So you've shot some great footage with your camera, and you have experience editing with one or two of the popular professional tools like Premiere, Vegas and Final Cut. And you've probably dabbled in some audio editing tools like Audition, Forge or Soundtrack. But you're really just experimenting, and you're not sure what all the filters and options are for. You can spend hours fiddling and not be any closer to making the footage look better or the audio sound better. This article walks through the post-production process in a home studio setting, and it shows you how to effectively use the tools you have on-hand.

Note: This should be read after Cheap shots: How to shoot pro-quality video on a budget, as it makes reference to ideas and concepts covered in that article.

Decisions, decisions

Before you begin the post-production process, the first thing you need to consider is the purpose of your movie. Is it a short film, a documentary, an interview, or a reality show? With this fact in mind, you need to then decide what will method you'll use to distribute the movie. Will it go to a cinema screen at a film festival, Blu-ray, DVD, the Internet or mobile devices?

If you decide that your movie will just be going up online, then production can be much quicker than if you're authoring to Blu-ray. If you're publishing to multiple formats, focus on the highest quality format.

The final thing to consider is your computer and hardware. You can only work with the highest format your computer can handle in real time, and it will take a bit of experimenting to figure this bit out.

Post-production format

What format is the footage in your camera? Is it HDV on minDV tape? Is it AVC-HD files on an internal hard-disk drive (HDD) or flash media? Is it H.264? All of these formats are compressed, which means two things:

De-compression will use up computing power during the editing process. This should be fine on modern computers, but may slow down older machines.

will use up computing power during the editing process. This should be fine on modern computers, but may slow down older machines. Color and resolution are approximated, so the image will generally look washed out and not as sharp as it can.

These two factors mean that if you tweak the image in any way, you will be adding processing overhead to your computer and actually make the image look worse.

Your options are:

Only edit the footage in its native format—no dissolves or animations of any kind, just straight cuts. When you've completed the final edit, you convert to a post-production format to do any tweaking, filtering or visual animations.

Or, you can convert the footage, at the beginning of the editing process, to the post-production format. This way you have freedom to be creative right from the beginning.

If you have plenty of storage on your computer's HDD, I strongly recommend converting to get the performance boost by working with less-compressed footage and the freedom to be creative early in the editing process.

If you have limited HDD space, you'll be forced to edit natively and convert towards the end of the production pipeline. Convert only the clips that have been used in the final edit. Most software packages have an option to export all clips on the timeline and convert them in the process.

Avoid the second production pipeline by buying yourself some more storage; get a couple of terabytes, which should be plenty.

Convert to what?

When footage is compressed its resolution and color is approximated, but its luminance (the variation between light and dark areas) is left pretty much untouched. The reason is that our eyes rely on luminance to process image information much more than color or resolution.

The ratio of compression applied to luminance, red/green, and blue elements in a pixel, is expressed by three numbers:

4:4:4 - Three fours indicate un-compressed pixel information.

- Three fours indicate un-compressed pixel information. 4:2:2 - This means the color space is reduced by half

- This means the color space is reduced by half 4:1:1 - This indicates that the color space is reduced to a quarter

Depending on the complexity of the compression method, other common ratios include: 4:2:0, 3:2:1 or 4:1:0. The first value, luminance, is usually uncompressed or only slightly compressed. So when converting, the idea is to increase the color space in the video to allow deeper and richer color tonality.

Instinctively you would therefore want to convert your footage to a 4:4:4 format, but the caveat is that file size will increase exponentially. An increase in file size then hits another bottleneck in your computer: HDD throughput. Unless you have a superfast HDD, it will not be able to handle such massive files. This is especially true if you uncompress the resolution, which is another element not expressed by the compression ratio; this only applies to individual pixel information, which can also be 8-bit or 10-bit.

It's also necessary to check if the original footage is interlaced. If it is interlaced, a de-interlace filter must be applied during conversion. De-interlace filters usually have a quality setting, and the higher the quality the longer the conversion time. Very high settings can take up to 10 hours per minute of footage to convert, so using a medium quality setting is usually a good enough option, unless your final delivery medium is Blu-ray or a cinema screen. De-interlacing can be avoided if the original footage is shot in progressive mode on the camera, as long as the camera is capable of progressive filming.

