Production - AS/A2 Editing Skills

Having used Final Cut Pro during the AS year definitely helped us out this time around. I for one, whilst being pretty tech-savvy, found using Final Cut quite challenging, since it's quite a hefty piece of software to get your mind around (and I had not used it before). However, this year I'm much more familiar with it, but at the same time, editing a music video has been considerably different in comparison to editing a thriller opening. For one, we've been having to utilize many more tracks on the timeline (over twenty) which is quite a step-up from last year, where we only needed a few. This has meant that I've needed to pay attention much more whilst editing to the placing of the video clips, so that I know which one is located where and to make things easier for us.

Here you can see a portion of our timeline which shows all our different base tracks, in addition to the audio track at the bottom.

Syncing our footage to the music is crucial. One thing that we haven't needed to worry about creating, in comparison to last year, is sound. However, we have had to adjust each of our base tracks to the audio track so that the lip-syncing is in time with the song. This was taught to us early on (see my blog post about it here) which benefited us as it meant we had an understanding of what the editing would comprise of before we even began to think about going out to film.

This is the colour correction pane, which is used to adjust the balance, hue, whites, midtones, blacks, and saturation. We have, so far, only needed to adjust the whites and midtones in order to brighten up some of our shots, although we've taken care in not exaggerating with these settings as it could make the colouring look unprofessional. 

In terms of effects and titles, we utilized these for our thriller opening, but we do not necessarily need these this time round. However, we will have to put a strobe light warning at the beginning of our video. Because of our previous experience with titles, this should be very simple. One thing we have been using which we didn't last year is colour correction. Looking back, some of my group's shots for the thriller opening would have probably benefited from some brightening up, although they did create a dark atmosphere, but the point is that we didn't consider it whereas we are now. All in all, I've been editing much more confidently, and have learned to use things like markers and the Razor Blade Tool in order to get the best of our music video editing.