Blog Post #60 - Editing Finalization

       With the project quickly coming to a close, I have officially completed my editing of my entire project. After a lot of work, effort, and patience going through all stages of cutting, aligning, syncing, and fixing every single clip, my final excerpt turned out well. It took nearly 2 weeks and 12 hours total of focus on the editing to complete it. 

       To begin, I started with the cutting and editing of each individual clip. Most of the ones I filmed were too long, being over 6 seconds. So, instead of including long take after long take, I decided to crop them the part of the play right before the best part of each one. Whether that be a pass, set or hit, it did not matter, I would crop it there and do so for each of the good plays. I was also attentive to pick out good filler clips for the highlight compilation as well to ensure the overall look of the documentary remained well-rounded throughout. Cutting these clips in this way indicated I would have to use straight quick cuts during this part of the excerpt as well to keep them moving fast. Creating the quick pace like this meant the compilation would remain entertaining and maintain the interest of the audience. 

      With this, after my clips were cut I moved on to editing their appearance. Some clips were too dark, too bright or extremely low quality. So, I used the tools of the editor on the Photos app as well as some tools on CapCut to fix this to the best of my ability, altering small details until they were in the best state I could achieve with the tools I had. With a small budget and limited filming options as filming a sport is difficult without interrupting them, I had to make due with what I had obtained. But overall, I think the editing in this way helped a lot in bringing the documentary excerpt to life. 

      The last major portion of my editing was putting everything together. Lining up these clips in an ideal order while also syncing sound with each clip to match perfectly. It was hard but the result created a cohesive look that was not unstructured or messy which would have encouraged an unprofessional feel to the excerpt. So, I avoided this as best I could and kept high attention to detail so the documentary was not solely a visual experience but an auditory one as well. To do this, I would move sounds around until it matched with the audio of the interview clip, it was a long process but an effective tactic. Once I did this, adding in sound bridges were easy as I could simply shorten the interview and leave the sound extending into the clip prior, making flowing transitions much easier compared to trying to cut interview clips at the same time as working with the sound.