The NAB Show is a great place to see the next level of media hardware and software. Even better, it’s also a great place to meet old friends, make new ones, and pick up the tips and tricks of your craft through the numerous tutorials, seminars, and off-site events that accompany the show.
This year I had the chance to interview Thomas Grove Carter, an editor at Trim Editing, which is a London-based creative editorial shop. He appeared at several sessions to present his techniques for maximizing the power of Final Cut Pro X. These sessions were moderated by Apple and FCPWORKS.
Thomas Grove Carter has a number of high-profile projects on his reel, including work for Honda, Game of Thrones, Audi, and numerous music artists. Carter is a familiar name in the Final Cut Pro X editing community. He first came to prominence with Honda’s “The Other Side” long-form web commercial. In it, Carter juxtaposes parallel day and night driving scenarios covering the main actor – dad by day, undercover police officer by night. On the interactive website, you can toggle in-sync between the two versions. Thanks to FCPX’s way of connecting clips and the nature of its magnetic timeline, Carter could use this then-young application to build the commercial, as well as preview the interactivity for the client – all on a very tight deadline.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Carter in a semi-quiet corner of the NAB Press Room shortly after his Post Production World keynote session on Sunday evening.
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[Oliver Peters]: We first started hearing your name when Honda’s “The Other Side” long-form commercial hit the web. That fit ideally with Final Cut Pro X’s unique ability to connect clips above and below the primary storyline on the timeline. Was that something you came up with intuitively?
[Thomas Grove Carter]: I knew that Final Cut Pro X was going to be good for this interactive piece. As you’re playing back in FCPX you can enable and disable layers. This meant I could actually do a rough preview of what it’s going to look like. I knew that I was going to have these two layers of video, but I didn’t exactly know what it was going to be until the edit, so I started to assemble each story separately. Then at some point, once I had each narrative roughly built, I put them both together on the same timeline and started adding the sound. From then on I was able to play it ‘interactively’ right inside FCPX. Back then, I split the day and night audio above and below the primary storyline. Today though, I’d probably assign a role for the day and a role for all of the night. Because, you can’t add audio-only above the primary storyline anymore. So that’s what I’d do to divide it out. All the audio and video still connects in exactly the same way – it just looks slightly different. Another great advantage of doing this in X was clip connections. For any given shot, there was the day and night version, and then, all the audio for the day and all the audio for the night. Just by grabbing the one clip in the primary and moving it or trimming it – everything for day and night – picture and audio – both would move together.
[OP]: Tell me a bit about your relationship with Trim Editing.
[TGC]: There are three partners, who are the most senior three editors. Then there are four or five other main editors and two or three junior editors, plus a number of assistants and runners.
It’s been running over 12 years and I joined the team just over 4 years ago.
[OP]: Are all of you using Final Cut Pro X?
[TGC]: Originally, before anyone started using Final Cut Pro X, we had a mix of Avid and Final Cut Pro 7. Then we began to move to Avid as we saw that Final Cut Pro 7 was not going to be improved. So I started to move to Avid, too. But, I was using Final Cut Pro X on my own personal projects. I began to use it on smaller jobs and one of the other editors said, “That’s cool, that thing you’re doing there.” And he started to try it out. Now we’re kind of at a point where most of the editors are on Final Cut Pro X. One is using Avid, so our assistants need to be able to work with both.
[OP]: Have you been able to convert the last hold-out?
[TGC]: He’s always been Avid. That’s what he uses. The company doesn’t dictate what we use to edit with. It’s all about making the best work. If I decided tomorrow that I wanted to cut in Avid or Premiere – it wouldn’t be an issue. Anyone can cut with anything they like.
[OP]: Any thoughts of going to Premiere?
[TGC]: We’ve fallen in love with the way FCPX works – the browser and the timeline. I think Premiere is good, because it feels very much like a continuation of where Final Cut Pro 7 was, which is why loads of people have moved to it. I understand that. It’s an easy move. But it’s the core way that X functions that I love. That stuff just isn’t in any other NLE. What I’ve found with everyone who has moved to it, including myself – there were always a few little hooks that keep people coming back, even if you don’t like the whole app initially. For me, the first thing I liked is how you can pull out the audio clips and things move out of the way automatically. And I always just thought ‘I can’t make this thing work, but that feature is cool’. And then I kept coming back to it and slowly fell I love with the rest of it. One of the other editors loved the way of making dynamic selects in the browser and said, “I’m going to do this job in X.” He’d select in the browser using favorites and rejects and he absolutely loved it. Loved the way it was so fluid with the thumbnails and he felt immersed in his rushes. Then he gets to the timeline. “Oh, I can’t make this work.” He sent it back to Final Cut Pro 7 and finished up there. He did that on two or three jobs, because it takes time to get comfortable with the timeline. It’s strange when you come from track-based. But once it clicks, it’s amazing.
