Editing Process
This year, the editing process was a lot more complicated, mainly down to the green screening which took us ages to finally get right as well as layering sounds which made it difficult for ourselves. But we were up for a challenge! We had to use different programs for green screen editing (Final Cut Pro at school) and for regular editing (Sony Vegas at Luke's house) which made life complicated for us.
Visuals
After filming all of the clips that we needed, we put the SD card into Luke's computer to see how the clips looked. We started off by renaming all the clips to prevent any confusion with what's what. Doing this saved us plenty of time trying to find certain clips due to their original file name and meant that sound effects could be quickly matched up to the correct clip.
The original merging together of clips was done on Sony Vegas Pro, an advanced software that is a definite development from iMovie last year. All the newly renamed clips had to be imported to the 'New Project' so that we could begin to import them onto the timeline. We started by placing all the clips that we wanted to use onto this, we then reviewed each shot and decided how we wanted to order it in relation to other clips as well as beginning to trim clips and merge them together officially so that the clips smoothly transitioned into each other. With regards to the lighting, we applied post-production white balancing effects so that consistency within all the clips remained the same and avoided visible changes in brightness, similar to last years film opening which was picked up on it. We also adjusted the various midtones of our shots in order to be able to adjust the time of day and weather. So, for instance, one shooting day it was particularly darker than the others and so when we went back to edit those shots, we had to adjust the red midtones on Sony Vegas so that we could brighten it but keep it still looking like it was the same time of day as seen in previous shots. Had we just adjusted the brightness straight up, the film would have lost that feeling of verisimilitude that we were aiming for. Once all the clips were merged together we had to check through the rough cut several times to pick up on any mistakes or points in the film where the flow is broken.
In some cases, for example the smoke effect animation, layers upon layers of smoke needed to be added in order to achieve a dynamic effect. Certain parts of the smoke also needed to fade in at different times to create the effect that we had during our title sequence and opening to our film production. An image of what the editing process for this process looked like it below.
Another effect that we added were the blackbars at the top and bottom of our film this year. They were simply added on Sony Vegas and provide our production with a more cinematic and professional feel. The frame doesn't have to stretch out to fill up the screen or be too narrow and small on the screen with these blackbars.
Sound Effects
For the sound effects, we had to rename the clips exactly how we did with the visual clips in order to organised them before we put them in with the film. This year adding the sound effects in were a lot more trickier as we had to overlay sounds in order to produce a more enhanced sound quality (foley sounds); for example during the car chase scene, layer upon layer of engine noises were needed in order to match the car's acceleration/deceleration and fir with the general motion of the car, whereas last year when editing single sounds were simply added in the correct position. These sounds that we chose this year would be selected from online websites or youtube clips and then place over the visual clip. The technique of sound bridging was also used in order to increase the smoothness of the film. It was also helpful to separate the audio clips away from the visual clips if there was any rustling or talking when the filming took place. This would allow for music and diegetic sounds to be implemented.
There were a lot of sound effects used this year:
The hardest part of the editing which was undoubtedly the green screen editing. Last year we worked on our film using iMovie for Betrayal however we wanted to show we could adapt to other products and use more advanced software to edit our film. We had planned on using Sony Vegas for our whole process this year but, for some reason, the keying for the green screen wasn't as high quality as we had hoped. Issues that were immediately visible was the purple coloured outline around the edges of our characters, and objects, the flickering background of a green screen occasionally and bright areas of the car being picked up as green, thus causing them to turn to the background clip. We gambled on using Final Cut Pro for the green screen instead and it ended up being a lot better. This it made it a little harder to transfer over to our final film when we got to putting it all together on Sony Vegas but we feel it was worth it when we look back at how poorly the green screen could have went.
Green Screen
Although we can look back now and acknowledge that it's obviously not a professional standard and it's not excellent by any means, it certainly still turned out far better than we could have hoped taking into account that we are students on a low budget. The fact that we used a new, unique technique is where we can say that we have definitely developed from the start of Media Studies at AS. The solution to our problem was using the chroma keying feature in Final Cut in which certain colours in a shot and/or shots and select it to be replaced by another clip layered below. So, for example, we took the colour green in the backgrounds of the car windows in our film and selected that to be swapped with footage of us that we took driving down the country lane where our car chase took place.