Xavier Plagaro Mussard

99% of GoPro users are skiers, skaters or drummers. Most of them don't even know what Super 8 is! 

99% of GoPro users are skiers, skaters or drummers. Most of them don't even know what Super 8 is! 

What a great guy, great cam!

I really enjoy this series, it's one of the genuinely good/interesting things on YouTube, but I especially liked this episode on the Digital Bolex. I always wanted to get my hands on one but never did. 
It's a shame that it ended up the way it did, because it genuinely was a pretty revolutionary way to create a camera. I don't know that we'll ever see a camera built with the same spirit and vision as the Bolex, and that's too bad. 
 

Gimbal + Slow Motion + Background music on post = A way to get bland results with no effort or ideas. I am in a video editing guys group on FB, 90% of the videos they post are random clips with background music. Ten years ago AI can do a better job at editing. 
Unsecure clients are always worried about all of the useless things, how big your camera is, how well you are dressed, how long the video will be. You paid a pro to not have to think about those things, don't you?

Well to me other than the Ursa Mini most of these new cameras have missed the boat. Real ENG cameras have zero stabilization in the body or the lens, yet you never see any goofy bad movement from them because they weigh a lot, and they are up on your shoulder. 
Like I have said you can use them for hours on you shoulder and never get tired or shaky.  I have no clue why when you buy a camera that is geared toward film making these company's trying to make the littlest, lightest camera they can make that fits in your hand then you have to rig the living shit out of a camera and they still suck is beyond me.

Man, I’ve gone so far as to hire a separate crew to shoot “a” cam with all the video-village gak —while I run around looking all unassuming, just doing my thing and getting 90% of the video used in the edit. 

Normally my clients are people that saw me work first hand, so they know what to expect, but this one had never seen me work. I didn't really think to do more than bring my lights, camera, tripod, and audio gear since it was a pretty simple sit down set up... Making it all look like a beefed up cine camera didn't even cross my mind! 
I guess it wouldn't hurt to add my SmallRig mini matte box lite, wooden hand grips, and external monitor in the future? I just never really saw the point in controlled conditions. 
I think I'd just buy another S5 or an S1.
When I got home I did this. 
I guess that does look better. 

When starting with a new client, I sometimes just build my EOSM with cheap matte box and a top handle, and then put it in a bag.  When they see me pull that rig out of the bag, they think they think I am a total pro!

Probably drinking too much of that strong Berlin beer.

I add this video even if unfortunately I can not add anything in reality to the discussion, just to show the exceptional tracking that blendertrack manages to obtain with an embarrassing simplicity .., everything is then transferred as it is to unreal with the same settings of the camera and this is the result .... If there were no algorithm interpretation problems because the file is in low resolution (1080p from mobile) and bicycle etc and because the background is not homogeneous enough, you could really do anything with the minimum effort ... Unfortunately this type of tracking I can only use for a few and studied scenes ... I then tried to digitize my son with capture reality but even here I couldn't, I'll probably have to try again with other camera settings

I get it from both sides. I live in a small town, 12,000 people that has a large college in it, 25,000. The young girls think I am a Pervert and the women with kids think I am a Pedophile lol. I can't win.
 But on the weekends when both the boys and girls are drunk, they come up to me and want to be in my movie lol.

Damn, I need to sell my Lamborghini to buy memory cards for 10k 120fps. 

Another way to take from the poors and give to the richs. 

can we start a betting ring on how they plan to cripple it ? 

If there are some other collections and barrels not exactly glass related, what about ours? ; )
Inspired by this post from one of the most dearest ones among us and a most part of us after all...
Show us your Nerd  ;- )
 

Yeah, I'll see someone I know say something incredibly disrespectful to me because we disagree on politics, but then when I see them at the grocery store it's all smiles and asking how my family is doing, etc. When I tell them to fuck off (quite literally) they act shocked and confused.
I don't mean to paint all older folks with the same brush, but people that didn't use the internet much all the sudden became super connected once smart phones took over the market and immediately became the shittiest users on the internet. Now your 60 year old aunt spends most of her day shit posting and making casual racist comments on Facebook but wonders why things are now awkward with you on holidays. 