It is easy to see how confusing this can all become. A good rule of thumb is to use a 4:2:2 color space in 8-bit on whatever intermediary codec your editing package supports. An intermediary codec un-compresses the resolution as much as possible without increasing file size too much. A popular codec on Mac is ProRes422; on PC, use CineForm CFHD (intermediate) set to 8-bit 4:2:2. These are great DVD post-production formats.

If your intention is to publish to the cinema screen or Blu-ray, then you'll have to work with an uncompressed 4:4:4 10-bit format, but to do so you will require a very powerful workstation with superfast HDDs and multi-terabyte storage.

If you intend to publish to mobile devices or the Internet, you can configure the intermediary codec with a smaller resolution than the original footage. Try a vertical resolution of 720, 640 or even as small as 270. This will work lightning fast on most computers and still provide a rich color space.

Let's get started

So you have your software, you know what the purpose of your movie is, and you're ready to start work. Hook up your camera and get your software ready for capture.

Capture and logging

This step is very important for narrative-based movies and documentaries. Interviews tend to just be one or two shots and are very easy to throw together, but it is still good practice to properly capture and log footage. Set your software to auto-capture or import and let it do its thing. By the end of the process you will have a collection of clips listed in your editing software's bin.

If you've recorded sound on a separate field recorder, this is the time to import the sound files into the software. Use the sound log to marry each sound file to each video clip. If the clip has been properly clapped, you will be able to synchronize the spike in the audio track with the video frame where the clapper is fully closed/clasped.

You must unlink the audio track that is already linked to the video clip and delete it. Then link the audio track from the field recorder to the video clip. Scrub through the video and check to see that the audio is properly synchronized with the video. Do this for all of the video clips.

Now watch every single video clip and rename them to reflect the clip: [SCENE][ANGLE][TAKE][Good, Bad, OK?]—this naming convention will allow you to quickly see what scene, angle and take a clip is, and whether it was good, bad or OK, e.g., Office Fight MCU T4 Good

As you rename each clip, you need to also create folders with scene names in which to store it. Once you have renamed the clip and placed it in a folder, you can also set an in and out point where you feel the clip commences and ends. Check the software manual, but usually the I and O keys do this.

While the steps outlined above are extremely tedious, they will make the rest of the editing process that much quicker, allowing you to be creative and have fun.

Convert now

Now that you have captured the footage, synchronized the sound, and logged the clips into folders, convert the project to the post-production format. Most editing software will have a function called migrate or convert project. You will be prompted to select the new format, or define a custom format. Once you start this process you'll usually have to wait a very long time, depending on the complexity of the project and the format you've picked. It might last a few hours or a few days.

Initial fix-ups

It is much easier to correct video and audio issues at the start, because when you begin editing, you will chop the clips up and end up with a whole bunch of fragments on the timeline that you do not want to fix individually.

Color correction

All you really want to do here is fix any ugly tints or colors that don't look right. Be careful with this bit; make sure the problem is not with your monitor. How can you tell? Well, if all of the clips look bad, check them on a TV screen using the original camera footage. If they look fine on the TV then it is most likely the monitor that needs correcting. If only a few of the clips look bad, improper white balance or mixed light sources are most likely to blame.

Apply a color correction or white balance filter to the clip. These types of filters have three sliders: saturation, temperature and tint. The filter will have an eye-dropper tool that can be used to indicate a neutral color in the scene. A neutral color is white or a shade of grey. The software will then attempt to auto-correct the white balance. It may get it slightly wrong and will need to be fine-tuned using the following two parameters:

Temperature shifts white balance between blue and orange. So if the image looks a little blue or orange/red, then use this slider to correct it.

shifts white balance between blue and orange. So if the image looks a little blue or orange/red, then use this slider to correct it. Tint shifts the intensity between green and violet. When you correct the temperature there is a tendency to accentuate the greens or violets in a scene; use this slider to normalize the tint.

You will most likely only need to make only slight adjustments to the sliders, as the eye-dropper function tends to be very accurate in modern software.