Video editing workflow

[derFunkenstein]

I have a 7-minute news piece that I'm trying to condense down to around half the length and still tell the story. I have permission from the news agency to do this, and I know basically what parts of the video and what parts of the audio I want to use. Unfortunately they're not necessarily the SAME parts. I'm trying to figure out how to go about doing this.

The tools at my disposal are Windows Movie Maker and Pro Tools 10. The audio stuff I can nail down, it's the video part and the sync part that I'm trying to figure out. Best I can tell my workflow needs to be something like this:

* Edit the video down to the parts I want to use in Windows Movie Maker
* Import the edited video into Pro Tools
* Import the audio from the original video into a track in Pro Tools.
* Slice up the audio I want and lay it out on the track in the order I want it.
* sync audio to video. I guess I have to do this manually because I don't really know what to do here.

That last thing I'm really lost on. I have around 10 days to get this figured out. Any suggestions? Right now I'm reading Mike Thornton's Working with Video in Pro Tools articles in SoS, and Mike is a widely known and respected tech dude. Hopefully he'll get me on the right track, but if you have experience I'm all ears.

[CityEater]

Hey mate,
It would be easier just to hand this to an editor for a couple of hours. You have the footage already? Is it in a format which your software can import? Is the audio separate or are you using the audio from the video but you want to edit parts of the audio over parts of the video. Your best bet would be just to find someone with a half decent NLE and snap it all together, I'm unsure why you want to go through protools at all though you may want to once you've cut it together if you're comfortable with protools.
Its simple enough to do this in a simple NLE like Movie maker if you want to do it yourself. Best thing to do is drag and drop it in and play around for an hour, Windows movie is pretty drag and drop and can be fun to use. Syncing by eye can be a painful process if you have the audio and video separately but the way I read this wwas you just wanted to edit the video rather than sync it?

Best of luck

[Cannonaire]

The NLE I use for most of my video editing right now is Sony Vegas (movie studio - the cheaper version), which is really easy to learn and will certainly let you accomplish what you have outlined. You can also download a 30-day trial which will not install a ton of bloatware and is easily uninstalled later. Additionally, Vegas will give you fine control over audio cuts and allow working with the video by time or absolute frames. More importantly, it will let you work with both audio and video in the same program which should make it a lot easier for you to sync everything; you can also import the pre-cut audio you made in another program and sync the video to it easily (this sounds like the best bet for your needs).

I always recommend against using Windows Movie Maker - especially the "Windows Live" version which has been stripped of much of its functionality. It does not allow for non-linear editing, as in removing a section of video/audio will desync and ruin all of the work after that point in the timeline. It also has no options for setting project resolution and simply makes everything the same dimensions, regardless of original resolution or aspect ratio. Basically, it is lackluster for anything other than a simple slideshow.

Adobe Premiere is also good, but I do not have much experience with it yet. I do know that it requires much more downloading and install space than Vegas.

Let me know if there is anything video-related I can help you with. Video editing workflow is a specialty of mine, and seeing your thread has ended my years of lurking here at TR.

[derFunkenstein]

From what I can tell, NLE = non-linear editor? I'll check out the free trial of Vegas, and if it's something I might find myself using a lot, maybe I ought to even pick it up. So I appreciate that recommendation. Thanks, Cannonaire, and welcome to the non-lurker version of TR.

it'd probably be easier to hand it to an editor, for sure, but I can already visualize pretty well what I want to do with it. Plus the budget is pretty much non-existent. If I can make it happen on my own, I'm certainly going to try to. If I was just going to use the same audio and video together it'd be cake. I think I might be making too big of a deal out of it.

And as I ponder it, I should edit the video and keep the audio for all the video segments I want, and then trim the audio I don't want out manually, and add in what I'm missing. A good night's sleep came up with that one for me.

[derFunkenstein]

Wow! The Vegas Movie Studio HD trial was EASY to use. Trimmed it all up and rendered it in around an hour of fooling around. Now to import to Pro Tools and do what audio edits I want and bounce it down to a final render. Thanks for the suggestion, Cannonaire!

[Cannonaire]

No problem, and thanks for the welcome!

Congrats for getting the editing done quickly.