Autodesk Smoke Essentials: Autodesk Official Press (2014)

Chapter 4. Editing a Rough Assembly

Once you’ve imported and organized your source media, it’s time to embark upon the first step of any edit — the rough assembly. An assembly means different things to different editors, but it’s generally the stage where you start fitting clips together on the timeline in the order in which they’re meant to play. For this first introduction to editing in the Autodesk^® Smoke^® platform, you’ll begin to edit the first walkthrough of our heroine in the lab.

Topics in this chapter include the following:

· Creating a sequence

· Playing and logging media

· Creating subclips

· Setting source in and out points

· Drag-and-drop editing

· Using cue marks

· Basic trimming in the timeline

Creating a Sequence

In order to start editing, you need to create a sequence. While Smoke automatically adds a new sequence whenever you create a new project, you may want to create your own sequence in order to exercise more specific control over its characteristics, since each sequence you create can have its own settings.

Furthermore, you can create as many sequences as you like within a project and organize them however you need to. For example, you may use multiple sequences to break a project into reels, to create multiple versions of a commercial spot, or to edit scenes of a narrative project individually. Smoke provides complete flexibility when it comes to organizing your projects.

1. Right-click the Lab Scene library in the Media Library, and choose New Sequence.

2. When the New Sequence Creation dialog appears, choose the settings shown in Figure 4.1 and click Create.

FIGURE 4.1 New Sequence Creation dialog

When creating a new sequence, keep in mind that you can choose all of these settings only when you initially create a sequence — you can’t change them later. In particular, you can’t change the Bit-Depth, Resolution, Scan Format, or Framerate settings later. If you choose the wrong settings for any of these parameters, your performance will be reduced, as Smoke converts each clip you edit into your sequence using a Resize or Timewarp effect. However, you can fix this after you’ve started editing by creating a new sequence with the correct settings and then copying and pasting all of the clips from the original sequence into the new one.

If you edit one or more clips into a sequence with frame rates that don’t match that of the sequence, you’ll see a warning dialog telling you what the frame-rate mismatch is and asking you if you want to proceed with the edit. Clicking Confirm will edit the mismatched clip into the sequence with a Timewarp effect automatically applied to match the clip’s frame rate to that of the sequence.

The default start time for new sequences is the European standard of 10 hours. If you live somewhere where the standard start time is 00:58:00:00, you can change this when you create your sequence. You can change the default for all new sequences in the Timeline tab of the Preferences.

Another way of preemptively dealing with clips having frame rates that aren’t matched to your sequence is to use the Convert Rate command, found in the Tools tab’s Utilities tab, to create a duplicate clip with a converted frame rate. Here’s how you do it:

1. Open the Tools tab, and then open the Utilities tab.

2. Click the Convert Rate button. You are then prompted to click a clip in the Media Library that you want to convert. Click the clip.

3. Choose a frame rate from the Convert Rate Parameter pop-up menu at the right to convert the clip to.

4. Now click a library or folder to which you want to save the converted duplicate.

A duplicate of the clip you chose is created and converted to the frame rate you specified. The original clip is left untouched. You can now edit this duplicate into the sequence.

Editing with Thumbnails

Everyone prefers to edit in their own way. The goal of this book, however, is to show you all of the available editorial options. The following lesson starts out by walking you through a rough assembly using the thumbnail viewer.

Please note that, in all of these editorial examples, the timecode values given are for reference only — you don’t need to edit your projects to be identical to the frame unless the instructions say so. Editing is a creative art. Feel free to use your own judgment as you create cut points from one shot to the next.

Setting Thumbnail In and Out Points

Each thumbnail in the thumbnail view has overlays with timecode and clip information, as well as a scrubber control at the bottom, which you saw in Chapter 2. These can be used to prep thumbnails for editing.

1. If necessary, double-click the Lab Media folder to open its contents into the thumbnail view. These are the clips you rearranged in Chapter 3. (There should be three of them, shown in the order you see in Figure 4.2.)

FIGURE 4.2 The three clips for this scene in the thumbnail viewer

2. Click the first clip to select it (A003_C014_1208P9, the wide shot toward the door), and use one of the two methods of thumbnail scrubbing to find the frame just before the woman opens the door, at the beginning of the clip. This will be frame 20:57:19+20, as shown by the source timecode at the upper-left corner of the thumbnail (see Figure 4.3).

