Evalution

We have learnt a lot about continuity editing since we started this project. Continuity editing is the process of editing together a video to make it flow better, making it more immersive and realistic for the viewer. For example, you must always keep the 180 degree rule established. Another continuity editing technique we uses was match on action, where the same action flows over to different camera angles of it, making it seem more natural.

We used the digital SLR cameras provided by the college to photograph our storyboard in preparation for filming, these gave us a good base to start from, and made the actual filming a lot easy to execute. They were rather easy to use, they had easy point and shoot features, but with plenty of technical settings too, if needed. We just simply used the optical view finder, while the camera was in capture mode. Once we had finished taking the photos, we took the SD card out of the cameras and into the inbuilt card readers on the PCs, we then simply navigated to the card's drive, and dragged the files from it into our own area. To create the storyboards from the photos, we used Adobe Photoshop CS5 along with a pre made template, all we had to do was import and crop the images into Photoshop, and then add text boxes to explain what was going on.

The hardest part of filming was probably organising it, as you had to keep tabs on quite a lot of different things, who was acting, when the actors were available, and making sure they knew there lines, considering the fact that we haven't been in college long, it was not the easiest task finding willing actors. However I believe next time we go to film a video, we will be better prepared as we will know more people, and would have learned from our mistakes, (such as not giving the actors any real time to prepare)



The video cameras we used to film our task were pretty easy to use, considering most of our group had had previous experience with similar devices. All we had to do was turn on the camera, switch the mode to capture, and press record  to start filming. The cameras used DV tapes, so instead of having loads of cut files, we had one long video we had to capture sections off in Adobe On Location. The first time round that we imported it, the video was completely out of sync with the audio (this is still noticeable on the final version) So we decided to re-capture it onto the PC, but recording it in sections, as appose to in one go, the audio was still off in places, but overall, this improved the quality of the sync. We connected the camera to the PC using a firewire cable provided by the college, it was a simple enough process considering drivers etc were already installed.

The editing part was the most tricky part of the process, not because we didn't understand how to use Adobe Premier, but because we had to spend a lot of time re-aligning the audio and video tracks, along with having to cut out people mistakes. We imported all the clips we had recorded in On Location, into the media library of Premier, and then dragged them onto the timeline to arrange. We used the pointer tool for general moving around, and then the razor tool to cut of the video when we had filmed too much, or needed to cut off the end of a take, etc. When we had to attempt to fix the audio, we would unlink the audio and video tracks from each other, then move them independently until we were relatively happy with how the video looked, then joined them back together again. It was annoying having to constantly do this, and I think that the time and patience that it took, took away from the overall quality of our video.

Once we had finished the video and rendered it as an avi file, we continued to upload it to YouTube, this was done with ease due to the college's high speed Internet connection, YouTube automatically compressed it and it was up and online within about 20 minutes. We then embedded it on our blog using html coding which you can get from the video.

Blogger has been rather useful in this task as it has helped me organize my work in a clear manor, which made it easy to get my head around the work. Also a useful feature of blogger is being able to write bits of the post at a time, and come back and edit it at a later date, this is useful when we have big tasks to write, or I see a spelling or grammatical mistake.