Skills I have learnt

When I started this coursework I had never really used a Mac computer before so when we started we had to get used to that first. On top of this I had to learn how to use Final Cut Express, which compared to Pinnacle Studios which we used last year it seemed quite difficult when I first looked at it. Luckily it was easy to pick up and I managed to get used to it straight away through the practice project that we created which was a music video. At first it took us a while to get used to the lay out, along with the different Mac control settings. This was irritating at first because it did hold us back as it took up time. However, I am glad that we had the chance to get used to Final Cut Express as it meant that we knew what to do when it came to rendering and a better chance of understanding it when things went wrong. The most valuable skills I have gained from this is the extra knowledge of more than one editing package because now I have experience in Final Cut Express, Pinnacle Studios and also Windows Movie Maker. This will help me in the future as I hope to get a career in the media industry. 

Another thing that this project has given me is deeper understanding of Adobe Photoshop as although I did have a basic knowledge of it, the photo editing software that I use at home is Coral Paint Shop, which although is similar, it does have it's differences. Now I have a broader and more in-depth knowledge of both photo editing software and footage editing software. We did also use photoshop to create the animation with our "Nightview Productions" logo as well as our main title at the end of our trailer. We had to look up how to make a gif. file because although we had experimented with this in our music video, we had forgotten how to do it, and it took longer than we thought. I think that having the animations work really well to give our trailer a more professional look and I am glad that we took the time to learn how to do this as it has improved our knowledge of photoshop. We also used photo shop to finalise our film poster which gave it a more professional and polished look rather than just using power point as we had done to create the drafts. 

Another thing that was quite new to us was using the flip cams. Before we had been filming on normal cam-corders with a tape in them, but we decided to use the flip cams this time because we wanted the better quality that they provide. The only down side of using these is that they don't zoom in very well, so if we wanted to do that, we had to be very careful how far away we were in the first place, or consider doing it afterwards on Final Cut Express. We hadn't used them before because as they are small, if we don't have them on a tripod, they pick up hand movements very easily which would make our filming look unprofessional. However, we used tripods pretty much through all of our filming, even when we needed the camera to track something and I think that this worked well because it reduced the movement of the camera and also our footage is of better quality than it would have been on a cam-corder because we used a lot of low lights. 

Learning to use Garage Band was a big help to us because of the fact that we can't use copyrighted music, so creating our own was useful. As no one in our group had any real experience on creating music, this program was ideal as it was easy to get used to and we could taylor our music exactly as we wanted it to be. We didn't have the same practice with this as we did Final Cut Express because we didn't have to create our own music. I think that maybe we could have done with a little more practice with it just to save us some experimenting time. However, it was easy enough to use and I don't think that more practice would have improved the final outcome of our music.