FIGURE 4.3 Finding the first frame

These are the two thumbnail scrubbing methods:

· Dragging just above the thumbnail scrubber bar to scrub precisely through a smaller portion of the clip

· Dragging within the thumbnail scrubber bar to scrub quickly through the entire clip

3. Press the I key to set an in point at this frame, and then scrub forward in the clip to a frame where the woman has turned around (somewhere around frame 20:57:39+16). Then, press the O key to set an out point. As long as a thumbnail is selected and highlighted in white, pressing I and Owill set edit points for that clip.

4. Now click the second clip (A004_C004_1208SD, the dolly shot that moves through the room), and use scrubbing with the I and O keys to set in and out points from the frame where the woman touches the pen to the calendar (22:46:37+02) to the frame where she places her hand on the podium in front of the green screen (22:47:09+09).

All of the clips used in this project are 23.976 frames per second media. Because of this, the timecode is expressed as 00:00:00+00, with the frames separated by a plus sign. Broadcast video frame rates are expressed using the more conventional 00:00:00:00 representation.

5. Click the third clip (A004_C006_1208DA, the medium shot toward the green screen), and use scrubbing with the I and O keys to set in and out points from the first frame where she walks into the picture (22:56:15+18) to the frame where she puts her hand back on the podium after swiping her fingers in the air (22:56:28+01).

Keep in mind that your edit points don’t have to match the timecodes listed exactly. In fact, as you work along, you should focus more on following the visual instructions (find the part of the frame that looks like such and such) as opposed to trying to match the frame numbers given. You’ll get a better feel for the controls that way.

Creating Subclips

At this point, you have three clearly defined clips, with in and out points within each thumbnail’s scrubber bar (see Figure 4.4) that you can edit together.

FIGURE 4.4 In and out points marked for each of the three clips

If you’ve scrubbed through the rest of the media, you may have noticed that the first clip provides a reverse angle throughout the action of the entire scene. In fact, the first two clips contain overall coverage for the entire scene, so if you’re trying to identify a sequence of clips that will fit together, the fact that each clip has only one set of in and out points may be somewhat inconvenient. Subclips let you subdivide longer clips into shorter ones for just this reason.

1. Right-click the reverse-angle clip, and choose Create Subclip from the context menu, or press +U. A new clip appears over the top of it, with _Subclip_001 added after the name. This subclip contains only the media from the in point to the out point of the original clip.

2. Rearrange the thumbnails so that the subclip you created is first, followed by the original clip. Now that the subclip contains the range of media you want to use, you’re free to set new in and out points in the original clip, so use thumbnail scrubbing and the I and O keys to set in and out points from the frame after the revolving red light over the door comes on (20:58:24+10) to the frame where the woman walks up to the podium (20:58:35+00).

3. Right-click this clip again, and choose Create Subclip (+U) to create another subclip. Move the original clip down to the bottom of the thumbnail viewer to get it out of the way, and rearrange the clips sequentially, from left to right, according to the range that each clip encompasses (seeFigure 4.5). To see this visually, you may want to scrub to the frame of the dolly shot where the woman opens the panel on the wall.

FIGURE 4.5 Clips and subclips arranged according to scene order

Now that you’ve organized and subdivided your media, editing these clips together is easy.

Drag-and-Drop Editing

In this next exercise, you’ll begin editing using the simplest and most obvious method possible — dragging thumbnails into the timeline. While there are more sophisticated editing techniques available, this can be a good, fast way of editing things together.

1. Drag the first clip from the thumbnail viewer to the beginning of track V1.1 in the timeline (see Figure 4.6). As you do so, you’ll notice a series of red tooltips indicating which clip tracks will be edited to which timeline tracks, what new timeline tracks will be created to accommodate the six audio tracks this clip contains, and what kind of editing operation you’re performing (red is the color of overwrite operations).

FIGURE 4.6 Drag-and-drop overwrite editing

When you drag a clip directly into the timeline, you edit in every track of media within that clip. In this case, the source media has six tracks of audio — some of which correspond to multiple tracks of audio, and some of which are empty. (That’s just how the dailies were created.

2. Open the Options pop-up menu at the bottom left of the timeline, and choose Show Waveforms With Effects to display audio waveforms, so you can see which tracks have audio and which tracks are empty.

3. With the timeline selected, press +Equals to zoom out of the timeline, creating more room to the right for more clips.

