I finished the rough cut trimming process of all 8 tapes a week ago and since then I'm still finding all types of excuses to avoid working on the project. In the mean time I organised my mp3 collection, edited the blog video snippets, downloaded loads of latino songs, sent one or two well pitched CVs and read lots of stuff about testing - hardly anything to do with video editing.

On Saturday I exported the first hour of video on tape with a whole series of problems between the video camera and premier pro. Every 10-20 minutes either the camera or premier kept stopping abruptly for no apparent reason. Premier behaves really strange when exporting to tape sometimes, and the solution to the problem was a restart of the application with the camera switched off, for whatever it's worth.

On Sunday I bothered to sit down in front of the TV and watch the whole first rough cut of the video. I was hesitant to 'waste' an hour watching the video but I must say this was a very important step that paid its worth. While watching the video I made notes on what clips need to be trimmed, sequences reordered, voice overs, bad sound, good sound etc. For the 1 and a half hour spent watching the video I spent only 2-3 hours the following two days making the necessary modifications.

The trick at this stage was to leave the music clip selection process for later on, until I could find the time to choose the music clips as the soundtrack. I created two dummy offline clips of 1 minute each, one for music and the other for voice overs and whereever there was the need for music I inserted the dummy clip. Now all I've got to do in the newly edited timeline is to go through the offline clips and replace them with actual songs. Pretty nifty eh.