Part 11: maybe 98% finished

Made a few more ‘style’ cuts and have really entered into the ‘fine-tuning’ stage – snipping a few seconds here or there and smoothing out some of the audio’s rough patches. I’m really getting much better at using Vegas and have become a fan. It’s very easy to make titles, professional transitions, etc. You can nest several projects together and perform some really complicated actions. It outputs mpeg files of comparable quality to other encoders, and can create ac3 compression audio tracks as well.

One thing to mention is the working pace. It may seem pretty slow, but consider that each time I decide to encode the most current edit, it takes about 3hrs to encode the first section, and another 6hrs to encode the second. I pretty much work in my spare time & let the computer crunch video overnight.

I had to make a couple of tough choices recently: it occurred to me that the ‘Flight of the Osiris” sequence starting off the second half is mostly unnecessary. It makes a nice ‘vision’ for Neo to have & I spent quite a long time editing it together (only the ‘chase’ parts of that episode into a 2min piece) but as a viewer you get the gist that the machines are tunneling down toward Zion without needing to see the Osiris discovering that fact & being chased. I cut it out, and replaced it with a flashback of Neo waking up in his pod from the first film. Then I cut that part from the first section, goosing the original film along.

I’d say that the actual editing of the film is 98% done. I’m going to sit through the whole thing again from start to finish looking for mistakes and minor adjustments, but it’s definitely the home stretch.