Out O' Date - Rough Cut and Fine Cut (30/04/13)

Today, I got on with finishing the rough cut for my Out O' Date project. I started off by taking the feedback that Chris had previously given me to improve the film. The first thing that I changed was the entrance of the car. When the car entered originally, the two shot of Tony and Alf and also the close up of Alf before he turned around didn't seem right. The two shot went on for too long and in the close up it looked like Alf was waiting for his cue to turn around. I cut these shots down and decided to add the long shot with the car in the foreground between them as the manager closed the car door.

The second piece of feedback that I took into account was the sound throughout the film. The two original opening shots didn't have any sound recorded with them so I added an atmos track over them that would suite them. I noticed in a lot of the other shots I could hear birds chirping in the sound so in the atmos track I used I made sure that there were birds chirping. The track that I used was recorded during my documentary project in Norfolk Park. I thought that the sound fit the shots very well. 

After adding these changes, I noticed that my sequence was only 01:18. I wanted to make the sequence longer so I looked back to the script and decided to carry on the sequence with what came next in the script. I found the footage for the next scene and added it into my project and renamed the files in the same format that I had renamed the first batch of files. 

I then started on the assembly of the next scene. I did the assembly in the assembly sequence that I had created first so then once I had done it, I could copy and paste the files into the rough cut sequence and do the rough cut in the rough cut sequence. I didn't have many problems whilst doing the assembly of the scene, how, one problem that I found was that there was only one close up shot of the lady at the door whilst she is talking and her starts smiling as she says she's going to get a bag of peas for Alf. I didn't like this shot but thought it would have looked very good. In the end, I decided that I would overlay the audio from the shot over a shot of Tony carrying Alf to the front door. After assembling the scene, I copied the sequence into the rough cut sequence to start the rough cut. 

In the rough cut of the scene, I started by trimming some of the shots down. The first shot that I made shorter was the opening shot to the scene where the milk float pulls up outside of the house. I wanted to make sure that the milk float was almost stopping when the shot started because I thought that it would have gone on for too long otherwise. 

Another major thing that I changed in the rough cut was again, the shot of the lady at the door. I left the shot as it was but whilst listening to the sound, I noticed that somebody was coughing in the background whilst she was talking. I tried to cut this cough out however, it was very noticeable that I had cut it out and it didn't work very well. I then decided to go through the clips where the lady could be heard talking and tried to add this audio over the shot. In the end, I managed to find a piece of audio that worked well with the piece so I placed it over the shot and synced it up and I thought that it worked very well. 

After making sure that the sound was alright, I duplicated the entire sequence and called the new sequence '03 Fine Cut 1' to start the fine cut. I started off by watching through the film again to see if there was anything that I noticed needing changing. One thing that I didn't like was the way that I cut to black for a second between the two scenes. I wanted to find a way to make these two scenes fit together without the cut to black in the middle. The way I did this was by overlaying the audio of the milk float pulling up over the shot of Tony lifting Alf up at the end of the first scene. I then brought the rest of the film forward to fit the two scenes together and this worked well. 

After changing this transition and trimming shots down to the correct length, I went through the entire sequence and listened to the sound and added audio crossfades to all of the shots, even if they were only 1 frame long, to make sure I could eliminate all of the clips and pops in the sound. 

Finally, I added the title and a credit to the end of the film before finishing the film and deciding to leave it for the day and have another look at it tomorrow to see if there was anything that I thought might be changing. 

Rock Climbing Documentary - Final Changes (30/04/13)

Today, myself and Lewis met to go through the feedback that we received for out Rock Climbing Documentary and make the final changes to the film before exporting it ready to hand in on Friday. The first change that I made to the piece was a fade between two shots because originally the wind came in very fast and was very noticeable. In the end, I cut the beginning section of the audio out that had the wind in it and dragged the audio from the clip before into it's place, making the transition a lot smoother and less noticeable. I added a crossfade in between the shots and made sure it was as smooth as I could get it.

The second change I made was in the same section as the previous change, and was to slightly change the cut of the music. Originally, the music cut and the beats of the music could still be heard during the fade out. I wanted to remove these beats and make the fade out a lot smooth so I removed the end of the clip and made the start of the clip longer to keep the length of the clip the same length. 

The last major change that I did to the piece was changing the structure of the film. Originally, we had two endings to the film, the first ending was the interview with the climber and then we cut onto another scene showing the climber bouldering again. I wanted to make the film end on the interview so I decided to try and move the end bouldering section into the centre of the film. The original structure of the film was the bedroom scene, then the bouldering scene, then the rock climbing and then back to bouldering. I wanted to move the end bouldering scene to just after the first bouldering scene to make it follow on. This worked very well and meant that the film could end on the interview after the climber had been rock climbing. 

