6 Million Piece Jigsaw

After a year of filming we have almost finished shooting for the new DVD ‘Committed’. We've travelled to locations all over the British Isles capturing loads of fantastic climbing.

And now we have over 70 hours of High Definition video footage, which equates to 2,400 GB's.

One of my poor hard drives

So now two months of editing lies in front of us, approximately 500 hours sat in the edit suite between now and the end of August.

Why does it take so long?

Most folks don’t understand the edit process… I certainly didn’t until I spent 150 hours editing ‘Fools with Tools’ back in 2004. ‘Fools’ was just a 15min film made from about 7 hours of footage.

'Fools With Tools', 2004... 150 hours of editing for just 15 mins

After ‘Fools’ I came up with a rough rule of thumb:
1 min of video takes about 10 hours of editing (when I say editing, strictly speaking, I mean all post production (ie editing, colour correction, video effects, narration, animation, sound mixing and general messing about in post!)

So, Why does it take so long?

Think of the film as like a giant jigsaw puzzle. The pieces are made up of video frames, (25 per second).

One piece of the Jigsaw, a frame of James Pearson on Trauma E9.

So for our 70 hours of video that’s:
70 hours X 60 mins X 60 secs X 25 frames per/sec = 6,300,000 pieces!

An hour long film is made from 90,000 frames (60 mins X 60 secs X 25 frames/sec).

So imagine opening a jigsaw box and spreading 6,300,000 pieces around the floor of your living room and then trying to select 90,000 of those pieces to make up a picture. A jigsaw like that should keep your granny busy well through Christmas and into new year.

Ok, to be fair, editors often deal with chucks of video, several seconds at a time, but that doesn’t mean we don’t consider every frame and justify it’s presents in the film.

Editing our recent trip to Pabbay.

When folk talk to me about Committed, they often say: "sounds great, can’t wait to see it."… yea well, I can’t wait to see it either. With all that in mind, I’m going to get my head down and get back to my jigsaw puzzle! I’ll see you in September!

"...that’s a bit of Sky…. that’s a climbers hand…"
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Diff.