Editing is a fascinating but smokey art. It seams to slowly blow away when you try to talk about it, a bit as waking up and trying to remember your dream, imho. I don't know how much it is repeatable. I always felt that I haven't studied enough of it. Your idea of detecting cuts with Resolve is great!
I am on a video editing FB group in Italy. Not once editing is talked about. Just usual Mac/PC, GPUs, Premiere problems, which NLE to choose, how to deliver to some TV, etc.  

Until a couple of years ago. Now people with their full name and with a profile picture of their family, posts in FB wishing death to someone else. It is sad, more than anything.
But adults are turning into rabid teenagers with zero responsibility.  

Thanks - excellent links and I'll definitely review them.  I'm familiar with Walter Murch and have his book but didn't spot that playlist, which looks excellent.  I've watched a number of his talks, but they seem to be around the same time and have the same content.
Yes, definitely a great channel, and his series when editing the feature where he showed actual editing was great.  It's hugely useful to watch someone actually doing the work, so you can see the effects and see what they're seeing, rather than just talking about stuff.
The challenge I have is that my work isn't narrative, but travel, and Sven is very focused on that, which is very useful to others.
I totally agree - it's very intangible.  Both Walter Murch and Sven (ThisGuyEdits) describe the process as being very visceral - literally based on the feeling of your gut (viscera).  
Another thing I do is grab screenshots while I'm watching things on Netflix / Prime / etc as references for colour grading.  I'm always trying to find a moment when the actor stops moving so I don't have motion blur in the frame.  
The reason I bring this up is that almost without fail, they cut just before that happens.  I mean, I regularly stop the video on the first frame of the next shot, and can do that reliably even when I haven't seen the footage before.  I don't really know what that means in editing terms, or even acting terms.  
Walter Murch mentioned a technique where he would be working on a cut and would skip back 5-10s, watch the sequence, and hit pause when he thought the cut should be - doing it by feel.  He would take note of the frame number, then skip back and do it again.  He would repeat this process until he was hitting the same exact frame reliably, and then he'd know that this frame was the right frame to make the cut.  IIRC he said something like until he's able to hit the same frame reliably he hasn't understood the timing of the material yet, so the process is really an exploration and learning experience, with the reliability indicating that the learning has completed.
The titular premise of Walters book "In The Blink of an Eye" is that we blink when we've finished a thought, and so you typically want to cut when the thought is finished, which is just before the blink.  It could be that people tend to move while thought is occurring, and then pause when one thought ends and the next begins.  This is probably linked to speech in some way, but I'm not sure how.
Anyway, pulling apart the material like this is a great way to really study it in detail.

Editing is a fascinating but smokey art. It seams to slowly blow away when you try to talk about it, a bit as waking up and trying to remember your dream, imho. I don't know how much it is repeatable. I always felt that I haven't studied enough of it. Your idea of detecting cuts with Resolve is great!
I am on a video editing FB group in Italy. Not once editing is talked about. Just usual Mac/PC, GPUs, Premiere problems, which NLE to choose, how to deliver to some TV, etc.  

I don't think the camera plays an important part in the final look of a well produced movie or series. The camera is a tool and pros work around the limits of their tools. If 90% of the look was the camera, one DP would be as good as another one. And set design, dressing, color grading would all be nearly useless. There is a reason end credits last 5-10 minutes.
Of course all this reverse in the case of the videomaker, a situation in which one person is responsible for everything. There the camera plays a great role. 

They have all missed a trick there.
Should have shot everything in 12K and just cropped instead of using lenses!

