Avid Media Composer Exercises

For Catalin's post-production module we had to get into pairs and work on three edit exercises on Avid Media Composer. The three exercises were Trauma Room, Car Theft and lastly Gaffer's delight; all of them were completely different two of them were short dramas where as the other one was a short documentary.

"Editing may be thought of as the coordination of one shot with the next. As we have seen, in film production a shot is one of more exposed frames in a series on a continuous length of film stock. The film editor eliminates unwanted footage, usually by discarding all but the best take." (Bordwell, D; Thompson K, 2010).

Trauma Room:

This is the first editing exercise we got set to do for Catalin's module for second year, whilst editing Trauma Room, we learnt the basics of using Avid using the keyboard to use different shortcuts like going a frame forward or backwards, marking in and marking out and many other shortcuts and you can customise your keyboard with different keys to do different commands. Also learning how to import and start on a new project.

Car Theft:

Editing Car Theft was different as it was like a short documentary but again we were learning the basics of how to use Avid, montage editing, putting in a voice over, putting in an interview and also using cutaways. This is our second time using Avid, at first I didn't like it but now I'm really getting the hang of it and I love editing on it. Catalin taught us how to create freeze frames, blur it out and then have text scrolling on top. This was difficult at first but with the help of Catalin, it brought me to understand how to do it. We had to duplicate sequences after each one; so we had the first sequence of assembly which was just a rough structure to see how it flows, then it was the rough cut assembling it shot by shot and then finally the fine cut where we finalise the cuts, trimming down the unnecessary frames.

Gaffer's Delight:

The last exercise of the year was Gaffer's Delight, this exercise was different as we had to introduce the two characters and identify them with dialogue editing and emotional mediation. Importing, organising and backing up Gaffer's Delight before making our sequences. During the fine cut we had to use J-L cuts showing reaction shots whilst the other character was talking and afterwards we would add transitions and edit the audio as the audio was different in every clip.

These three Avid exercises have given me the chance the experience, experiment and learn the ways of Avid Media Composer, giving us an insight on a different editing software. In these exercises I was working with Luke Duverney-Ruse and he was great to work with despite the fact I had to edit the most of exercises and export them all on my own because he had been feeling very poorly this year due to his operation. 

Bordwell, D; Thompson K (2010). Film Art: An Introduction. 9th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. 223.