Friday, 18 April 2008

Getting to grips with Final Cut pro



Our second semester focuses around Television programme making. My television experience and knowledge is limited so I was keen to get stuck in and learn as much as possible. One of the aspects of this part of the course I was looking forward to most was learning how to use the editing software Final Cut Pro. As I have good experience with audio editing software and am competent with computers so I was quite confident going into this.

Our first assignment was to create a montage of scenes we filmed on the beach for a music video for one of Sam's songs. Getting used to the basic editing tools and functions took a while and it took me 2 attempts before I submitted my work. My first selection of shots were fairly poor as I included some wobbly camera work and scenes with bad lighting and the whole piece just ended up looking like a bunch of random sequences. I rethought the assignment and tried to think like a television editor would think if he/she had to edit the piece. For example if Sam moved her head to look at something in the shot, I would cut to a dog chasing a ball and I tried not to 'cross the line'. I tried to cut on motion as much as possible. It was also good fun to use some effects that final cut pro had to offer. There was a traffic sequence that I speeded up to 500% which worked really well. I also sped up a scene of Sam walking down Weston High Street. We set the shot up and got her to walk down the street very slowly. When I sped the shot up it looked as though Sam was walking normaly but all the other pedestrians were buzzing around her. I will upload the finished piece to youtube soon.

Our second edit assignment was to put together a news item. We had some prerecorded footage of an ice mountain being built for a promotional day at a local car showroom - if a member of the public correctly guessed how long the mountain took to melt they would win a prize! The item was focused around a local radio DJ who was promoting the event live on the radio and I used his commentry to tell the story with pictures of the ice mountain being built.

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