How Do You Even Start?!? (editing Workflow)

Bloke

Wannabie Member
Not a motovlogger as per se, but was interested at one time hence my membership here, so hello all :)

So about a year ago I went on a 1000 mile 4 dayer around the south-west(ish) of England

Wales - Portsmouth - Teignmouth - Lands End - Bude - Taunton - To Warwick - To Oxford and back home into Wales.

Pretty epic riding time and some amazing roads, a lot of boring not so great roads too mind but generally cracking roads as we planned it in advanced based on Ride magazine route recommendations.

So I had a Contour Roam 3 strapped to my helmet and for 3 of the 4 days I managed to record 7 to 8 hours footage every day and for 1 day recorded a timelapse for 7 hours.

My problem is for the last year its been sat on my NAS, with no action, the lads I did it with are eager to see the footage but having tried watching through it I've found myself falling asleep after an hour of staring at the road ahead from my helmet view. It's obvious I need a better way of working.

If I had a drift camera the tagging function would probably be useful but I didn't have that luxury at the time so have to manually sift through footage.

What and how do you lot who regularly edit motorcycle footage use to edit your clips? How do you approach filming a large trip anyway? and how do you approach editing it all into usable footage?

I assume there is some sort of software that will allow you to blitz through a timeline looking for interesting bits or some other way that beats sitting through 24-28 hours of footage writing down timestamps.

I'm heading to Spain and France in October this year for a 10 day blast and now have an additional camera along with a manfrotto magic arm for changing camera angles of shots (hopefully can get something other than a straight ahead look) and would love to have something in place for when I do head off so I can produce something worthy of sharing with family and friends.

Sitting through 10 days of footage without having a workflow in place I fear it will basically ends up just collecting digital dust on my NAS once again.

Open to ideas and if any of you have produced videos already on how you deal with the nause of editing, please do share :)
 
If you didn't tag anything along the way your just going to have to use your memory where the worthy parts are and work from that.

I'd say start by making some smaller clips that are manageable say 30 mins and then cut down from that one at a time.
 
Thanks, In terms of software are there any particular you'd recommend. Editing platform is a specced up Macbook Pro but relatively new to the OSX ecosystem.

In particular I am looking for a timeline "scrubber" for want of a better word, something that can make scrolling through hours of footage easy to do to identify changes in views, etc...

I came across a post suggesting clapping for a tag on non-tagsupported cameras. Do you know of software that will overlay audio waveforms across video? to enable scrubbing to said tags easier?
 
I came across a post suggesting clapping for a tag on non-tagsupported cameras. Do you know of software that will overlay audio waveforms across video? to enable scrubbing to said tags easier?

I'm moving to Adobe Premiere Pro from Sony Vegas at the moment. But I know at least in the Sony movie suite software, the audio appears under the video track with the waveforms there; that's how I normally find where I'm talking in a video to speed up editing. Though I will say, when you take into account wind/bike noise, it can be pretty difficult to find even what you thought at the time were loud noises...

An interesting idea just occurred to me, how about getting a mic with a small on/off switch? That way you could switch it off for a second before whatever you want, and then the audio wave would have a deadspot as a 'marker' for you to work with. Just a thought ^_^

I do think if you're editing 20+ hrs of footage though, you're going to be looking at a solid days editing at least!
 
With your situation you'll have to log the footage. No way around it. Doing that doesn't have to be terrible though. If your mates want to see a vid, recruit them to help.

Most editors have a scrub and mark function. On FCP and Premiere to run the video faster you press L. J, K and L are your backward, pause and play shortcuts. Pressing J or L again speeds up the footage in forward or reverse respectively.

To tag the footage you can press M with the clip active. This adds a marker to the footage that's visual and you can add details by double or right clicking the marker. Can't remember which. Be sure the clip is selected and not the time line though as time line markers don't stay on the clip when you chop it all up.

My suggestion on a process would be to watch footage at 2x if there is speaking or 3x if you're just riding. Keep your hand on the mark key. Mark the footage as you review and stop at the end of each clip, go back and add details to your markers. Have your buddy taking notes outlining the footage while you watch, or write an outline after each clip. Let the outline guide your general storytelling and let the clip markers be your detailed time code list.

This us a little looser than fully logging all the clips but it's a process that works for me. I have a decent memory of my clips in most cases though.

Hope this helps.
 
Ah awesome suggestions from all! :)

Glad I came to the right place. Having a clue as to what on earth to do with the footage was the first problem, now just need the motivation.

Not wanting to purchase multiple video editing packages, which of FCP or Premiere would you go for?

Budget isn't much of an issue just I don't want to end up wasting money on two packages when buying the right one that suits my situation would suffice.

Oh and unfortunately the mates I went with aren't the most computer savvy and live a ways away from me so this is all on me :) Great Eh! :D

Interesting solutions to the tagging problem there. External Mic switch is a neat way of essentially doing a "tag button", that idea... is sweet. I was going to go along the lines of covering the lens with my hand for 5 seconds so I could see it go black on screen but I like your idea better.
 
okay... creative cloud is annoying, just want the software not the cloud nonsense but £229.99 for FCP!? bloody hell... budget not too much of an issue but wasn't expecting £230! Ruddy nora!
 
okay... creative cloud is annoying, just want the software not the cloud nonsense but £229.99 for FCP!? bloody hell... budget not too much of an issue but wasn't expecting £230! Ruddy nora!

CC isn't too bad, I have the Photoshop/Lightroom package. I've literally never used the 'cloud' side of it as my internet is terribly slow, I just installed the programs and now pay a monthly fee to use them as I would any other normal program. Don't let the Creative 'cloud' part put you off ^_^ Only downside is you're tied into a contract with it.
 
Premiere is the industry standard, but FCP is just as good. Maybe look in to Vegas? It should have similar features.

I was wary of CC as well but adopted it years back. It's actually kind of nice having things decentralized. It also covers you for any updates.

And yeah, if you can kill audio easily that's better as you can look at waveforms easily to identify marks.
 
I spent the last 5 years with FCP, and when I got the new PC, I went and tested out a ton of free and trial applications and finally landed on Sony Movie Studio 13 (I got the Suite, but Platinum is perfect for motovloging and action cam editing). I have cut a couple videos, and still learning the interface and shortcuts, but it has been a pretty easy transition. And with Platinum, it is $80 instead of $200 (minimum) for Vegas.
 
hmm... so had a wee bash. Instead of springing for a professional editing suite had a go using iMovie on the mac.

So I have about 4.5 hours of footage on the first day in about 40 minute segments but I just need to chop it all down nicely into chunks but with no ability to label or group footage or even make sense of the order it "imports" into my media library, it soon becomes a nightmare.

Figure i'll give FCP Trial version a shot maybe after a cup of tea or two to chill after the rage of dealing with iMovie.
 

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