As I gradually get more serious about learning the art of editing, I've discovered it's a very under-represented topic on social media.  There are definitely some good resources, but compared to cinematography or colour grading, it's much more difficult to find resources, especially if your interest isn't purely narrative film-making.
A good strategy is to search for editors by name, as often the good stuff is just called "<name> presents at <event>" and no mention of editing or even film at all.  However, you can search for editor after editor and find nothing useful at all.
As such, I've now started analysing other people's edits directly, hoping to glean interesting things from their work.
My process is this.
Step 1: Download the video in a format that Resolve can read
I use 4K Video Downloader for Mac, but there's tonnes of options.  You're probably violating terms of service by doing this, so beware.
Step 2: Use the Scene Cut Detection feature in Resolve
Resolve has this amazing function that not many people know about.  It analyses the video frame-by-frame and tries to guess where the cut points are by how visually different one frame is from the previous one.  It's designed for colourists to be able to chop up shots when given a single file with the shots all back-to-back.
This isn't a tutorial on how to use it (the manual is excellent for this) but even this tool shows useful things.
Once it has analysed the video, it gives you the window to review and edit the cut points.  Here's a window showing a travel video from Matteo Bertoli:

What we can see here is that the video has very clear cuts (the taller the line the more change between frames) and they occur at very regular intervals (he's editing to the music), but that there are periods where the timing is different.  
Let's contrast that with the trailer for Mindhunter:

We can see that there's more variation in pacing, and more gradual transitions between faster and slower cutting.  Also, there are these bursts, which indicate fading in and out, which is used throughout the trailer.  These require some work to clean up before importing the shots to the project.
Lastly, this is the RED Komodo promo video with Jason Momoa and the bikers:

There are obviously a lot of clean edits, but the bursts in this case are shots with lots of movement, as this trailer has some action-filled and dynamic camera work.
I find this tool very useful to see pace and timing and overall structure of a video.  I haven't used it yet on things longer than 10 minutes, so not sure how it would go in those instances, but you can zoom in and scroll in this view, so presumably you could find a useful scale and scroll through, seeing what you see.
This tool creates a list of shots, and gives a magic button...

Then you get the individual shots in your media pool.
Step 3: "Recreation" of the timeline
From there you can pull those shots into the timeline, which looks like this:

However, this wouldn't have been how they would have edited it, and for educational purposes we can do better.
I like to start by manually chopping up the audio independently from the video (the Scene Cut Detection tool is visual-only after all).  For this you would pull in sections of music, maybe sections of interviews, speeches, or ambient soundscapes as individual clips.  If there are speeches overlapping with music then you could duplicate these, with one track showing the music and another showing the speeches.  
Remember, this timeline doesn't have to play perfectly, it's for studying the edit they made by trying to replicate the relevant details.
This travel video had one music track and no foley, so I'd just represent it like this:

I've expanded the height of the audio track as with this type of music-driven edit, the swells of the music are a significant structural component to the edit.  
It's immediately obvious, even in such a basic deconstruction, that the pace of editing changes each time the music picks up in intensity, that once it's at its highest the pace of editing stays relatively stable and regular, and then at the end the pace gradually slows down.  Even just visually we can see the structure of the story and journey that the video takes through its edit.
But, we can do more.  Wouldn't it be great to be able to see where certain techniques were used?  Framing, subject matter, scenes, etc etc?
We can represent these visually, through layers and colour coding and other techniques.
Here is my breakdown of another Matteo video:

