Woo boy. This is the big one. Despite the troubles I talked about in the last two posts, like formatting the SSD for Mac losing an entire day of shot footage. Or a monitor dying after only 2 or 3 trips out. Editing is where I really ran into troubles.
First, the “gaming” laptop I bought a few years ago is just flat out not powerful enough to handle what I was trying to do. I thought 16GB of RAM would be fine. It’s the most I’ve ever had in a computer before. Also don’t have a total crap graphics card. I think a 1060.
Not gonna cut it, as it turns out. So after I find out what the future holds and money gets set aside I will be buying and building an editing pc. Already been picking out parts and pricing online for a bit.
I did get one thing for editing, thanks to money from friends for a birthday that just passed, a fast drive for editing. Yeah the laptop has a built in SSD but that’s only 500 gigs. And as it turns out, processing 6k raw footage takes a lot of room.
So I picked up a terabyte of NVME SSD, with an enclosure and a nice USB-C cable. It’s better than nothing.
I already have an old external HDD that used to be storage for one of the xboxs. Now it’s the drive I put the raw files on. The NVME gets used for cached clips, and then I tried and tried to avoid using it because I knew it would be the slowest point of contact. But in the end I had to put a major amount of files onto the NAS server I purchased last year. Mostly to use as backup only for all my photography and general files I’ve saved over the years.
So to sum up, 500 gigs SSD inside laptop runs my OS and editing software.
2TB HDD holds the raw files that I decided to use.
12TB NAS holds all the backups and project files
1TB NVME SSD is nice and fast for the cached clips.
Cached clips are what you make when you need to actually edit the videos. I learned a hell of a lot over the last month, which I’ll try to condense some here.
I did have experience with Premiere Pro before going into this, but since the camera came with an amazing piece of software that would be far better for using the raw footage I was shooting there wasn’t even a question. And I’m so glad I didn’t even try anything else. Davinci Resolve has been both great and awful. Just like any other editing software I’ve ever used.
So to actually get my computer to scrub through 6k, 4k and 2k footage you have to optimize the media. Which is a simple process as far as grabbing all the clips and hitting optimize. Then it just takes, overnight. Not even joking it was probably a good 10 hour process. Pretty much every step of editing took a while.
I made a spreadsheet of all the footage I captured that I liked, more than half of it didn’t make the cut for one reason or another. Shakey camera, bad movements. Boring. Missed focus. The list goes on. So before it even got loaded into the editor I was watching all the footage and cutting. Usually the same or next day after shooting. My weekends had a pretty solid 50% dedicated to video production of some form or another over the last month.
Overall it was a hundred clips that had good stuff I liked. Then I was also going out and shooting some b-roll separately. Just clips of the general nature and surroundings for transitions. I had grand ideas of making one long video telling a story about these wetlands I was visiting and all the creatures that depend on it. Didn’t really expect to do voiceover from the beginning, that would just be a whole other process. Writing a script, doing research so I know what the hell I’m talking about. Maybe one day.
In a real movie studio each one of the steps I was taking would probably be one, or more persons jobs. I know for a fact you get someone who just does color grading. A colorist I read online. Well I can’t afford to do that obviously. So each step I took was just me figuring it out.
So, media into Davinci Resolve. Optimize and come back the next day. Start sorting all the clips by tagging them with colors for each animal. I was grouping them all so it would be cohesive with all the shots of the same animal together.
Let me tell you how many times I googled “Davinci Resolve…” and then whatever it was I needed to do. I can’t. Because it’s probably thousands of times. It was fairly constant, but that’s how I’ve learned anything. Photoshop, lightroom, premeire, after effects. Etc. If I don’t know how to do something, the hardest part is figuring out how to describe it into google so I can find someone who has already dealt with and is sharing the answer. The knowledge I have is 99% from just watching and learning from others on the internet.
After I got the clips trimmed down I started assembling them onto a timeline. Picking out which clips should go in which order, try to put ones where the background is similar so it looks more natural. The goal is to make it seem like all the footage was captured at the same place at the same time. Which is obviously not true as I said it took about a month and a half of shooting each weekend. But that’s even more taken care of in another step coming soon.
Clips trimmed, assembled and on separate timelines. Moving them all together for one big timeline and do transitions. You know, how to edit them together. Does it fade to black here? What if I do a built in FX transition. Some of them are fun, though I try to limit because they can often be distracting and over the top.
