Preparing for final cut

I’m preparing for final cut of the documentary Saving Mimosa and one of the questions is how to simplify sound edit.

The editing is now done in FCP and the sound mix is to be done in ProTools.

The recording have been done in more than twenty places and we have interviews with several persons.

From the beginning, we tagged each interview person as a separate role, but not the ambient sound in each place.

But when looking at the edit close to final cut, I found out that my initial approach had some limitations. The ambience sound was very difficult to edit due to the lack of tractability of locations.

The new approach was to tag each location to a role, e.g. Riding Stable, Horse Fields etc. It was a tedious work, and better done at ingest.

When all clips in the film was tagged with roles for each sound, I got 59 sub roles for dialogue and ambient sound. With this way of organizing sound, it’s easier for me to make the final edit and adjust the pacing in each chapter and for the sound mixers to do their work.

I also made an export to ProTools to see that everything’s working before continue with the final adjustments.