Editing Blog Lesson

Editing Blog Lesson

Today, the whole class sat down to watch a simple editing lesson from one of our teachers. She took us through the process of checking out equipment, to how to use the equipment, and how to manage our shots afterwards. We’re most likely going to check out everything besides and SD card, since one of my group’s members already bought one for us to use on our own, just so that it’d be easier later. We’re gonna make use of the tripod a lot because there’s going to be a lot of walking around in our commercial, but we don’t want our cameraman’s hands to be shaky and mess up the footage. We learned the basics— how to use the camera, tripod, the basics that (hopefully) we all knew before, but it was still nice to have the refresher since I honestly haven’t used a conventional camera in long time. How to manage the viewfinder, how to charge the camera, and how to attach it to the tripod. She showed us the program we’re going to be using, Pinnacle Studios. It looks pretty simple to me, but maybe that’s just because I had to edit a video for a final last year in a different class. She also demonstrated how to dump footage on the computer so that we don’t have to keep using our SD card any time we want to edit in the future. From what she said, we just have to put the card into the computer, look for the DCIM folder, find the folder with our takes in it. If all else fails, go through the private folder, and once you find everything then dump it onto the desktop and take out the card.

It’s recommended to us that we make a separate folder on the desktop itself so that we can keep everything organized (and so we don’t delete it by accident), and to always use the same login. Of course if we were to use a different login on the computer, obviously the file wouldn’t be there and we’d probably lose it. Next step is to open the software and import our movie files in. Unfortunately the program is a bit buggy sometimes, it tends to freeze and crash the computers a lot, but it should be fine as long as we give it time to load everything. Once everything is finally on, we get to the bread and butter of the project— editing everything together. This is where we cut the parts we don’t like, anything that doesn’t flow together smoothly gets taken out. We’ll add our voice over in this phase, our titles, anything else that’s really important to the commercial. Put our movie on AV track 2, title on 1, and our voiceover/music files on 3. Skip around and make sure everything is smooth by just dragging around the play bar, and fix anything that isn’t perfect. Add transitions, filters, and make sure the movie autosaves.

Now that we’ve taken our raw footage and turned it into one cohesive piece, it’s time to export. We select the export button right next to where we imported earlier. Make sure the file is set to MP4 so that it’s actually a movie file, otherwise it could be set on MP3– that could accidentally just turn it into audio. Basically.. if we accidentally select MP3, it’ll just be an audio file and everything will be ruined. Also make sure that Full Side SD is selected so that the best quality possible is shown for the movie once we publish it. We start the export, let everything render together. All the little gaps between each cut will smooth together, as well as the film as a whole. Everything should turn into one full piece at this point. Save it as the name of whatever you wish for your file, and leave it inside of your folder you made earlier when you dumped your files. When the day comes, it’s time to publish and pray your teacher likes it.