4. Drag the positioner in the timeline ruler to the end of the first clip you edited. As you do so, a red-outlined thumbnail (named Lab Walkthrough) in the thumbnail viewer displays the current timeline frame. Continue dragging the positioner to the frame where the woman is halfway through turning away from the calendar toward the camera, as shown in Figure 4.7 (frame 10:00:18+20 in the timeline), so that you can match the action of the two clips.

FIGURE 4.7 Moving the positioner in the timeline

You can choose to display a thumbnail of your sequence in the thumbnail viewer, regardless of whether the actual sequence is in the selected folder. This floating thumbnail of your sequence appears within every selected folder while in the thumbnail view. You can choose to display or hide this floating thumbnail via the Display Sequence Viewer control in the General tab of the Preferences.

You may notice that the positioner in the timeline is locked to the tiny positioner in the Lab Walkthrough thumbnail’s scrubber bar. If snapping in the timeline makes it difficult to move to the exact frame you want, you can also scrub through the Lab Walkthrough thumbnail.

5. Select the second thumbnail in the thumbnail viewer, and press Shift+I to move that thumbnail’s positioner to the in point you had previously set. You can now see how this clip fits together with the next, but you’ll want to scrub forward a bit to try to match the halfway point of the woman’s turn in this clip to that in the timeline. This should end up being frame 22:46:39+09 (see Figure 4.8). When you do, press I to set a new in point, and then drag that clip into the timeline so that its in point lines up with the positioner.

FIGURE 4.8 Matching the in point of the second clip to the frame in the timeline

If the currently selected sequence is outside of the folder that contains the clips appearing within it, then a red sequence thumbnail appears within the thumbnail viewer regardless of the library or folder you’ve selected. You can choose whether to display this floating thumbnail via the Display Sequence Viewer control in the General tab of the Preferences.

6. Move back the positioner in the timeline, and play through your new edit using the playback method of your choice (either the spacebar or JKL keys) to watch the magic happen as the two clips play together.

7. Next, drag the positioner in the third thumbnail of the viewer and the second clip you edited into the timeline to the frame where the woman is halfway through closing the panel on the wall (frame 20:58:28+14). Set an in point in the thumbnail, and drag that clip into the timeline so that it snaps to the positioner there.

8. At this point, press Shift+Z to resize the contents of the timeline to fit into its available width.

9. Now it’s time to perform the last edit of this sequence. Select the fourth thumbnail in the viewer, and press Shift+I to move its positioner to the in point you set for it, which should be the frame where the woman walks into picture. Click anywhere in the timeline, and then scrub in the timeline ruler or use the JKL keys to move the positioner to a frame where the woman’s position as she walks to the podium matches her approximate position at the in point of the fourth thumbnail (at frame 10:00:48+01). Then drag the fourth thumbnail into the timeline so that it snaps to the positioner, and press Shift+Z to see the entire four-clip sequence you’ve created (see Figure 4.9).

FIGURE 4.9 Your four-clip sequence so far

Snapping happens only when the Snap button is turned on. However, pressing the Shift key while dragging a clip temporarily enables snapping if it’s turned off, or it disables snapping if it’s turned on.

As you put this edit together, keep in mind that in the first pass of a rough cut, excessive accuracy is not required; you’ll be tidying things up using some simple trimming in a subsequent exercise. At this point, you’re almost finished, but there’s one more edit left to do to get to the end of this sequence.

Dragging and Dropping an Insert Edit

If you play through the last clip you edited into the timeline, there’s a frame where the woman reaches up with her arm to make a gesture with her thumb and pinky finger. (This is eventually going to correspond to a virtual computer interface, but we’re not quite there yet.) There’s a matching action in the reverse angle of this scene, and you can take a shortcut from having to make two edits here by insert editing the piece of the reverse shot you want in order to set yourself up for trimming the second clip you want in the timeline.

1. Use the JKL keys to play through the last clip in the timeline to find the frame where the woman reaches out to gesture. The exact frame in the timeline depends on how you edited the previous clips, but it is 10:00:57+21 in the timeline shown (see Figure 4.10).

FIGURE 4.10 Finding the woman’s gesture in the timeline

2. In the thumbnail viewer, select the original reverse-angle clip from which you created the two subclips you’ve been editing, and scrub to find the frame where she reaches out to gesture. Notice that there’s a grip who leaps out to turn on some lights on the podium, interrupting this gesture. You’ll be editing after he leaves the frame (frame 20:58:50+05). Set an in point.

