Today’s Plan:
- Editing Interview Footage
Working With Sample Footage
Today we’re going to learn how to execute an “L Cut.” This is simply when there is a video transition over uninterrupted audio. The inverse of this is a “J Cut,” where there is an audio transition that precedes a video transition. The name for these cuts reflect the shape that the video and audio tracks make in an editor when you execute them. In the former, the original video clip stops and the audio drags on (like the foot of an L) and in the latter the audio starts before the video comes in (like the bottom of a J). This is a lot more complicated to describe than it is to demonstrate.
I’ve got two sample video files for you to download. These are from the fall 2022 Go West Film Festival. The first clip, our A-Roll, is Rodney Sauer, composer, keyboardist, and silent film fan, discussing X after his performance. The second clip, our B-roll, is a snippet from that performance.
We are going to perform a simple L-cut, so that we transition from Rodney talking to the B-roll of the performance.
We are going to do this two different ways. First, we will eliminate the audio from the B-roll clip. Second, we will lower the audio from the B-roll.
This shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes. You’ll have the rest of class to work on editing your interview footage.
Executing an L-Cut in Adobe Rush (No B-roll audio)
Here’s the steps:
- Download Our Two Files:
- Create a new project in Rush. Select the interview as #1 and the film clip as #2
- Select Clip #2 in Rush (so that it has the yellow border around the video clip and its audio file). Right-click on the clip and select “Separate Audio.” You should now see something like the image below.
- Delete the B-roll audio file.
- Drag the B-roll video file to the track above it. NOTE: The tracks in Rush and Premiere work exactly like layers in photoshop. We see whatever is on top of the stack.
- Now you can simply drag the B-roll clip to anywhere on the timeline and it will play “over” the A-roll. The A-roll audio will still play. Viola, an L-cut.
Executing an L-Cut in Adobe Rush (Lower B-roll audio)
This one is a bit trickier, only because Rush will kind of fight us. We need to do a simple hack to get this to work. The first few steps are the same:
- Create a new project in Rush. Select the interview as #1 and the film clip as #2
- Select Clip #2 in Rush (so that it has the yellow border around the video clip and its audio file). Right-click on the clip and select “Separate Audio.” You should now see something like the image below.
- Now this will be weird. Drag the separated audio file to a lower track. For reasons I cannot fathom, Rush will *not* allow you to raise the video clip to the higher track. We need to trick it.
- Move the separated audio track *after* its B-roll video track. See image #2 below
- Now drag the b-roll video to the higher track. For reasons I really, really cannot fathom, Rush will slide the separated audio back in sync with the B-roll video clip. Weird.
- Move the video clip to the position you want it. Then move the audio clip into position. It should auto-sync once it is close.
- If you play the project, you will hear that the b-roll audio is too loud. We want to bring down the volume on the b-roll audio clip.
- Select it and open the audio editing panel. Look for the image of a waveform on the far-right edge of the workspace. Alternatively, you can go to View > Audio.
- Reduce the b-roll audio from its default of 50 to 25. Select the A-roll clip. Increase its audio from 50 to 75.
- Bonus: drop a dissolve effect on the B-roll audio out and the B-roll video in.
