Rough Cut Editing Process

Now that my group had footage, we began to edit and sync it with the song, Secrets - One Republic. We used Final Cut Express on an Apple iMac8,1 Model to do this. I had to import the footage from the clips into the FinalCut database, this is when my group named each clip so we could tell which sections of footage were which, Then we moved them into the viewer and started to place clips into the timeline, but before we did this my group found that we need to lock the audio bar so that the music did not split.

We thought best for us to go chronologically through the video whilst using the animatic we made as our guide (as we had been doing when recording). The animatic was opened up along side out FinalCut project so that we could look at and adapt specific cuts and effects that we had used within our animatic.

With the beginning of the video we had previously planned that we wanted long drawn out, slow shots and slow transition effects to reflect the calmness of the music instead of using what we had done with the rest of the video, Straight Cuts.

You can see from the picture opposite the way we had to drag the fade effect into the space between two clips and then lengthen the fade so that it overlapped both clips it was between. The only other effect other than a fade that we used in the video was an additive dissolve, which gave the transition a glow as two clips overlapped each other.

When attempting to place the clip into the timeline of our project, we had to mark an input and output point on the clip we was watching in viewer for the few seconds of which we wanted to include. This gave us the ability to drag small clips of our original footage and then sync the song with our video easily.

After that process and my group had the clip that we wanted; we'd had to lock the first layer of video (V1) and insert the clip i wanted on to the above track (V2). This allowed us to get our timings where we wanted them and drop it into the track with ease.

One thing me and my group had trouble with was the lip syncing between our singer and the song itself. it took a lot of time and patience to get the video to match exactly to what you hear. Sometimes the clips were a fraction of a second out and this was very noticeable on the video. This is why we had our group constantly checking what we'd done.

Once we had gotten the timeline in to the right order, we had to edit the contrast and colouring of some shots, due to how the lighting slowly changed in the course of our recording, this was particularly difficult to do on Final Cut and the result meant that we would need to re-film some of our shots.