What do
you think when you hear the words "shot
logging." Do your palms sweat? Do your eyes get
all glassy and unfocused? Do you start to shake like a
wet poodle? For some reason, a lot of beginning
videographers see the task of shot logging as the
video production equivalent of taking out the trash:
necessary, but certainly not the glamorous part of the
job. And it's usually one of the first tasks a
director palms off on an assistant. In this article,
we hope to convince you to change your attitude about
this seemingly humble task. We truly believe that shot
logging is the place where great videos are born.
The Basics
Shot logging can be a two-step process. In production,
logging happens while you are shooting. Take after
take, you write down the time code and a brief note on
the shot. Then, back in the edit bay, you manually
enter the time code of the good shots into your
software and capture away. If you have taken careful
notes, you are ready to edit at the end of this
process.
Most of us run-and-gunners can't simultaneously
shoot and log, so tape logging often happens in post
production. In the editing process, shot logging comes
right after your field shooting and directly before
you start to build your timeline. The basic process of
shot logging is to shuttle through your tapes while
logging time code in and out points for the scenes you
want to keep. You watch the tape, press the
"I" key at the start of a good take, press
"O" a few seconds after the action ends and
then name the take something logical and useful. This
eliminates any bad takes or material you won't want in
your final edit in a sort of pre-edit. Marking these
in and out points is how you set up your tape for
batch capture. This process is one of the things that
makes editing so efficient. You only digitize the
footage you're actually going to use and leave all of
the bad takes behind.
Caution
There are some good reasons why you might want to be a
little cautious of letting someone else take over your
shot logging tasks. First and foremost, many beginning
editors consider logging tapes to be merely a process
of elimination. They sit down to figure out what they
won't use. You might want to look at shot logging
differently, perhaps as a process of exploration,
seeking out undiscovered treasures. Even when you
shoot every frame of the footage yourself, you'll
often find things you missed in the field.
I remember a field production years ago where I was
working with a full crew including a camera operator.
We were moving around to various locations in a retail
store and at each spot, I'd plant myself in front of
the monitor and watch every take like a hawk. At the
end of the day, I knew we had all the basic shots
covered. When we got back to the shop, I almost
decided to let someone else log and capture my footage
based on the original script and the Scene/Take
information from the shoot.
But I didn't. Instead, I took some time the next
day to examine the field footage. Much to my surprise,
during one of the transitions between locations in the
store, the camera op accidentally left the camera
running. In the middle of that mistaken footage, the
camera happened to swing across the wall of the store,
and, for a moment, the camera paused and focused on
the company logo on the wall before swinging away
again. The effect was visually interesting. After I
slowed the footage down a bit, we ended up using that
very shot as a part of the opening sequence. If I had
left the logging for someone else, chances are they
would have simply fast-forwarded over the mistake and
never seen that gem of a shot hidden in the footage.
Hardware Logging
The fact that you need to do your own logging and
become thoroughly familiar with your material does not
mean that you have to make the process any harder than
it naturally is. Nearly every professional-level
editing package on the market has excellent built-in
shot logging capabilities.
There are also hardware-based shot logging
solutions that can help you make short work of
eliminating obvious blown takes and bad shots before
you ever get back to the edit suite.
Sony has a Clip Link system that lets you mark
shots "OK" or "NG" (no good) in
the field. Unfortunately, this is a proprietary (and
expensive) system and it only works in conjunction
with compatible Sony camcorders, tapes and EditStation
systems.
A number of companies (such as Pipeline Digital,
Cinergy and TCLogger) sell slick hardware shot-logging
solutions that allow you to log your tapes to a Mac or
PC as you shoot, complete with image thumbnails. All
these solutions are steps forward in helping the high
volume videographer get organized, provided you have a
Mac or PC nearby.
In the end, no matter how much technology you bring
to bear on the process of logging your tapes, you need
to make sure that your system isn't getting between
you and your understanding of the scenes that you've
actually captured to tape.
Final Thoughts
I can't count the number of times I've been sitting at
my edit desk facing the need for a cutaway shot or a
bit of B-roll and realized that I'd seen something in
my unused footage, somewhere. Since I had taken the
time to log and capture all my own footage, I merely
had to scroll through a few pages and read a few notes
and there it was. If I hadn't done the logging myself,
it would have been a process of inserting tapes,
fast-forward, rewind, play, eject, insert new tape and
repeat. And that's a best-case scenario where I even
remembered that I had shot that footage.
Your field footage is the raw material of your
project. Not giving yourself a chance to become
thoroughly familiar with your raw materials diminishes
your chance to figure out new and interesting ways to
build an excellent communications framework using that
raw material. It may seem like you might have better
spent your time doing something else, but tape logging
is likely to save you time and improve your
productions.
So the next time you find yourself sitting down to
log tapes, and before you ever add an In or Out point,
begin by adjusting your attitude. Logging is actually
an opportunity to let your mind wander over the raw
materials of your video. Train yourself to view shot
logging not as a task, but as an opportunity to
uncover the hidden treasures and to help you transform
your raw material into a powerful program that will
leave your audience enthralled.
Contributing Editor Bill Davis owns and operates
a video production company in Arizona and has been
logging tapes for years.
[Sidebar: JKL]
Once upon a time when computer editing was emerging as
a useful business tool, Avid dominated professional
video editing (and it still does at the high end).
Avid systems mapped keyboard shortcut commands into a
group that is now common to most editing software.
Virtual tape transport functions fall on the JKL
keys. "J" is back, "K" is stop and
"L" is forward. Multiple presses of the
"J" and "L" keys increase the
speed of the virtual tape shuttle. The "I"
and "O" keys became the set (mark) In and
set (mark) Out keys. As luck would have it,
"I" and "O" sit right above "JKL."
Even though some early editing software tried to
use other key combinations, JKL is now the standard in
nearly every software video editing system sold. And
that means learning to use the simple JKL keyboard
convention for logging tapes should be your first step
in mastering efficient tape logging.
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