3. To perform an insert edit via drag and drop, click the Ripple button at the top of the timeline to turn it on (its blue on light should appear), and then drag the thumbnail for which you just set an in point into the timeline to snap to the position of the yellow playhead. Notice as you drag the clip that the thumbnails that indicate which clip tracks go where are now yellow, which is the color of ripple and insert operations (see Figure 4.11). Turn the Ripple button off again when you’re finished.

FIGURE 4.11 Drag-and-drop insert editing with the Ripple button turned on

4. Press Shift+Z to fit the entire edited sequence into the timeline, and you’ll see that the previous clip has been cut in half and that its second half has slid to appear after the clip you insert edited (see Figure 4.12).

FIGURE 4.12 The result of an insert edit

Now that you’ve built a rough, six-clip sequence in the timeline, you’re ready to start doing some simple trimming to refine what you’ve done.

Basic Trimming in the Timeline

Before you start trimming, you’ll probably want to switch to the Player mode of the viewer, since trimming requires a more detailed look at how the outgoing frame of a previous clip and the incoming frame of a subsequent clip fit together.

1. To open the Player, you can either double-click the red-outlined thumbnail in the viewer or press Option+1.

Remember, the source media for this project is log encoded, so if the image appears washed out, you’ll need to set the viewer to Log mode so that the scene appears the way it’s supposed to look.

First, you’ll want to refine the edit you just made.

2. Play through the last three clips to see how they fit together. By listening to the audio, you should notice that the shot continues past the director calling “cut.” You don’t want to use the entirety of the clip you just edited into the timeline, so play from the beginning of the fifth clip and stop about four seconds from the point where the woman swipes her two fingers in the air (approximately 10:01:03+07, depending on the previous edits).

3. Choose Mark Add Segment Mark (Control+M) to add a marker to the clip at the frame of the positioner (see Figure 4.13). Next, open the Timeline Options pop-up menu, and choose Snap Snap Includes Marks to enable clips and the positioner to snap to whatever marks you create.

FIGURE 4.13 Placing a segment mark on a clip

There are two kinds of markers. Cue marks (M) are placed in the timeline ruler, underneath the timeline tracks. Segment marks (Control+M) are placed at whatever segment intersects the positioner, on the track identified by the positioner’s focus.

4. Click the Editorial Mode pop-up menu (to the left of the Link, Ripple, and Snap buttons), and choose Trim (or press the R key). Next, click the Options pop-up menu, and choose Focus On Trim.

The Trim tool lets you resize clips, extending or shortening their in or out points. The Focus On Trim option automatically moves the positioner to whichever edit point you’re trimming, so that you can see what you’re doing.

5. Move the pointer to the end of the last clip in the timeline, and when it changes to a right-facing arrow, click and drag the out point of that clip to the right to make it longer (see Figure 4.14), all the way to when the woman just walks out of frame.

FIGURE 4.14 Resizing the out point of the last clip using Trim mode

6. Next, move the pointer to the beginning of the last clip, and when it changes to a left-facing arrow, click and drag the in point of that clip to the right to make it shorter. If you look at the bottom left of the viewer, you’ll see two timecode displays: the first one shows the record timecode of the timeline, and the second one shows the source timecode (labeled Src) of the clip you’re trimming. Drag the in point of the clip until the Src timecode display reads 22:56:31+21.

7. Play through the last clip to make sure you have the entirety of the woman’s line of dialog, “Meet me at Trueberry in an hour? I need that data.” If the first part of the line is cut off, adjust the in point of the clip.

8. With the last clip trimmed to the appropriate range of media, make sure the Ripple button is turned off, and move the pointer anywhere within the middle of the clip. When you see a yellow crosshairs, click and drag the last clip so that its in point snaps to the segment marker you placed on the previous clip in the timeline (see Figure 4.15). Red tooltips show that you’re overwriting the last portion of the previous clip when you release the mouse button.

FIGURE 4.15 Overwriting one clip with another in the timeline

At this point, it’s time to start playing through all of the edits you’ve made to make sure they play as well as you like. You’ll want to refine them for both continuity and timing using the Trim mode you’ve enabled.

9. Play from the beginning of the first clip. You may have cut right in the middle of the director calling “Action,” so you’ll need to cut out the very first bit. Move the pointer to the very left edge of the clip, and move the trim cursor to the frame just before light from the opening door hits the wall in the darkened room. This cuts out the unwanted audio, but now there’s a gap in the timeline that you need to eliminate.

