Da Vinci masterpiece

Piecing together the shots was fairly easy, I loaded the RAW footage into DaVinci Resolve (V12) as well as the time coded clip from the original film. I went through the time coded clip and marked every cut with frame markers, using a different colour for each character to mark the scene change. I began dragging in the first set of clips from my media pool and dropping them into place on a separate video track, by disabling clip link I was able to delete any audio from the files and just work with the video clips. By closely examining the movements in each original scene I was able to match them with our raw footage, it was interesting seeing how many of the clips in the sequence had been sped up or slowed down just slightly, some of which were obvious but others were much more subtle. Matching the speeds to make sure the characters were moving in the right ways was fairly easy to do in DaVinci; when selected to change the clip speed I was given the option to add a speed point which enabled me to grab the clip and literally drag it to be the right size so it matched the original. Adding a speed point at any point in the clip enabled me to slow down or speed up certain parts of each clip with ease, so I could put a speed point a third of the way through the clip and only speed up the first third or second two thirds if I needed to, meaning i didn't have to splice the clip into sections to change the speed at certain points.

At this point we're waiting on the character freeze frames to come back from the VFX students. For now i've left a gap at the precise moment where the freeze frame begins and ends. The only problem with editing without them is that I don't know at which frame in the selected clips they will use for the freeze frame, this means that i'll have to go back later on and change the clip if they don't match.

For the moment i've just pieced together the clips and made sure the timings match, next time I edit i'll starting on the freeze frames and effects. There are several tricky transitional edits that will require using the keyframe tool which is completely new for me so should be a challenge, but so far the rough edit is looking remarkably like the original and that's without a final grade or effects! Just goes to show how getting the initial shots right can do so much for the editing process.