Editing Our Footage

In order to edit our film, we used the following pieces of software;

- Final Cut Studio: Main editing software, enables us to piece clips together, add transitions and generally make a film

- Soundtrack Pro: Provides music, sound effects and if necessary overdubbing for voices. Provides all the sound for our film.

- Quicktime Player: Plays the film on our Macs.

- Youtube: Enables us to host our films onto the internet and embed them to our blogs.

- Compressor: Used in order to make the massive film files smaller for storage, Youtube and DVD, not to mention the rendering.

Editing our film started by capturing all of the used tapes and placing them in order onto Final Cut (much like in the animatic). All unnecessary bits of film are then removed by cutting then deleting them from the timeline. Fades and transitions are put where required amongst other effects (light filter in our case). When all this is done, credits are then inserted as well as an ident, the general gist of your film is now beginning to become a real piece of media text. This crude film is then imported into Soundtrack Pro. Within this software, sound effects are added such as a phone ringing which was the most common in our film, along with music. How well they fade out is also controlled here. As well as decorating it to sound good, I also used it for one of its more practical uses by removing background noise we did not want and distorting voiced of people you could not see while on the phone. I also kept a copy of this for the animatic due to it changed so so much, it would be simple to use the films soundtrack itself. The finished soundtrack is then exported back to Final Cut where it is all aligned up and finished. After everything is rendered, you may export it as a Quicktime Movie (mov.) file and there it is, the complete film. We also compressed this file to reduce the file size and hosted it on Youtube by uploading it onto Josh's account. This meant that our film was complete and open for the whole world to enjoy if they wish.

Example of Final Cut