10. Click in the empty part of the track, just to the left of the first clip, to select the gap. When you delete the gap, you want the rest of the clips to the right in the timeline to move to the left to fill it up, so you need to click the Ripple button to turn it on. With Ripple enabled, every adjustment you make in the timeline is done as a ripple operation.

11. Press the Delete key. An unexpected result occurs: the video clips have been moved to the left, but the audio clips have not, and now there are out-of-sync markers on every audio clip in the timeline (see Figure 4.16).

FIGURE 4.16 Accidentally rippling the video track but not the audio tracks

This is not the result you wanted. It occurred because you didn’t enable the Sync Lock buttons of each track.

12. Press +Z to undo the last operation, and Shift+click the Sync Lock button on track A1 to turn on sync lock for all of the audio tracks (see Figure 4.17). Turning on sync lock forces that track to keep in sync with any changes you’re making to the current track, indicated by the focus point of the positioner, which is on track 1.

FIGURE 4.17 Turning on sync lock

13. Now click the gap to the left of the first clip and press Delete again. This time, all of the audio clips follow the video clips in rippling to the left, closing the gap while keeping everything in sync.

14. Play through the first cut between the first and second clips in the timeline to watch the edit, which takes place just as the woman turns away from the calendar. The action in these clips is pretty well matched, and you can try different cut points by rolling the edit to another frame, in the process simultaneously changing the outgoing edit of the first clip and the incoming edit of the second clip.

15. Turn off the Ripple button. You don’t want to ripple the following edit.

16. Move the pointer directly over the cut between the two clips, and when you see the roll cursor, click and drag the edit to the right to the frame where she grabs the case on the desk. As you do so, you’ll see red bars on either side of the edit, which confirms that a roll is happening (seeFigure 4.18). When you’re finished, play through the cut again to see how you like it, and roll the edit to another frame if you don’t like the result.

FIGURE 4.18 Rolling an edit

17. Play through the third cut of the sequence, where the woman is walking to the podium. If you edited this sequence according to the previous instructions, the few steps the woman takes toward the control panel may seem excessive. In particular, the woman takes three steps to get to the control panel in the third clip, but then she takes another two-and-a-half steps to get to the control panel in the fourth clip. The first step or so of clip 4 needs to be trimmed to preserve the momentum of the woman’s stride. To accomplish this, you’ll want to perform a ripple edit to trim the beginning of clip 4, while pulling all of the clips that come after it in the sequence to the left to fill the gap.

18. Turn the Ripple button on again; then move the pointer to the right of the third edit. When the left-facing trim cursor appears, click and drag to the right to trim out the first half step she takes as she enters the frame (at around 22:56:16+07), as shown in Figure 4.19.

FIGURE 4.19 Rippling the incoming frame of the fourth clip

This doesn’t quite feel right, but at this point, the process of dragging the edit point is a little too coarse. Fortunately, there’s a pair of keyboard shortcuts you can use to nudge a selected edit point using the currently selected Trim mode and Link and Ripple settings.

19. With the incoming frame of clip 4 still selected, press the Comma key to add frames back to the clip until you’ve added another half-step to the woman’s stride (at frame 22:56:16+00).

When one half of an edit is selected for a ripple operation, or an entire edit is selected for a roll operation, the Comma and Period keys let you add and remove frames one by one, allowing for more precise trimming.

Shift+Comma or Shift+Period lets you perform keyboard-driven trim operations five frames at a time.

The Essentials and Beyond

Drag-and-drop editing and timeline trimming are essential skills for any editing project. They are particularly useful when editing with pen and tablet. Even though there are more sophisticated techniques shown in the next chapter, these techniques will continue to be useful in a wide variety of situations.

Additional Exercises

· Use Trim mode with Ripple enabled to readjust the edit between clips 3 and 4 so that the woman takes fewer steps in the third clip and more steps in the fourth clip. Then turn off the Ripple button and try using roll edits on the edit between clips 1 and 2 and the edit between clips 2 and 3, to see if there are any other match points you might like better.

· Create a new sequence in the Lab Scene library named “Lab Walkthrough Alt,” and edit a new sequence that starts with the wide reverse shot toward the door but then cuts to the dolly shot while the woman is writing on the calendar for a medium shot. Then edit the rest of the scene with more intercutting between the dolly and reverse shots.