At first, I finished picture editing according to the script. I'd gone through all the hours and hours of raw footage and selected the performances and shots I wanted to use…ending #1.
Then I edited picture down for time, took out entire scenes and smaller parts here and there…ending #2.
This felt like an ending because more or less had picture lock…1 hour 36 minutes.
Then it was time for music and sound effects. Did this for about a month and a half. Finished that... ending #3…BAM! Movie over…right? Wrong.
Then came mixing audio levels…Scene by scene, levels were even. …done, ending #4. What I mean by this is that if I watched scene 1, jade's voice and neil's voice were at the same level. Now that didn't mean that scene 1 and 2 were the same sound level. Quite the contrary. Some scenes (although mixed properly unto themselves) were super quiet and some were super loud.
I burned a copy after ending #4
Side note: I’ve been editing with bose headphones this whole time so that I could hear exactly what’s going. So I mixed the audio accordingly.
I then listened to it on the tv, and the sound did not sound mixed the same as it did in the headphones. Understandable of course. But since it takes 8 odd hours to encode the movie again, it’s not exactly a “oh haha, that’s too quiet…oh well,” no. It’s more a DAMMMMMMITTTTT! And the audio mix…wasn’t even close. It was a good ten db off throughout the whole movie…all you need to know is that’s a lot. And then, some spots had little bits that were much too loud and distracting. And pretty much over all the music and added sound effects were too quiet.
Incidentally, I have a new list of enemies as an audio mixer...they are:
-doors shutting
-high fives or slapping handshakes
-flip phones being shut
-glasses/beer bottles/shot glasses being put on tables
-pretty much any two surfaces hitting each other
-latches of any kind
-screen doors doing anything aside from nothing
-foldable knives being opened and closed
-people saying the word fuck (something about this word is so harsh that it spikes audio levels like you wouldn't believe)
-Neil for writing the word fuck so many times in his script
All of these things suck because they spike audio levels to unacceptable levels.
So days upon days were spent balancing levels of entire scenes more effectively by using the decibel level meter in final cut. And on Thursday February 18 at 1:00am in the morning, we had ending #5. And as it stands today…this is the ending that ended all the endings.
It took only one hour to encode the audio. I thought we were cruising. Something to note, I was leaving Calgary for five days on Friday morning at 5 am. So I needed to finish it before then, there was no way I was leaving it for 5 days and try to enjoy some time with relatives. That just couldn’t happen. So 1 hour to encode audio. Beauty. Video was cruising along, and so by 2 am I went to bed. Woke up, video encode was doing ok, a little slow, but only 4 hours to go…or so it estimated. At 3 pm I had to go to work. When I left, the computer projected the encoding had 20 minutes to go. Beauty. At ten I’d finish work, come home and burn the movie. I phone John on my break at 7. Ask if the encoding’s done. 5 hours 26 minutes to go John tells me…GAHHHHH!!!
Now maybe it’s because my computer was being put through the ringer. It had been working and processing shit for about 48 hours straight by this point. So it was running out of gas, quickly. Meanwhile, I try to concentrate at work. This was an exercise in futility for me. As anyone who knows me knows, if I start worrying about something, I will obsess over it incessantly until something gets resolved. So for 3 hours I was worrying whether or not my computer would shit the bed and completely shut down. This has been something I’d become increasingly paranoid about over the last couple of weeks. It’s pretty much my greatest fear that my computer will shut down or break or just stop working and my movie will be lost forever. Anyways, I get home at 10:13pm. Run to my computer. Railed Up and Wrecked-Sequence 1 edit 4.m2v successful as of 9:22pm Thursday February 19, 2010. HAHA SUCCESS!!!!
It was a good thing I did all that worrying too, because I’m sure that it helped.
From when I had done my horrible audio mixed dvd, I had put together the a dvd menu and had created all the chapters and everything. So I brought in the new files, and started burning copies.
At long last, my greatest fear had been alleviated. My project had escaped the digital purgatory of my computer and it was now in my hands in the form of a beautiful gold dvd. So I immediately burned 7 more copies haha.
