When we put together estimates for potential video projects, one line item that always needs a bit of explanation is “Media Management.” It falls under Post-Production, but a lot of people don’t quite understand what it is. While it’s not technically part of the edit, it is crucial to the editing process. There are two main steps to take before the edit can begin, and those are ingesting the footage and logging it. Multiple articles could be written about each step, but here’s a quick overview of the steps of media management and how they help the edit go smoothly.
Ingesting the Footage
Footage is captured on a camera, and stored on that camera’s video card. (Or sometimes an external capture device, if you’re feeling fancy.) Regardless of what you use, you have to get that footage from the card onto a computer so you can work with it. That process is called “ingesting footage” and it involves moving the footage from card to computer, and transforming it (transcoding it) into a format that your editing program can handle. Here at MLP we use Adobe Premiere, which is really good about handling different formats, so we don’t usually need to transcode the footage when ingesting it. But for other editing programs, you’d to transcode your footage to ProRes. ProRes is a video compression format that is fairly high resolution – so when we transcode it, we don’t lose any quality in the footage. Once your project is complete, you export it to the final format; generally at MLP, we output to ProRes/MOV to maintain the highest level at quality.
Logging the Footage
Sometimes we’re lucky enough to bring our editor on a shoot with us. In those situations, he can watch the production, ingest and log footage on site, and already have a good idea of what clips he’ll use in the final project. But when we can’t bring him along, he gets the footage only knowing the concept, script, and storyboards; not what was actually captured. That’s where logging the footage comes in. As he ingests the footage into Premiere, he’ll watch the clips and take notes on the contents. If these are interviews, he’ll write down highlights and good soundbites. If its b-roll, he’ll write down a description of what’s been captured. The whole purpose of logging footage is to simplify the edit and remove the need to watch the footage multiple times. Let’s say our editor is almost done with the project, but realizes he wants one more soundbite in there. Instead of watching through all the footage again, he can quickly read through the descriptions to find the clip that he wants. This works for revisions as well – if the client wants a specific clip or shot, logging the footage ahead of time makes it so we can easily find it for them.
So that’s that! When you’re looking at an estimate for a video, media management seems like a small little line item, nothing all that important. But as you’ve read, its crucial for making the actual edit go smoothly.