Hi,
I have about 6 mins of footage that I need to reduce to 2 mins. There is about 1 min 45 of talking and I dont think I can fit it all on that 2 min mark. I would like to know what should I look first to keep and what to remove. If anyone as little trick to help me out that would be great.
Well, it really matters what you want to say in your two minutes. If it is a lot of extra footage of scenery etc, then I would say start with that. Cutting out scenery can be hard, but it will dramatically cut down the time of your video. The dialogue to me is the most important part of the video, because it gets the story across.
Then another useful trick that I have learned, is cut out any pauses in the dialogue. It may be a .5 second pause, but when there are a hundred such pauses throughout the video, cutting them all out really cuts down the time of the video. I had to edit a video that was supposed to be under 8 minutes, but when we put it all together it was 10. Just by cutting out pauses and "Uh"s, I was able to cut it down short enough so that we could even add credits before the 8 minute mark.
And if your video isn’t scripted, the editing process could be much more difficult, because you don’t know what you need and what you don’t need. But that’s off topic, so for now I hope that this helps.
And if you have talking AND scenery… you can always show the scenery WHILE the talking is going on and just NOT show the talking the entire time. What is required to be seen and heard? Is ALL of the talking necessary too?
If you have enough B-Roll, I’d suggest you use as much of it as you can. If the talent’s speech is scripted and you need to cut something out, I’d ask the client what the least important part is and work from there. Listen to what’s being said, and then use your best judgement to cut out sentences or fragments that sound more like filler or tangents to the main point coming across.
Another technique I’ll use is to cut and splice the audio/speech to make it fit within the time allotted. If the person talking has a lot of pauses, stutters, or tends to go “Uhhh, Umm, etc.” between a lot of words, you can shave off a substantial amount of time by cutting those out. You do need to be careful, because it will sound unnatural if you cut out too much. You probably don’t want the voice-over to sound like an auctioneer.
The only talking is via texts at bottom of screen, making things easier to cut each sequences into several Clips.
I started by making a list of the people talking(text), then another with the best looking shots of each scenes. Because there is 10 movies of the same story with 10 different cameras that last 4to5 min each to reduce into a 2 min movie it was easy to get to 2.5 Min’s. Then I had to remove the unneeded texts that was either repeating it self or not making sense. I am at 2:10 ATM and still fighting in between some text ATM to get enough time to add the thugs car to come at start and leave at end.
I have time to get back working on it and I am pretty sure I will pull it off. I also need to write a 40 lines text on how and why I used these techniques to reduce the time. That is the tricky part he he.
Thx to all for sending me in the right direction
Cuts that overlap just the audio from the preceding shot, with video that moves on to the next point, can save several seconds apiece and those seconds can add up. You just need to have plenty of cutaways.
Audio that is “cut off” unfortunately sounds terribly “cut off in mid sente” … but here’s a stupid trick that seems to work: drop the audio-levels to zero over the space of half a second, not all-at-once. It sort-of sounds like the person changed their mind mid-sentence or mid-word and their voice trailed off, even if (of course) they didn’t. If you do this when you’ve got only the audio playing, i.e. you have cut-away the video to something else, it works. Well, “sort of.” But desperate timelines call for desperate measures. :rolleyes:
Folks when they’re talking have a definite rhythm or cadence to their voice, particularly to their pauses, and you will want to try to match that.
If the talent is available, be sure to review everything with him or her. The talent is “the subject-matter expert,” and “the instructor.” Not you. You are “the technical ‘means to an end.’” You’re the wiz at making one dollar out of a buck fifty.
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