As shown in the screenshot above, the shot of the climber sat against the wall with the snow in the foreground was overexposed. I wanted to try and solve this problem by changing the brightness and contrast. This didn't make the snow less exposed however, I did manage to get the colour in the shot to stand out a lot more and make the shot look nicer. 

Finally, before exporting the film, I went through the entire sequence and added audio crossfades to all of the shots to make sure that I could eliminate all of the clips and pops between each shot. After doing this and making sure that the sound was good, I exported the film ready to add to a DVD once I had finished my comedy film. 

The Swimmer

Title - The Swimmer
Director - Lynne Ramsay
Year - 2012
Running Time - 18 minutes

The Swimmer is a short film about a young man (the swimmer) who swims across rivers and lakes in Britain to a soundtrack of assorted nationalistic music. As he passes by the banks, people are their watching him and their thoughts can be heard. He then walks through the woods at night time and then returns to the water and appears to sink below to the surface.

The film was commissioned by the London Olympics 2012 and aims to give a real feel for the diversity of the landscape and people of Britain. It is a BAFTA winner for the Best Short Film for writer/director Lynne Ramsay.

One of the things that stood out to me most in the film was the use of the slow motion shots from above the swimmer whilst he is swimming. These shots added a lot of detail to the film, being able to see all of the swimmer's movements in great detail and I thought that this stood out and worked very well.

I also liked the use of the underwater shots in the film. I thought that they were shot very well and noticed that there weren't many bubbles in the water, making the shot very clear.I have always wanted to try underwater shooting and this film has inspired me to try underwater filming even more.

Overall, I thought the film was very good, showing the diversity of Britain's landscape and people very well, which was one of the main aims of the film as it was commissioned by the London Olympics 2012. 

Week Eleven - Poetry Documentary (25/04/13)

In today's session, we were looking again at our Moving Image Production Narrative films that we will be presenting next week. Before looking at these, Chris told us the research topics to add to our blogs this week and also two books that we should look at if we were to pursue editing next year. The topics that he gave us to research were:

• Senna
• Use of Music in Shane Meadows films
• The Swimmer by Lynne Ramsay

The books we were introduced to were:

• A Broadcast Engineering Tutorial for Non-Engineers
• Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis

We then started looking at people's rough cut of there Narrative module films. The first film that we looked at was Lewis' film, Steel Bells. I thought that the film was very well cut and I am also looking forward to seeing if when it is finished with the sound design complete. One thing that wasn't done correctly was that the sound on the film was the sound from the camera. This was because Lewis had handed it over to the sound designer to sort the sound out. Chris then took us the correct way to post produce films. The order that he showed us was:

• Importing
• Converting - Apple ProRes 422
• Log
• Sync the Sound
• 1st Assembly

He stressed that syncing the sound before starting to cut was very important. This is because if the sound was left as camera sound without checking the Marantz sound, when it s passed on to the sound designer, some of the sound for some of the clips might not have been recorded, meaning that the sound would be unusable.

Later in the session, Chris looked at my rough cut of my 10 minute documentary, that he had helped me  a lot in the previous session. The feedback that Chris gave in this session was positive, stating that all of the elements that were needed were in the film, however, they were in the wrong order. The feedback he gave was:

• The right bits are in the edit, just in the wrong order.
• The main interview in the bedroom goes on for far too long, and could be used throughout the film rather than just in one scene. 
• After the line where Addie talks about poets not lying, I could cut to the shot of Kai talking about the reason for him getting into poetry, which was because of depression, and then cut to a shot of him performing his poem.
• The crossfade between Dan and the lady playing the guitar didn't work
• In the Gorilla poetry night scene, Dan recites a poem that doesn't rhyme, and there is a clip in the film where Addie talks about poems not having to rhyme, and these clips may look good together. 
• The lady playing the guitar was nice to hear and watch and there should be more of her in the film.
• The park scene should come between the Gorilla poetry night and the Riverside night.
• Addie talking about discovering poetry should come after the park scene.
• In the Riverside scene, Addie should be the last poet seen, and he should get the applause.
• The Riverside scene could start with Raymond and Adam, followed by another poet and then finally cutting to Addie's poem to make the night look more populated. 
• The interview in the golden hour seen didn't have a poetry feel to it.
• The golden hour scene went on for too long, needs to be shortened to have more of an impact.
• The pull focuses come in too early and leave too late, the focus should be pulled straight away.
• The film should end on a poem

Even though there was a lot of feedback that required a lot of work to be done to the film, I am very happy with the feedback that I received because once I have used it to edit the film again, it will improve the structure of the film and make it flow a lot better than it previously did.

