When the Film Finally Lands on the Timeline

Editing, editing, editing, editing, editing, editing.

Editing Alien Echo today — a big day of editing. Syncing all the footage, sound, and audio is the process I always go through first. I’m very blessed to use Final Cut Pro, where there’s a bit of auto-syncing going on, which I’m a huge fan of, because I’m old enough to remember when you had to do it all completely manually.

On set, we record on an audio recorder as well as the camera, and then you obviously have to sync that. The audio recorder with the boom mic is always much better quality than the sound coming from the camera, so you do have to go through that process.

I like doing this as my step one in the editing program because it gives me a chance, as the director, to go back over all the footage and really see what we got and how we got it. You start making those decisions — take one, take three, take five — whatever was the best take. It gets your brain thinking, even though you’re not actually laying the film down yet.

But I’ve officially synced everything, which is terrific, and laid down the very first piece of footage on the timeline.

So I’m super pumped to get Alien Echo on the timeline and moving on to the next step.