Editing Blog

During today’s class period we had to begin editing our commercial. To get the footage onto our computer we had to dump the footage. This required us to put our SD card into the SD card reader and then plug this into our computer. Then we had to create a folder on the desktop. From there, you check the DCIM folder for the SD card, which organizes the clips by the date. If you can’t find your footage you go into the private folder, then click on AUCHD, and then stream. Our footage did not pop up in the DCIM folder so we had to to go into the private folder. Once we found our clips we transferred them to the folder on our desktop. This process took quite some time since we had over 50 clips on the SD card. I found the dumping process to be fairly straight forward. The next step was to boot up Pinnacle Studios and import our footage onto there. This was a bit of a learning curve as I had never previously used Pinnacle Studios.

My group tasked me with editing our blog but I needed the footage to edit. To import we had to click import on Pinnacle Studios. Then you had to click import from desktop. The desktop would then scan for compatible files that we could use to edit. Once again this took quite some time as we had over 50 clips to import. When the footage finished importing now the editing process could begin. First, I watched all of the takes we had for each scene to determine which one would be used in the commercial. I would choose 1-2 and move then to the second track on the editing program. The reason I did this was because we had learned the first track was specifically for titles and text and the third was for voice overs, music, and other sound. I did not add titles today or sound because we had limited time to edit. I experimented around with different transitions however. A few of my favorite transitions were the dissolve, wipe, fade in, and fade out. I found these to fit with our commercial theme and tired include them throughout the commercial where I felt necessary. Before class was about to end I made sure to save what I had done. I saved it onto the desktop in a pinnacle studios video format so I could continue editing next class.

Throughout the editing process we ran into many complications. First, the main problem we had was locating our footage. We had dumped at the end of the previous class, but we’re not able to find the footage anywhere on our computer. Our solution to this problem however was we located our SD card and dumped the footage. The second problem we had was the time it took to import and dump. Our group had filmed over 50 clips ranging from 6 to 10 seconds in length. This meant that our footage took up a lot of storage and therefore took a lot of time to import. This was usually about 5-10 minutes and hurt the amount of time we had to edit. The final problem we had was how slow the computers were when having the editing software at times. Clicking too many things at once would cause the computer to overload and it would freeze. At one point the computer even crashed because it was so overloaded. All in all, despite the challenges we faced we were still able to start editing during the class period.