What is Live Editing?
Live editing is a method to edit your conference as the conference in happening in real time. For 90% of our clients, live-editing is the best way to get footage done right, at budget, quickly. In most cases you'll have a cameraman who is recording the conference anyway: following the people on stage, zooming in and zooming out as appropriate, monitoring audio and making sure it all goes well. A lot of times, you'll also have some content on the screen (PowerPoints or demos) and you might also have a wide camera shot of everything that's happening on the stage.
With normal editing, all those assets get saved as files and taken back to an office, and if you have an 8-hour conference, before any edits get made, the editor has to watch the video. So they watch 5 minutes, and then make an edit, and then watch 5 minutes and make a change… drop in a slide… go to the wide shot, etc. But this is actually stupid. He has to watch 8 hours of video, so you get charged for editing time- just for the time he has to watch through things. On average this takes 3 hours for every hour of completed video. It's really not very effective.
What works a lot better is if you can have the cameraman do all of the editing WHILE HE IS RECORDING THE CONFERENCE. This means that the cameraman will have a computer in front of him, and leading to that computer you have a few different feeds: one from the camera he's running, one from the wide camera, and one from the slides. Then as the conference is happening, the cameraman follows the action, selecting between a number of prepared scenes. When the talent is up on stage he records a full screen shot of you. When you say let's look at the slide, he presses a button on the computer and BOOM we go to a picture-in-picture of you and the slides. The conference continues and maybe a special guest comes out, and the cameraman cuts to a wide shot that's both of you on screen, and then he can zoom in with his camera and cut to that zoomed in shot, and then maybe back out to the wide for a question and answer… and so on for the whole conference.
Here’s an example of one live editing set-up
The computer shows, the camera shot (left), the live edit output (right), and the various pre-created scenes with PIPs.
The whole time that the cameraman is recording, he's watching and listening and thinking about where the audience’s focus should be.
What are the Benefits of Live Editing?
Everyone wants video to be 1) done well, 2) done fast and 3) done cheap. With traditional editing you get to pick two of those. But Live-editing is better, faster, and cheaper than traditional editing. It means you save 95% of the editing costs. It means your video is delivered in a day or two. It means the company doesn’t have to choose between a quick delivery and high quality cuts!
For a more detailed discussion of the benefits of live editing, see this article.