Many young filmmakers view editing as the final step in making their movie. Once they’ve picture locked, they have finished crafting their film and telling their story. However, be warned: just because you can see the finish line doesn’t mean that you’re done yet. In fact, while these final steps may not be the most fun part of the filmmaking process, they are absolutely essential.

While each of the concepts explored in this post could sustain a post of their own, for now we’ll just do a brief overview of what each entails.

Visual Effects#

In reality, if you have a visual effects-heavy film, you’ll probably be doing much of the VFX work during the editing process, dropping temporary VFX shots into your timeline along the way as placeholders. Then, since improved VFX won’t alter the timing of the film, VFX can continue to be tinkered with even after the picture is “locked.”

However, even if you’re not working with a ton of visual effects, you may still want to include some minor effects in your project. If you’re re-sizing or re-framing shots or even putting on a basic plug-in effect like a stabilizer, that can also happen after picture lock.

Once you get any effects work done, you can move on to...

Color#

Color Correction vs. Color Grading#

Color Correction happens first and it refers to adjusting things like color, exposure, contrast, and white balance so that your footage flows seamlessly from shot to shot. You may have shot your close-up an hour after you shot your wide shot, but you don’t want it to look like an hour has passed with each cut.

Color Grading happens second. This is the process where you fine tune your images to give them whatever stylized look you want. Note that your style doesn’t necessarily refer to “hyper-stylization.” You may color grade to give your footage a naturalistic or documentary style.

LUTs#

LUTs (standing for look-up tables) are pre-sets that you can apply to your footage to uniformly change the color in some way. While there are a number of sub-categories of LUTs, the two we’re most concerned with for now are Input LUTs and Creative LUTs.

Input LUTs are usually applied early in the process, maybe even before editing begins. If you bring your footage into the editor and find that it looks milky or flat, then you may be in need of an Input LUT. Essentially, certain video formats (like Log) will maximize the amount of visual information in each frame, but don’t bother displaying that information very well. An Input LUT made specifically for your camera will uniformly put all of your footage in the right color space (usually REC. 709).

On the other hand, Creative LUTs are part of the color grading process. After your image is color corrected, putting a LUT on top can be a great step in moving it towards the stylized look you want. Online, you’ll be able to find LUTs that do everything from making footage look old to making it appear hyper-saturated. Now, Creative LUTs are rarely the end point and you’ll need to do some color tweaking even after applying them, but they can certainly be a great starting place to get you going.

Color Work Flow#

So here’s a quick run through of what coloring a sequence might look like. This work flow is the same for both correction and grading, but for the sake of this example, we’re going to talk about it like a grade.

1. Start by picking a shot that is indicative of the look of the scene. Usually picking a wide shot with most or all of characters is a good starting point. Otherwise, if there’s a certain shot you return to frequently or have edited the scene around, use that shot.

2. Tweak the color in that shot, until you’ve created a grade that is satisfactory.

3. Use that shot as a “reference” shot to match all the other shots to. If you did your job during color correction, this step may be as easy as dropping the same settings from the reference shot onto the other shots in the scene with minimal tweaking in between.

Basic Color Work in Action (aka DON’T SKIP OVER COLOR!)#

Now, color grading is a step that many people try to skip, since it can seem more technical than other aspects of filmmaking. Plus, after editing your film, you may have gotten used to what your footage looks like and you’re antsy to just get your movie out there in the world. However, we’ll still implore you to do some color work. Even if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, you can still play around with the color settings until you find what looks best. After all, some simple color grading is better than no color grading at all. For example...

If you have a shot that looks like this:

Then by just slightly adjusting two settings — contrast and saturation — you can have a vastly improved image.

Contrast measures the difference between the darkest and lightest parts of your image.

Saturation measures how pure your colors are. Saturated images have a lot of color while de-saturated images will introduce a lot of gray and look “washed out.”

Slight increases in both contrast and saturation made my image look like this:

I would argue that this image has vastly improved upon the original.

After this, I also played around with my colors to create a sense of stylization. The image below came from adding some more red and blue tones to my image. Now, this doesn’t necessarily make the image better but it certainly creates a different mood. The below image seems warmer and more romantic. If that’s a look that’s appropriate for your project, it might be worth going for.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an expert in color grading and always hand my footage off to more seasoned professionals when working on a film. However, the point here is that in literally five minutes of fiddling with color correction tools, I was able to transform a relatively gray and flat image. You can do the same with your footage.

Titles#

On-Screen Titles and Graphics#

Whether they’re lines of text establishing locations, the opening credits, or even just the movie’s actual title, word that appear on top of your image will not effect your runtime in any way. Therefore, even if you use temp titles while editing, you will likely want to add the final titles after doing your color work. That way, you can just add properly colored text on top of your color graded image rather than tinting or graying the letters as part of the color process.