[OP]: How do your assistant editors fit into the workflow?
[TGC]: Generally I go from one job to the next. It might be two weeks or a month and a quick turnaround. Occasionally there might be an overlap – like, the next job has already started shooting and I haven’t finished the last one off yet. So it might be that I need an assistant editor to load my stuff. Or maybe I have to move on to the next job and I’ve got an assistant doing final tweaks on the last one. It’s much simpler to load projects in X than it is in Avid and one thing I’ve heard in the industry is, “Oh, does that mean you’re going to fire a lot of assistants, because you don’t need them?” No! Of course, we’re going to employ them, but we’ll actually give them editing work to do whenever we can – not just grunt work. Let them do the cut-downs, versions, first assemblies. There’s more time now for them to be doing creative work.
We also try to promote from within. I was the first person who was hired from outside of the company. Almost all the other editors, apart from the partners, have been people who’ve moved up from within. Yes, we could be paying this assistant to be loading all our stuff and making QuickTimes. But if you can be paying the assistant and they can be doing another job, why wouldn’t you do that? It’s another revenue stream for the company. So it’s great to be able to get them up to a level where they can pick up work and build up their own reels and creative chops.
[OP]: Are you primarily working with proxy media?
[TGC]: Not ‘Final Cut Pro X proxy media’, but we use ProRes Proxy or LT files, which are often transcoded by a DIT on set. They look great, but the post house always goes back to the camera originals for the grade. Sometimes if it’s a smaller job – a low budget music video, for example – I’ll get the ARRI files if they shooting ProRes and just take them into Final Cut straight away- just to get working quicker.
[OP]: Since you work in the area of high-end commercials, do you typically send out audio, color and effects to outside post facilities?
[TGC]: Sound and post work is finished off elsewhere. We work with all the big post facilities – The Mill, Framestore, and MPC, for example. The directors we work with have their favorite colorists. They’re hiring them because they have the right eye, the right creative skills – not just because they can push the buttons. But we’re doing more and more in the offline now. Clients aren’t used to seeing things as ‘offline’ these days. They’re used to things looking slick. I do a lot of sound design, because it goes so hand in hand with the picture edit. Sometimes the picture doesn’t work without any of the sound, so I do quite a lot of it – get it sounding really great, but it will ultimately be remixed later. I might be working on a project for a month and the sound becomes a very integral creative element. And then the sound mixer only gets a day to pull it all together. They do a great job, but it’s really important to give them as much as we can to work with – to really set the creative direction of the audio.
[OP]: In your presentations, you’ve mentioned Trim’s light hardware footprint. How is the facility configured?
[TGC]: Well, we’ve got ‘cylinder’ Mac Pros, Retina iMacs, and more recently we’ve been trying out a few of the new MacBook Pros, alongside the LG 5K displays. I’ve actually been cutting with that set up a lot recently. I really like it, because I turn up at the suite with my laptop, plug two cables in and that’s it! One cable for the 5K display, power and audio. The second cable goes out to HDMI. It runs the client monitor (HD/4K TV) and a USB hub. It’s a really slick and flexible set up.
For storage, we’re currently using Samsung T3 SSD drives, which are so fast and light, they can handle most things we throw at them. It’s a really slick and flexible set up. But with a few potential feature films in the near future, we are looking again at shared storage. I think that’s an interesting area of the market these days. There are some really amazing new products, which don’t come from the same old vendors.
[OP]: How do clients react to this modular suite approach?
[TGC]: If were doing our jobs, clients shouldn’t really notice the tech were using to drive the edit. And people love the space we’ve created. We’ve got really nice rooms – none of our suites are small. Clients are looking at a 50″ to 60” TV, which is 4K in some of our suites. And we’ve got really great sound systems. So, in terms of what clients are seeing and hearing, it doesn’t get much better in an edit suite.
Sometimes directors will come by even when they’re not editing with us. They’ll come by and write their treatments and just hang out, which is really nice. There’s a lot of common space with areas to work and meet.
