daily video

Part of my new job is the editing of daily video.

I won't bore you with trial details, and the first minute or so if a recap; but the second half of the video is where I get to do something fun.

Usually daily court video is a dull voice over with grainy video, medium shots and some stills thrown in when we have them, and yes, that is the first part of this. I edited this with the idea that the audience either does not remember all the details, has not followed the case or this is their first time learning about the trial.

Then I get into what I call dueling lawyers or what our web video guy calls a 'quote train.'

The basic and essential idea is to move the narrative forward with tight audio clips that inform and play off of each other. Generally in video, you use 'B roll' to hide your cuts in the narrative interview so that it does not appear that you have edited the audio. Here the quick cuts help move things along in what is otherwise a fairly static video.

For those of you not yet into video, 'B roll' is all that stuff, detail shots, action shots, long shots, essentially the cutaway shots that help keep video interesting. It is all that boring stuff TV shoots to put on the box when the talent is talking.

Yes, the quality of the video capture is not great, yes, it was assembled on Windows Movie Maker, and yes, there are some other issues, but for an on deadline web piece it works surprisingly well.

Next up will be the Ken Burns effect in Final Cut Pro and Soundslides Plus.