As for the timing of these title cards, a general rule of thumb is that you should be able to read them through quickly at least two and a half times before they disappear. This may seem too long to you, but remember that you already know what they say! For someone watching the movie for the first time, they need to realize that the titles have appeared on screen, look to the appropriate part of the frame, and then read what’s written, all while keeping an eye on what’s happening behind the text.

A word to the wise: no audience will care if the titles are up on screen for a bit too long, but they’ll quickly become annoyed if the titles are not on screen long enough.

Title Cards#

“Cards” refer to any titles that are added in separately—perhaps accompanied with their own original artwork—rather than words overlayed on top of footage. While you don’t need to have your final cards in the movie until late in the process, it’s crucial that you put temporary cards in during the edit so that adding the title cards does not affect the timing of the rest of the film.

End Credits#

Adding in end credits is the only step that affects your movie’s timing which you are allowed to do after picture lock. Since it will only add time to the end of your film, the timing of all your shots will not be affected. End credits usually go in very late in the game since you need to make sure you credit everyone who worked on the film. Until the film is almost done, you might now know who is going to perform every job.

Final Sound Work#

While some sound editing is inevitably part of the picture editing process, a large portion of the sound work can’t be done until the film is picture locked. In short, sound tends to serve the image rather than the image serving sound. As such, doing anything more than the most basic sound work while picture editing can be a waste of time since any given moment may be shortened, elongated, or cut altogether.

Once the image is locked, you’re going to have a spotting session (perhaps the first of many). A spotting session is any time you watch your movie—or part of your movie—and note all the moments where you need to add in sound. This could be additional effects, music cues, or ADR lines. Then you can get to work acquiring those elements to drop into the film as well as cleaning up any sound that’s already in there, a process that may include adding fades to all audio, choosing the crispest recording of each line, and ensuring that background tones are present but not overwhelming.

Then once all of your sounds are edited into the movie, the very last thing to be done before you export is the final mix. On a professional film, this can be a multi-day process inside a mixing room. On a DIY project, this usually entails running through your project with a good set of headphones ensuring everything is loud enough without ever peaking.

For a more extensive look into all of this, check out our post on sound here (LINK TO BE ADDED)

Exporting#

Now that you are totally finished with your project, the only thing left to do is share it with the world. But be careful! If you don’t export it correctly, you may end up not showing your work in the best possible light. Below, we’re going to break down some the most common places where video footage might be uploaded online and best practices when exporting your footage for this place. (If the website in question didn’t specify something, we put an N/A)

| | YouTube | Vimeo | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Video Container | MP4 (preferred), MOV, MPEG4, AVI, WMV, FLV, MPEGPS, 3GPP, and WEbM | Accepts most major containers | Preferred: MP4 | Preferred: MP4 or MOV | Preferred: MP4 or MOV | | Preferred Video Codec | H.264 | H.264, Apple ProRes 422 (HQ), or H.265 (HEVC) | N/A | H.264 | H.264 High Profile | | Scan Type | Progressive | Progressive | N/A | Progressive | Progressive | | Recommended Video Bitrate (for standard 24 fps footage) | 35-45 Mbps (4k) 16 Mbps (2k) 8 Mbps (1080p) | 30-60 Mbps (4k) 20-30 Mbps (2k) 10-20 Mbps (1080p) | N/A (They specify a max resolution of 1080p) | 3500 Kbps | 5000 kbps | | Recommended Frame Rate | Native (whatever frame rate you recorded in) | Native | No recommended Maximum: 30fps | 30 fps (23-60 allowed) | 30 or 60 fps Maximum: 60 fps | | Audio Codec | AAC-LC | AAC-LC | AAC | AAC | AAC-LC | | Audio Channels | Stereo or Stereo + 5.1 | Stereo | Stereo | N/A | Mono or Stereo | | Sample Rate | 96 khz or 48 khz | 48 khz | N/A | N/A | N/A | | Recommended Audio Bitrate | 128 kbps (Mono) 384 kbps (stereo) 512 kbps (5.1) | 320 kbps | 128+ kbps | N/A | 128 kbps (Mono) | | Aspect Ratio | 16:9. If you upload footage with a different ratio, the player will adapt itself to the size of the video. | N/A | N/A | N/A | 16:9 or 1:1 | | Maximum File Size | 20GB | N/A | 10 GB | 4GB | 512 mb | | Maximum Video Length | 12 hours | N/A | 240 minutes | 60 seconds | 140 seconds |

Then, once your video is uploaded, all that’s left to do is send your link out to others and share your work with the world. Then kick back, and give yourself some well-earned rest...

And then get to work on that next project. With all the lessons you learned this time around, this new one is sure to be even better.