About a year ago, I tried using Apple’s Soundtrack Pro to do sound design on a wedding that I was editing. Unfortunately when I exported my mix back into Final Cut Pro, I found that the levels were all over the place and not what I had set during the aduio edit. Since then I have done all audio editing inside Final Cut Pro.

I am pleased to say that Apple has fixed these problems. I just completed sound design on a 25 minute highlight video with no problems. I will now be using Soundtrack Pro on a regluar basis.

Color, Apple’s color grading program included with Final Cut Studio 2, brings the ability to do professional (i.e. Hollywood level) color grading to video. It isn’t the best solution for every editing situation though.

When is Color better than color correcting in Final Cut Pro? If you have to do nothing more than simple levels adjustments or correcting a slight color cast, you are usually better off staying in FCP. But if more extensive color corrections need to be made, or if you are trying to achieve a certain look through grading (a term used for making multiple corrections on a clip), then Color is a good tool to use.

For the event videographer, there is one major limitation. Color doesn’t like FCP Multiclips. If you try exporting a sequence containing Multiclips, you might find clips out of place, or even footage that wasn’t even included in your sequence in the Color timeline. Sometimes the graded timeline cannot be sent back to FCP. The only workaround that I have found is to substitute clips from the orginal media for the Multiclips. This unfortunately makes grading multiclips, or even clips that originated as multiclips difficult and time consuming.

As a result, I am not using Color at this time. Until Apple solves the multiclip issue, color correcting in Final Cut Pro is the only viable option. I do a lot of multiclip work, and can’t afford to take the time to work around this limitation.

Since the recent sudden demise of HD-DVD, Mac users have not had many choices for high definition DVD authoring. Apple’s Final Cut Studio currently only supports HD-DVD not Blu-Ray. While it was hoped that Apple would introduce a new version with Blu-Ray at the NAB show a couple of weeks ago, this didn’t happen. In fact Apple skipped the show for the first time in years. Although Blu-Ray support will probably be added soon, it isn’t here now. Adobe does have it in Encore, but many of us (myself included), are using Apple’s Final Cut Studio (of which DVD Studio Pro is part).

There is little sense right now for the wedding and event videographer to spend hundreds of dollars to purchase an expensive authoring application if they have DVD Studio Pro. In the low cost category, there is currently only one native Mac application for Blu-Ray authoring, Roxio’s Toast with the Blu-Ray plugin ($90 plus $20 for the plugin).

I have tried it and have not had much luck. While Toast is an excellent app for burning CDs and DVDs, the Blu-Ray plugin is very buggy. I tried authoring discs using AVDHD (H264) and have found that many times Toast would quit with an error before completing. I was able to author a disc encoded with MPEG2, but this is inefficient and uses a lot more space. Since I do not have a Blu-Ray burner at this time, I am burning to standard DVDs. With AVCHD, it is possible to get about 40 minutes of video on a DVD-5. MPEG2 will produce only about 20 minutes.

The other issue concerns the menus produced by Toast. Like most consumer oriented DVD applications, Toast allows you to create menus for your DVD. Unfortunately these are extremely primitive. It seems that you can only make a main or title menu. No sub-menus for your chapters. While you are supposed to be able to include chapters on your disc, I have not been able to get it to work, either from Toast, or by importing them from Final Cut Pro.

The Toast menus are also ugly and you have few options to modify them. Overall Toast’s Blu-Ray plugin is not yet suitable for either consumer or professional use.

After reading Phil Hinkle’s article in EventDV on authoring Blu-Ray discs using Nero, I began to take a second look at the possibility of a having low cost solution while we wait for support in DVD Studio Pro.

Nero is a CD and DVD authoring application that runs only on Windows ($110 with Blu-Ray plugin). If however you have an Intel based Mac with Windows installed, you can use it. Nero, like Toast is a consumer level application. But it is way ahead of Toast in capability. The Nero Vision application is quite sophisticated, and can be used to capture and edit video as well as authoring DVDs. Sort or like iMovie and iDVD rolled into one. The nice thing, is like iDVD it actually has some decent menus along with the flexibility to modify them or even roll your own. It’s no DVD Studio Pro, but it will do.