After speaking with Chris about the documentary film, I asked him if could give me should feedback on my Out O' Date edit. The feedback that he gave me was:

• Need to solve the entrance of the car
• Need to add atmos track and sort the sound out.

I was very happy with this feedback and I am looking forward to sorting the sound out on the film because this is also something that after watching it back, I thought wasn't done as best as I could do it. I believe that the picture cut is almost done and I think that I need to trim the shot of the lady walking over towards Alf slightly as I think it is a bit too long and also I would like to trim the shot of Tony and Alf looking at the banner as the car pulls up in the background because it doesn't seem natural the way that they are looking at the banner after they have finished speaking.

Overall, I thought that this session was very helpful, providing me with a lot of feedback for me to use to improve my films and I am looking forward to using this feedback to make the best films that I can. 

Out O' Date - Assembly and Rough Cut (24/04/13)

Today, I started my assembly for the individual project, Out O' Date. I started by opening up the script that I had previously looked at to refresh my mine before I started cutting of the order of the scene. The pages of the script I used I have include in the images below.

After reading through the script, I started cutting the piece together. I started with the assembly of the film, just placing the clips in order of how I want them to be. The first clip I placed in was a shot establishing the location and showing what the two men, Alf and Tony, were doing. This was a shot on a crane tilting down to reveal Tony sticking the banner to the front door of the supermarket and Alf looking around to make sure that they weren't going to get caught. Following that, I had a mid shot of Tony sticking the last bit of tape onto the door and walking backwards away from the poster, looking at it along the way.

After that, I wanted to have a shot looking face on at Alf and Tony as they looked at the banner on the door. In this shot, they also have a conversation about the banner being spelt wrong. I wanted to intercut this conversation with close ups of each of the men as they had their conversation, but I would do this in the rough cut. There were several takes of this shot so I looked through all of them for the best performance but selecting one to include in the film.

At the end of the previous shot, the manager of the supermarket pulls up in her car in the background in the centre of the two men. I cut to a close up of Alf with the manager in the background and as she closes the car door, he turns and walks towards her. I then cut to a shot with the car in the foreground showing the manager walking towards Alf and stopping as they got to each other to begin their conversation. 

I then added a shot looking over Alf's shoulder at the manager during their dialogue scene, cutting to a shot of Tony from over the manager's shoulder whilst he spoke and then back to the previous shot over Alf's shoulder. 

After a piece of dialogue from the manager saying that the banner was rubbish, Tony shouts over saying that it wasn't rubbish. I wanted to use a mid shot of him looking over at the manager rather than just hearing his voice in the background to show his emotions showing that he likes the sign as he was the one that made it. 

After that, I cut back to the shot over Alf's shoulder looking at the manager and then back to the shot of Alf over the manager's shoulder before cutting back to the previous shot where we see the manager knee Alf. I that quickly cut to a shot showing the manager walk towards the supermarket's doors after kneeing Alf and showing Tony look shocked. 

I then cut to a mid shot of the manager ripping the sign off the door and throwing it into Tony's arms before she left and went around the corner of the building. Finally, I cut to a close up of Alf on the floor after he had been kneed and Tony comes running up to Alf in the background and picks him up and walks him off screen, signalling the end of the scene. 

I then watched the scene back and trimmed some of the clips to make sure that the audio worked well and that no pieces of dialogue were overlaying each other and that the images worked well together. I then duplicated the sequence and called it Rough Cut 1, as I was ready to start rough cutting the piece. 

When I started rough cutting the piece, I started by making the introduction scene flow better, by making sure that the cut between the two shots worked correctly with the continuity of Tony putting the banner on the door.

I then started the main part of the rough cut, which was adding the close ups of the conversation between Tony and Alf at the beginning. For every piece of dialogue, I looked through the clips that I had been supplied with of each close to to select the best performance. For the first pieces of dialogue, I used the close ups of the men before going back to the two shot of them. 

I then went back to a shot of Tony as he took the tights off his head before going back to the two shot of the men showing the manager pull up in her car in the background. For the rest of the rough cut, I went through the clips, overlaying some of the sound to make sure that it sounded good and I also placed crossfades between all of the sound to make sure that there were no drastic changes in sound and to make sure there were no clips and pops at the beginning and end of each clip. I also added crossfades to the beginning and end of the piece, to bring the clips in gradually. I made sure that the fade at the end of the scene was a long one because the two men go out of frame leaving an empty scene and I thought that it looked a lot nicer having a long fade out. 

