While the editing process is where your story comes together, in digital moviemaking it is also the stage of production where you stand the greatest chance of doing the most damage to your resolution. Image management is the name of the game here. The care you take in the editing process will be reflected up on the screen.

Get the biggest monitor you can, better yet, get a couple of'em. Like any good work environment, the surface area of your desktop has a lot to do with how easy it is to keep track of things. By the time you get into editing, the name of the game is data management. A sizable workspace goes a long way toward knowing where everything is.

Storage is one of those things you can't ever have enough of, especially if you're planing on printing from your edit system's output. If you're editing at a really low compression ratio (2:1), the space that each frame takes up is going to be much greater than at higher ratios (50:1).

Get yourself a good orthopedic chair. You're going to be spending weeks in this thing, make them as pleasurable as possible.

The eleven-hour workday is fine for moving light stands and set pieces around but no one can be creative on a continuous eleven-hour day work cycle. Physical exhaustion is much easier to recover from than mental exhaustion.

Nonlinear systems all follow the basic rule-of-thumb, digitize your selects, build bins for each scene, you'll never have enough storage, you'll never have enough time and Coke and pizza are your best friends. Oh yeah, and once youıve got it calibrated, don't touch the damn monitor!

Start the edit process with a highly compressed 'draft' quality image. Many people are quite content to complete the entire project in this ultra-low quality mode and then re-capture and re-edit the scenes in successive order. As each high-resolution scene is finished it is recorded to the video master that you are taking to the printer, and then dumped to make room for the next scene.

As you re-digitize the video footage for your final edit, make sure that you run each take through the system's built-in, software waveform monitor and vectorscope. Itıs a lot cheaper to color balance here than at the printer.

There are certain aspects of conventional production methodology that don't really change because of innovation. One such thing is 'Tone & Bars' in video and the counter in film.

Black at 00:58:00:00, then Bars and Tone from 00:58:30:00 to 00:59:30:00, then black to 00:59:40:00, then slate (includes the film's name, the production company and date. You'll later come back and add the running time) to 00:59:50:00 where you'll insert your countdown numbers and a beep at the top of each second from 10 to 2. At the end of the '2' you go black until 01:00:00:00 (one hour) where the program begins. Any creativity or liberties taken at this point will not only screw up every professional that comes in contact with your movie but it will also make you look like a clueless dork.

When you finally got to the end of your edit its time to add the score. This is how you subliminally tell the audience how you want them to feel about each scene and character. The thematic underscore creates mood and texture. A scene underscored with violins and trumpets can cause emotions to swell with majestic expressiveness while a lone oboe can escort your audience into an almost cathartic empathy with your characters.

In the standard Hollywood fare we all-to-often see every gesture and nuance underscored with dramatic themes. The audience never gets a chance to make up their own minds or breathe. On the other end of the scale is the small budget production that is forced to use 'caned music'. Often the emotion and theme don't match or the timing is off.

In these instances it is often better to lay an audio reference track down and edit the scene to it. As blasphemous as this may sound, a good sound track has a pacing to it that is based on thousands of years of refinement. By editing your scene to that evolving thematic correlate, your scene takes on a tempo and pace that not only merges it with the musical underscore but also conforms it to an established tempo.

And excellent comparison and overview of the various nonliner systems out there ( as well as dependable advice, sales and support) can be found at ProMax.