editing strategy

[massimou]

I've been edititing for a while, but I never seem to the steps in the right order (sound effects, visual effects, cutting etc..)
Which is the best order to do these steps in (to save as much time and hard disc space as possible), what programs should I use for what? I have Adobe After Effects, Premiere and Audition.

[greymalkin]

It depends on if you're wanting to edit just the video, the audio, or both.
Also, what source are you using? Lets assume you are using footage from a DV camera. This is the steps I use.

1 - Edit the video, do all your cuts, transitions, color correction..yadda yadda. Do all this before you encode to MPEG.

1.2 - If you plan on editing your Audio, render it to .WAV after you made all your cuts..etc and before you render to MPEG. After you've extracted the Audio, then you can render the file to MPEG. For max quality you want to use a total bitrate (audio + video) of 9800kbps.

1.3 - Load the .WAV in Audition and do your cleanup..noise reduction..whatever you want to do and save the .wav again.

1.4 - If your authoring program does not have the capability, you will need to convert the .wav to AC3 using another program. If you use TMPGEnc's Sound Player Plugin you will need to save the file as 16-bit/48khz* in the step above.

2 - Load the video and audio up in your authoring program and set up your menu. When you go to build the dvd it should not re-encode the video or the audio (unless your authoring program is also the program that is doing the AC3 encoding).

I extract the audio after all the editing in case i cut anything out or do anything that might change the timing of the video. This ensures I have the exact audio track/timing that will be on the final video. I then don't really care what happens to the audio track that is attached to the video.

* - ack! sorry about that! thanks BJ_M for catching my blunder.

[BJ_M]

in step 1.4 above - it should be 48khz

[massimou]

What I do is that I do the cutting and sound effects in premiere and the visula effects in after effects... Should I do the cutting first in premiere and then do the visuals in after effects and last go back to premiere and do the sounds? The problem with that is to export the film back to premiere without it taking loads of space. Any ideas how to improve?

[edDV]

What I do is that I do the cutting and sound effects in premiere and the visula effects in after effects... Should I do the cutting first in premiere and then do the visuals in after effects and last go back to premiere and do the sounds? The problem with that is to export the film back to premiere without it taking loads of space. Any ideas how to improve?

You need to plan it all out in advance with a storyboard (a plan) which is a previsualization of your program. Then you divide the project into subprojects that you can address with software.

We don't know what you are trying to do.

Often a music video will start with an audio track and video will be cut to match the audio.

After Effects is usually used for short segments that need special attention. Many editors insert proxy effects-transitions and rough audio into the timeline to hold positions for detailed effects work while the overall cut is refined for timing, audio match etc. Only then are detailed effects and audio sweetening done to finish the project.

This approach limits redos.