Editing the Montage

After collecting my 3 tapes of footage for my one minute montage our lecturer Phil put forward the idea to enter the finished products into the Bath Music Challenge. The rules were simple, submit a 60 second video using one of the music pieces provided on their website.
I immediately decided to do two different edits, one for my official submission and one to be entered into the challenge.


There was a description about using the 60x 60 theme in your work. After a few days of sitting in front of my project attempting to edit to a song by the Apostates I thought about making the montage up completely of sixty 1 second shots. After a trial edit I decided this would help me since I was in a bit of an editing slump, however I had my heart set on using a split screen sequence, so I decided to incorporate those shots and let them run for longer, for example if i split the screen into 4 shots then i would let the sequence run for 4seconds.

Although I felt I'd taken a massive leap in the editing process, I found I had to recapture shots completely because now I had to come up with 60 unique shots and for some reason there were about 15 of Mike, the Apostates' drummer! This was extremely time consuming but once that was done all I needed to do was create my split screen sequence using a youtube tutorial video I had found earlier, which you can check out here:



One of the biggest problems I had was that after capturing my footage most of the shots were in different aspect ratios, even when some of them were done in the same session. I spent days trying to recapture and reconnect the media with no luck whatsoever. Eventually Phil helped me by creating an EDL (Editors Decision List) and using that to source a new sequence and connect to the relevant media clips, through this method my work was saved. A solution to a problem neither me or Phil could quite understand.

I'm quite proud of my montage, the footage is cut so quickly that it fits with the up-tempo punk song I chose. I was also happy that at a couple of points some of the footage matches in time with the song. I feel this has so far been the most rewarding experience of using Final Cut Pro because I had to deal with certain problems I'd never encountered before such as rendering media, using multiple tracks and the overwrite key and motion tab to create split screen sequences, and exporting EDL's which I don't quite understand but saved me from having to re-edit my montage completely which was a really tedious process of finding sixty 1 second shots that looked good!

Check out the finished montage:



The Apostates can be found on their myspace