In the next part of this article, I will discuss Nero and if it is a suitable interim Blu-Ray authoring solution for Mac users (at least those with Intel Macs).

Looking at the number of weddings that I have this year and the time it will take to edit them, I realized that unless I change the way I edit, there will be a big backlog and some unhappy clients by the end of the season. So here are a few things to do that will help cut the number of editing hours:

1. Capture while doing something else. As I use a tape based workflow, capturing video from tape takes from 5 to 10 hours, depending on how many tapes there are to capture. As I have two computers to work with, I can capture to one while editing on another (savings 5 to 10 hours).
2. Color correction. I can be more efficient by doing basic color correction up front. Then only tweak color to achieve a particular effect. Also getting the white balance right while shooting will cut lots of time out in post.
3. Right now I spend about 20-25 hours working on the short form (Highlights) video. I spend a lot of that time looking for the right footage and the right audio (sound bites etc). If during the first pass, I mark the best stuff, it will be right there to drop into the timeline.
4. DVD authoring. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel. Create some nice templates and stick with them.
5. For the Deluxe Package I used to create an entirely separate long form edit. No more. Now the ceremony, main dances, toasts, cake, bouquet & garter are extras on the DVD. There is no need to make them into a single video when the short form highlights video tells the story.

Now if I can just stick to these ideas, There will be a lot more time spent not editing.

While at the WEVA Expo last month I attended Larry Jordan’s excellent Soundtrack Pro seminar. Now for all of you who are wondering what Soundtrack Pro is, it is Apple’s audio editor for video. Version 2 was released as part of Final Cut Studio 2.

After getting back from the Expo, I was eager to put into place what I had learned. So last weekend I started refining the audio on my current project. This is a wedding that we did in June. I had promised the bride that she would get her DVDs in early September. Anyway, after a few false starts, I got the workflow down in Soundtrack Pro’s multitrack editor. Once I had the sound the way I liked it, I was ready to export the project back into Final Cut Pro (the video editing application). This is where things went wrong.

The export function creates a new audio mixdown file. Unfortunately when I opened the file in Final Cut Pro, the audio levels were all wrong. Some tracks were too loud, some were too soft. I figured that it was my problem, and that I did something wrong. I treaked things some more in Soundtrack Pro and exported again. The audio still wasn’t right.

Today, I looked on Apple’s Soundtrack Pro forum. It seems like a large number of people have had the same issue. Soundtrack Pro screws up the levels when exporting a file. This is a bug that makes this product unusable for me. Apple never should have released the new version as it is. This is too bad, as Soundtrack Pro is really a nice audio editor. I will wait until they fix the bugs before using it again.

The 8 to 12 hours that we typically spend shooting on the wedding day is only a fraction of the time spent producting a wedding day movie. Most of it is in the editing phase. This often runs anywhere from 40 to 80 hours.

In the beginning, much of this is routine, even tedious. After the footage has been captured into the computer, I have to go through all of it and pick out what I want to use. Then it is assembled into a rough cut. The next step is to refine this into what we call our “Documentary Style” program. This means that we edit the day’s events in chronological order, keeping all the major events, but cutting it in a way that keeps the video interesting. At the end of this phase we usually have a program that is from 1 to 2 hours in length.

If our client has ordered the Basic Package, we have completed most of the editing. If they are getting the Deluxe or Premium Package, we have just begun. Here we start on the Highlights program. Even though this only runs anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes, it takes longer to edit. Why? Because this is where the artistry comes in. The Highlights program doesn’t document the day, it tells a story, the wedding story.

For me editing the Highlights is the biggest challenge. Distilling the essence of the wedding can be frustrating at first, but soon it all comes together and I have something that I am truly proud of. Most of all however, is what the couple will have. Perhaps fifty or sixty years from now, long after I am gone, they or their children and granchildren will still treasure it.

That is the real reward.