Finally I cobbled together what I thought would be a halfway decent video. B-roll to set the scene, all the clips from one animal and some more b-roll to break up between the different ones. About 24 minutes of footage in all.
Now the fun part, color grading. Similar to what I wind up doing in Lightroom in a sense. But way different process. Davinci Resolve has some great videos on their Youtube channel teaching you how to do this. And I obviously gobbled those up. I know some basics and that would be enough for what I was doing. I know there is so much more I can learn and do for the future but I had to limit myself to starting out small and just working alongside these videos. I learn better by doing anyway.
It was about two solid days of just color grading. Probably that alone took 15 or 20 hours. And I’m somewhat proud of what came out of it. I know there is so much better I could do, given the time and honestly a proper computer. But I was antsy to get it finished. Plus there’s only so much I could do with the footage I had. It wasn’t the best, I had to really crank the ISO in order to work with the light I had out in the field. It was cloudy a lot of the days I went out shooting. But I worked with what I had. I knew I could put noise reducing on annnnnd…
It broke my computer. Noise reduction as it turns out is the single most demanding process in editing. And it requires some real computing muscle to get it done. I am all too familiar with it in lightroom for a single image. And although some people have a taste for the grain reminding them of the old film days. Me, not so much. I want crisp clean footage.
I will say that one of the really nice things about the camera I went with, was the dual ISO thing. Which basically means I can more or less change it in post. I often was shooting at some really high 2000+ ISO. Even 3200. Not that I wanted to, but you have to figure it’s all a balance. As I mentioned in the last post I was shooting these animals from across a huge distance of several hundred feet. I literally couldn’t get closer without getting in the water. So I had to close that aperture to the smallest little pinpoint in order to actually be able to focus. Which means I need as much light as possible. Now I opened the shutter angle up as far as it would go, which isn’t great but that’s kind of the tradeoff. And the only thing left in order to get a usable image is that ISO and the grain that comes along with it.
As I mentioned the camera shoots in raw, and their software is awesome to be able to adjust some stuff like white balance and ISO in post. I would drop it as low as it could go and then adjust the image from there. Trying to reduce as much of the grain as I could. Then I would render out the whole video and do noise reduction separately to make the image actually viewable without killing me. (Not ideal but it was the best I knew how to do)
Only that didn’t happen. I set it to render and the computer laughed at me. I think it coughed and wheezed out some dust when I attempted that. A 24 minute video in 4k? At 50 frames per second? HA. The estimated render time was a week. A whole fucking week.
I spent several days trying anything I could, much to my frustration. Even dropping the quality down to 720p at one point just so I could watch it back and see how it looked.
In the end, through a lot of headache and failed attempts it just wasn’t going to work. So I scrapped the idea of one long video and decided to just cut it up into short videos of each animal. Those I could actually handle the render time, and the storage space.
So over the last few days that’s what I’ve been doing. Recutting the video down to just the individual shots and putting a bit of music to them. For a minute there I figured 4k was out and was just trying to work in 1080. But trimming down the length helped a lot.
In the end I have 4 videos ready to go. First one is already uploaded and going live in a few hours on Youtube. I scheduled it so I would have time to look it over after Youtube was done compressing the crap out of it. Hopefully it still looks halfway like what I can see on the raw files.
And that’s been the project I’ve been working on for a while now. It’ll come out as small clips kind of as a proof of concept. Can’t lie, I’m hoping to grow a bit of an audience and maybe if I’m lucky someone will see the effort that went into it and I’ll gain a patreon subscriber. I figured you have to start somewhere and I can only go up from here.
I’m not sure what the future will hold. This past weekend was 4th of July so I stayed the fuck home. I really wanted to go out just on Friday morning and just do a nature walk with a some stills photography. But then the Covid-19 cases jumped to over 50k new ones in a day and I thought “nah.” Oh and they’re still doing that, not just one day but many. As I checked this morning Georgia crossed 100k positive cases in the state. Not great. Even though I go out with a mask you know what is even more effective? Staying home.
There is a chance we’ll be leaving the state. Not to get hopes up, just to kind of mark the day. Girlfriend has a job interview for out of state. I would be absolutely thrilled to move somewhere with a much less dense population. More on that as it unfolds. Or not, if she doesn’t get it we stay right here. The money we decided was for a move becomes new editing PC money :)