Here's what I've done:
V6 are the "hero" shots of the edit.  Shots in orange are where either Matteo or his wife (the heroes of the travel video) are the subject of the video, and pink are close-ups of them V5 is where either Matteo or his wife are in the shot, but it doesn't feature them so prominently.  IIRC these examples are closeup shots of Matteo's wife holding her phone, or one of them featured non-prominently in the frame, perhaps not even facing camera V4 and below do not feature our heroes... V4 either features random people (it's a travel video so people are an important subject) prominently enough to distinguish individuals, or features very significant inanimate objects V3 features people at a significant enough distance to not really notice individuals, or interesting inanimate objects (buildings etc) V2 are super-wide shots with no details of people (wides of the city skyline, water reflections on a river, etc) V1 is where I've put in dummy clips to categorise "scenes", and in this case Green is travel sections shot in transport or of transport, and Blue is shots at a location V2-V6 are my current working theory of how to edit a travel film, and represents a sort of ranking where closeups of your heroes are the most interesting and anonymous b-roll is the least interesting.  You should adapt this to be whatever you're interested in.  You could categorise shots based on composition, which characters are in the shot, which lens was used, if there was movement in the shot, if there was dialogue from the person in-shot or dialog from the person not-in-shot or no dialog at all, etc etc.  Remember you can sort between tracks, you can colour code, and probably other things I haven't yet tried.  NLEs have lots of visual features so go nuts.
Step 4: Understand what the editor has done
Really this depends on what you're interested in learning, but I recommend the following approach:
Make a list of questions or themes to pay attention to Focus on just one question / theme and review the whole timeline just looking at this one consideration I find that it's easy to review an edit and every time you look at the start you notice one thing (eg, pacing), and then in the next section you notice another (eg, compositions), and then at the end you notice a third (eg, camera movement).  The problem with this is that every time you review the video you're only going to think of those things at those times, which means that although you've seen the pacing at the start you're not going to be noticing the compositions and camera movement at the start, or other factors at other times.  This is why focusing on one question or one theme at a time is so powerful, it forces you to notice things that aren't the most obvious.
Step 5: Look for patterns
We have all likely read about how in many films different characters have different music - their "theme".  Star Wars is the classic one, of course, with Darth Vaders theme being iconic.  This is just using a certain song for a certain character.  There are an almost infinite number of other potential relationships that an editor could be paying attention to, but because we can't just ask them, we have to try and notice them for ourselves. 
Does the editor tend to use a certain pacing for a certain subject?  Colour grade for locations (almost definitely, but study them and see what you can learn)?  Combinations of shots?
What about the edit points themselves?  If it's a narrative, does the editor cut some characters off, cutting to another shot while they're still talking, or immediately after they've stopped speaking, rather than lingering on them for longer?  Do certain characters get a lot of J cuts?  Do certain characters get more than their fair share of reaction shots (typically the main characters would as we care more about what main characters think than what secondary characters feel while they're talking).
On certain pivotal scenes or moments, watch the footage back very slowly and see what you can see.  Even stepping through frame-by-frame can be revealing and potentially illuminate invisible cuts or other small tweaks.  Changing the timing of an edit point by even a single frame can make a non-trivial aesthetic difference.  
Step 6: Optional - Change the edit
Change the timing of edits and see what happens.  In Resolve the Scene Cut Detection doesn't include any extra frames, so you can't slide edit points the way you normally would be able to when working with the real source footage, but if you pull in the whole video into a track underneath the individual clips you can sometimes rearrange clips to leave gaps and they're not that noticeable.  This obviously won't create a publishable re-edit, but for the purposes of learning about the edit it can be useful.  You can change the order of the existing clips, you can shorten clips and change the timing, etc.  You could even re-mix the whole edit if you wanted to, working within the context of a severely limited set of "source footage" of course, but considering that the purpose of this is to learn and understand, it's worth considering.
Final thoughts
Is this a lot of work?  Yes.  But learning anything is hard work - the brain is lazy that way.  Also, this might be the only way to learn certain things about certain editors, as it seems that editors are much less public people than other roles in film-making.
One experiment I tried was instead of taking the time to chop up and categorise a film, I just watched it on repeat for the same amount of time.  I watched a 3.5 minute travel film on repeat for about 45 minutes - something like a dozen times.  I started watching it just taking it in and paying attention to what I noticed, then I started paying attention to how I felt in response to each shot, then to the timing of the shots (I clapped along to the music paying attention to the timing of edits - I was literally repeating out loud "cut - two - three - four"), I paid attention to the composition, to the subject, etc etc..  But, I realised that by the time I had watched a minute of footage I'd sort-of forgotten what happened 30 shots ago, so getting the big-picture wasn't so easy, and when I chopped that film up, although I'd noticed some things, there were other things that stood out almost immediately that I hadn't noticed the dozen times I watched it, despite really paying attention.
Hopefully this is useful.

Its that hypocrisy that gets me.