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Film Finishing Prep: Copying Media Using Premiere Pro

KK at Onipa‘aPicture Lock! After months of editing, Marlene Booth’s documentary Kū Kanaka is nearly finished. I am sitting in Stanford Chang’s edit room at Gravity in Honolulu as he color corrects and finishes final picture on this mostly-Adobe Premiere edit.

In order to move the picture locked sequence to Stan’s system, I needed to learn and use Adobe Premiere Pro’s Project Manager feature. But first we spent some time cleaning up our sequence and getting the highest resolution stills and archival footage possible. We also upconverted a lot of SD sources to HD via Teranex hardware. I will detail this process in this blog, and I will talk about Project Manager in additional detail in the next blog.Read More

Your iPhone is a Mic

Here’s a quick post about using my iPhone as a quick and dirty recording device. I happen to have an iPhone 5, but I’m sure this would work on any newer smartphone using a comparable app.Read More

Moving a doc from FCP to Premiere Pro

“DON’T!”…would have been my advise in the past with regards to changing editing software or operating systems or computers in the middle of an edit. But if you aren’t too deep into your editing, you might consider getting off that reliable but ancient workhorse Final Cut Pro 7. Read More

5 Tips For Cutting a Winning Fundraising Clip

Every film project needs a fundraising clip, no matter what stage of production or post. As a documentary editor, I feel like I spend as much time editing fundraising clips for filmmakers as actual films. And now with the growing popularity of crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter.com and IndieGoGo.com, and individual film websites, a good short video that gives a potential funder a solid idea of what your film is about is essential.

So the question is, what to show?

Here are five tips to consider when crafting your film’s fundraising clip.Read More

Living in Public: Addressing Privacy Fears About Your Online Posts

Would you hire me? Read on…

Usually, it begins with a comment like this:  “Oh, I could never risk putting something out there on the internet, and have it come back to haunt me years later. That stuff never goes away.  Once it’s posted, it’s on the internet forever.” Lately, I’ve been having this conversation with certain clients, friends and fellow filmmakers who still are avoiding social media, because they fear that someone will post something unflattering about them, and they won’t be able to control it.Read More

Filmmakers Using the Web to Build a Brand

I am obsessed with social media. As a documentary filmmaker from the old fashioned school of long-form storytelling, I am completely taken with the newest form of telling a story:  tweeting it in 140 characters or less on Twitter Or telling the ongoing saga of your life in status updates, photos and links on Facebook. A blog like this one is so old fashioned, really. It’s so 2008. But call me old school, I do like scribbling out a story, setting it up with a lead, even a rambling one like this one, and taking you, the reader, on a journey.

And Twitter and Facebook aren’t all that different really…Read More

Edit Room painted red!

I am NOT a Feng Shui expert. But I do think the basic principles of Feng Shui jive with the basic principles of good design, and I used Feng Shui to help design and decorate the last two workspaces, which were both very successful. So Stanford and I read a couple of books, Read More