Evaluation - Question 6 - Kayla

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

As it was mine and Claire's job to edit our opening we learnt that technologies such as Final cut pro aren't always trustworthy. Whilst editing our footage kept getting disrupted and having to be rendered, which was very aggravating when we were matching up clips as we would go to watch it to see if our continuity matched but before checking it we would have to render it even if the footage wasn't in the right place therefore it would take a lot longer to just get a few match on actions. The reason our footage took so long to edit was due to the fact we used a Canon camera and so some of the footage was too high quality for FCP therefore we had to change all the footage so that it would be less hassle to edit. Another problem we had was, if we had been editing on one mac and then try to open our project on another mac, it would have trouble playing so we did try really hard to stay working on the same mac but it wasn't reliable as other people may have been using it. We also realized that when editing you should back up your project once every few minutes because we were working on our project when our mac crashed, it crashed due to the size of the video files, this is when we decided to reconvert our footage to a different file type. It was quite annoying that our mac crashed because it meant we lost the edits we had been working on for about half an hour, luckily we had it fresh in our memory so we tried to re create the things we had lost and in the end it was ok. 

Once we adjusted to the software and we got use to adding transitions ect, it got a lot easier and quicker to edit our opening and so by the last day we were really confident with the software and so we got a two minute opening that we were proud of completed.

When filming we learnt that setting the white balance is very important and so we got used to setting it before we used the camera. We also realized that framing is key and we had to set up the camera a lot closer to the characters than we thought we would have to. With more knowledge about framing in the main task we learnt not to just zoom in the get the shot closer but we actually moved the tripod closer, this kept the quality of the shot and also helped us when it came to editing because it meant we didn't have to change the framing on FCP which would have taken a lot longer than just having the camera in the right place.