Evaluation - Question 6 - Claire

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Here you need to consider all of the technology you used for this main task. You could include images of you using some of the equipment. What have you learnt about the camera (methods, procedures etc), and what have you learnt about using the editing software (image, sound & titling).  Be honest and discuss difficulties that you had and how you overcame these.  Again illustrate with imagery.  Don’t forget to evaluate.

I have learn that a lot of the technology isn’t always very reliable. We had a lot of problems with software from camera and recorders to Final cut pro on the macs.

We used Kayla’s camera for a lot of the filming, it’s an amazing camera with fantastic quality for the imagery. However the software on the macs didn’t accept the quality of the camera and we had to convert a lot of the videos over so we could use it because our system constantly crashed and it made keep the continuity hard when both software’s we’re compatible together. It slowed down the process of editing as well because we had to replace filming with the converted videos. You are highly recommend to use the same Mac every time you edit because moving the sequence over networks can jeopardize the quality, and we had a lot of problems with this as our mac was always being used when we went to edit, we had to move 3 times which meant we had to render our work a lot and move it about to get it to flow again.

we also learned Final Cut  Pro on the Macs can be very tedious and frustrating while we were trying to put together our match on action, although you can zoom in on the sequence to see exactly what you have, you can't zoom in on the original clip so cutting it down is very difficult to make the continuity to a high standard.

We remembered this time to do the white balance every time we filmed, we did have to re film a few parts due to the white balance being off, but it paid off in the end. While using the cameras and filming we realised the importance of ‘speed, camera, action’, it helps your actors get ready but most importantly it helps you decide if you like the shot size, angle and position. I found out the positioning of the camera is important, meaning it’s spacing and sizing of shots, zooming is never a good idea because it can distort the footage so getting CU, BCU and ECU can be very difficult to keep straight and steady. We didn’t use a lot of those shot we got because we didn’t feel like they were to a good standard.

In our work shop with Sophie where she taught us about titling I learnt a lot about how to add text into moving imagine, how to take away any unwanted backgrounds from images. This taught me the importance of where tilting is placed and how effect it can be to an audience when done right. However we didn’t spend a lot of time on the titling which is something I regret because I believe it could have been better.

I have become more comfortable and confident using the Macs and the software now I know what I am doing, this helped me to speed through a lot of the editing and sound production. Although we did have a big problem with our  Mac crashing while in the middle of editing, we lost some work which we had to redo which is how we learned that we should always back up our projects after every save and have more than one version saved. This helps to illuminate any problems like this happening again.