Editing Blog: Finishing it up

On Tuesday, November 5, our class edited our commercials again. The first time we attempted to edit, many computers were slow, crashed, or couldn't handle the software. The software that we use is pinnacle studios. Thankfully, my group's computer worked perfectly fine on the first day of editing, so we were able to piece together our commercial and cut for time. On this day however, to avoid computer problems, we received laptops with the software (pinnacle studios) already downloaded on it. However, there wan't enough laptops for everyone, so for the first half of class, one side of the class used the laptops and for the second half, the other side used the laptops. My group was on the second, so we used a laptop during the second half of class. During the first half of the class, we discussed as a group what we were going to do during editing. Eventually, we got a laptop to use. It took some time to log into it because the laptop was being very slow. Once we were logged in, we plugged the USB in and dumped our footage onto the laptop.
Once our footage was on to the laptop, we went in to pinnacle studios. We were planning on just adding some finishing touches to our commercial, but quickly ran into a problem. Our commercial was not pieced together and cut. All the work we had done editing was now wasted. However, it wasn't as bad as we thought because this time we had already done it and knew exactly what we wanted. During this time, I was in charge of piecing our commercial together, so I started to drag our clips into the bar to put it all together. This is when I noticed yet another problem. The laptop was being super slow. The audio would play back just fine, but the video itself was lagging a lot. This made extremely difficult to cut out parts. It was very crucial to cut out parts because our commercial was about 50 seconds long.
Eventually and fortunately, the computer finally started to work properly and the clips were playing normally without much problem. I could now accurately finishing cutting the commercial to the allotted run time of 30 seconds. This did not take very long because I already knew what to cut from our first day of editing. Once I finished this, my group wanted to takeover and add some finishing touches. These included transitions, music, and such. For the music, we used music from dirt bike film already on pinnacle studios. We thought it was funny to play the music when we introduced the "cool" character in our commercial. Next, we added some transitions. At this point, the other three members in my group took over and I couldn't really tell exactly what transitions they were adding. All I know is that they were adding some pretty wacky looking transitions. Overall, filming and editing our commercial was a very fun experience for me, and I think for the rest of my group as well. I am excited to work on our music video for our next film project.