The problem with bacon

Long time, no update. We’ve had a few fits and starts over the last month – mostly with computer and hard drive issues – but I’m proud to report that all that is past us and the rough cut is halfway done.

What does that mean? It means that half of the segments are already edited in their roughest form. It’s more-or-less what the final segments are going to look like, but without a lot of the refinements and without spending too much time on making the edits as tight as they could be. It’s like when you write that first draft of a report or short story – the hardest part is just getting it all down on paper first, so that you can tweak it and revise it later.

I fully expect to complete the entire rough cut by this time next week.

Then comes the refinement pass of tightening up the editing, trimming wherever possible, rearranging the segments to make it flow better, and inserting some footage of the fair as a bridge between sections to give it more of a narrative.

Then comes what I call “last pass” – color correcting, cleaning up and balancing the audio, and adding titles and credits.

Speaking of audio, I thought I’d share a bit of what it sounds like when things aren’t quite going your way.

While shooting out on the field, we often had to contend with background sounds, music playing….just your basic fair noise. Sometimes you can move to a quieter area or wait a few minutes for the parade to go by. Other times you just have to do the best with what you’ve got.

This is one of those sequences. We filmed it on the second day, shortly after a big parade had just gone by. The crowd is still noisy – both inside and outside the building – and there is music playing over the speakers that they cranked up JUST as we started recording. Worst of all, it wasn’t until I got home to review the footage that I discovered there was a prominent hum throughout – the result of some electronic interference, or perhaps a mic connection that was jostled.

So I ran the audio through some filters to minimize the junk as much as possible. Unfortunately, the result is never as nice as you’d like it to be, and it stands in stark contrast to the audio quality of the rest of the program.

I’ll definitely be coming back to it when the rough cut is done. The only alternative is to ditch this bit from the show entirely, and I just couldn’t bring myself to cut Chocolate Dipped Bacon On A Stick. Could you?

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