There’s a lot of art all over the place and when anyone sees a sign that has the word ‘trim’ in it – they buy it. It might be a street sign or a ‘trim something’ logo. So, you see these signs all over the building. It adds a really nice character to the place. When I joined the company, I wanted to bring something to it – and I love LEGO – so I built our logo using it. That’s mounted at our entrance now.
[OP]: There’s a certain mentality in working with agencies. How does Trim approach that?
[TGC]: We tend to focus on the directors. That’s where you develop the greatest relationships, which is where the best work comes from. Not that I dislike working with an agency, but you build a much closer creative bond with your directors.
One small way we help build a good working environment for directors and agencies is to all have lunch together, every single day. We have lunch rather than editing and eating at our desks. One of the great things about this is that directors get to meet other agencies and editors get to meet other directors. It’s really good to be able to socialize like that. It also helps build different relationships than what would ever happen if we we’re all locked away in a suite all day.
[OP]: At what point do you typically get involved with a job?
[TGC]: I’ll usually get pencilled on a job while the director is still pitching it. And then I’ll start work straight after the shoot. Occasional we’ll be on set, but only if it’s a really tight deadline. On that Honda job, that was a six-day shoot to make two, 2 1/2 minute films and then they needed to see it really soon after the shoot. So, I had to be on set. But typically I like not being on set, because when you’re on set you’re suddenly part of the, “Oh, this shot was amazing. It took us four hours to get in the pouring rain.” You’re invested in that baggage. Whereas, when you just view it coldly in the edit, you don’t know what happened on set. You can go, “This shot doesn’t work – let’s lose it.” That fresh vision is a great reason for the editor to be as far from a shoot as possible.
[OP]: One of the projects on your reel is a Games of Thrones promo. How did that job come your way?
[TGC]: That was actually a director I hadn’t worked with – but, just a director who wanted to work with me. He’d been trying to get me on a few jobs that I hadn’t been able to do. It was an outside director that HBO brought in to shoot. It wasn’t a trailer made of footage from the show. They brought in a commercials and music director to shoot the piece and he wanted to work with me. So, it came down like that and then I worked with him and HBO to bring it all together.
[OP]: Do you have any preferences for the types of projects you work on?
[TGC]: Things like the Audi commercial are really fun, because there’s a lot of sound design. A lot of commercials are heavily storyboarded, but it can often be more satisfying if the director has been a bit more loose in the filming. It might be a montage of different people doing activities, for example. And those can be quite fun, because the final thing – you’ve come up with it and you’ve created the narrative and the flow of it. I say that with hindsight, because they turn out to be the most creatively satisfying. But, the process can be much harder when you’re in the thick of it – because it’s on your shoulders and you haven’t got a really locked storyboard to fall back on. I’ll happily do really long hours and work really hard, if it’s a good bit of work – and, at the end of the day, I’ve worked with nice people.
[OP]: With Final Cut Pro X – anything that you’d like to see different?
[TGC]: Maybe collaboration is one thing that would be interesting to see if there’s a new and interesting take on it. Avid bin-locking is great, but actually when you boil it down, it’s quite a simple thing. It locks this bin, you can’t go in there. You can make a copy of it. That’s all it’s doing, but it’s simple and it works really well. All the cloud-based things I’ve seen so far – they’ve not really gotten me excited. I don’t feel like anyone has really nailed what that is yet. Everyone is just doing it because they can, not because it works really well, or is actually useful. I’d be interested to see if there’s something that can be done there.
In the timeline, I’d like to be able to look inside compound clips without stepping into them. I often use compound clips to combine sound effects or music stems. I’d like to be able to open them in context in the timeline and edit the contents inline with the master timeline. And I’d love some kind of dupe detection in the timeline. But otherwise, I’m really enjoying the new version.
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I certainly appreciated the time Thomas Grove Carter spent with me to do this interview. Along with a few other interviews, it made for a better-than-average Vegas trip. As a side note, I recorded my interviews (for transcription only) on my iPad, with the aid of the Apogee MetaRecorder app. This works with iPhones and iPads and starts at free, however, you should spend the $4.99 in-app upgrade to be able to do anything useful with it. It can use the built-in mic and records full quality audio WAV files – and – it features a connection to FCPX with fcpxml. Finally, to aid in generating a text transcript, I used Digital Heaven’s SpeedScriber. Although still in beta, it worked well for what I needed. As with all audio-to-text transcription applications, there’s no such thing as perfect. I did need to do a fair amount of clean-up, however, that’s not uncommon.
©2017 Oliver Peters
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