Documentary Unit - Editing Part 1

As the editor of the team, I was in charge of everything related to post-production in our project. The main objective I had was to cut a video of 10 minutes of length from more than 3 hours of footage. The first thing I use to edit is a second screen. For about 3 years now, I have gotten used to editing in 2 different screens, because I believe 1 is not really enough for working properly as an editor. You can have you main editing software like Final Cut Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premier Pro, etc. in your main screen and the other one can be used for looking up videos, images, music that you may need, previewing things you have done already, working on Photoshop in an image while having your video or even rendering a file and looking at it while editing, but not losing sight of your main editing window makes a lot of difference, because you never lose the focus in what you are doing and it gets much easier to find things and just click  and drag. 

My usual workspace

After setting up everything, the main thing is to import all the footage I have into Final Cut Pro. As a new element I have been using lately that helps massively on editing long videos with hours of footage, such as this one, is the use of Keywords in Final Cut Pro. Keywords Collection is a feature it has that allows you create a "folder" in your event where you can drop any video you want there and separate it from the other ones. The use of Keywords Collection is to organise the footage from a specific place or person in one folder, so it gets easier to you to find all the shots were that person appears for example, without the need of going through all your clips. I created some very useful keywords that helped a lot while trying to fill in the actuality and get shots from some moments in specific. Here is the list of my keywords:

- Bobby 

- Cynophobia

- Display Team

- Dogs

- Essex B Roll

- Go Pro

- Interview

- iPad

- Roy Interview

- Titles

- Training Centre

Once all the clips were organised in their respective Keyword Collection, the editing began by putting the best clips we had in the timeline so they could be cut later on.  Here are two different cuts in the timeline of the beginning of the video:

Draft

Final Version