well, the AVID systems that I have worked on before, you can just click an option on a menu and pull frames that can be exported. The AVID HD doesn't work that way. Without getting too involved in it, I spent the better part of 3 hours last night, 9:00-Midnight finding the right spot in the timecode, pulling a frame, copying it to mini drive, burning it to a CD-R, transferring it to a G4 with After Affects, resizing it to fit the frame, adding the most basic of animation, i.e. Deborah's name and her profession coming on screen, creating a Quicktime file, burning that to a CD-R, taking that back to the HD system, loading that onto a test timeline, matchframing the clip, creating two subclips, slipping the Quicktime between the two subclips, playing it, and being relieved that it worked.
Now, I just need to replicate this I figure about a dozen times. Nevertheless, I have to admit although this project is stressing me out somewhat it is also incredibly cool having to figure out this stuff.
Well, it's time to go, need to meet with one of the people in my film and look to see what type of images she has for cutaways and such.
Peace,
Jon