I watched the scene back after I had sorted the audio out and cut all of the clips into place, in some cases overlaying the clips to make sure I got the best performances of the actors as I could and then added the title page to the beginning of the film. I then exported the rough cut ready to show Chris tomorrow to get his feedback on what he thinks works well and what needs to be changed. Overall, I am happy with the piece as I think it flows well and I think that the pacing of the scene is done well. 

Out O' Date - Choosing a Scene and Labelling the Clips (23/04/13)

Tonight, I wanted to choose the scene that I would be editing for my third brief, Out O' Date. I read through the script that I had been provided with and decided that I wanted to create the opening scene to the film. I chose this scene because the opening of a film sets what the film is going to be about and opens the story and I also thought that the scene looked like it would be a good scene to edit as it was funny and in some places, challenging.

I then went through all of the footage that I had been supplied with and found all of the footage for this scene. I opened Final Cut Pro and created a project file for this project. I then imported all of the footage and started labelling it. I wanted to keep the clips in the order that they had been filmed in so at the beginning of each filename I put a number, which would follow the previous clip. I then want to include the scene number, the shot number and the take number and then following that I would have a description of the shot, including the shot type. The format I would be using for the labelling would look something like:

01 - * S1/S1/T1 - Long Shot - Crane - Man putting banner over the door

I also used the * symbol for two of the shots because there was no sound recorded on these shots, which were shot one and two.

Whilst renaming the clips, I also labelled them with a colour to tell me whether the shot was a bad take, good take or perfect take. The colours that I used for this were:

• Red - Bad Take
• Green - Perfect Take
• Orange - Good Take

After labelling all of the footage, I saved the project and decided that it would be best for me to leave the project for tonight and get on with it first thing in the morning and spend the entire day editing it. I am looking forward to getting on with the edit as the scene looks like it will be a nice scene to edit and I can't wait to see what it turns out like. 

Side By Side Documentary

Title - Side by Side

Director - Christopher Kenneally 

Year - 2012

Running Time - 98 minutes

Side by Side is an American documentary produced by Justin Szlasa and Keanu Reeves. It was premiered at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival and is was also shown at the Tribeca Film Festival. 

The documentary looks into the history, process and workflow of both digital and photochemical film creation. It look into what artists and filmmakers have been able to create with film and digital and how theirs need and innovations have helped to push filmmaking in new directions. There are lots of interviews throughout the film with directors, cinematographers, colourists, scientists, engineers and artists as they talk about their experiences and feelings of working with film and working with digital. It also looks in to where we are now in the present day, how we got to where we are now and also what the future may hold. 

I thought that the introduction to the film was very powerful. The voice over was speaking about the growth of film since it had been intended and showing various iconic films on the screen such as Rocky and The Wizard of Oz, starting with the oldest films and progressing to the newer films of today, moving from film to digital. I thought that the use of the iconic films with the voice over was very powerful and it caught my attention straight away, making me want to carry on watching the rest of the film. 

A part of the film that I thought was very interesting was close to the beginning when we are taught about how film works. I learnt that film is covered with an emulsion that contains silver halide crystals, and when lights hits them, they react chemically and then the crystals change into silver when they are developed, leaving a photographic image. The film reels are then taken to a film lab to be developed over night and ready to preview the next day. I enjoyed learning and seeing this process on screen as it gave me in depth knowledge of how the developing of the footage works. 

I thought that just by watching the film, I had learnt a lot about how a documentary is edited because around the same time that I watched the film, I was editing my documentary film for the Moving Image Production Narrative module. One of the main things that I transferred from this film to the editing in my film was the use of overlaying the audio of the interview underneath the previous shot to bring the interview in smoothly.

Bullet Time (The Matrix)

Bullet time is a special and visual effects that is a digitally enhanced simulation of variable speed, for example slow motion. The characteristics of bullet time are it's extreme transformation of time (slow enough to see a bullet going through the air, hence the name bullet time) and space (the way that the camera can move around the scene at normal speed whilst the action being filmed is extremely slowed down).

Bullet time is very different to normal slow motion because to achieve this effect just regular slow motion, the camera would have to be moved extremely fast to achieve the normal looking camera movement effect seen in bullet time. 

Notable films that have used this effect include The Matrix and a video game called Max Payne.

The bullet time effect was originally achieved photographically by a set of still cameras surrounding the subject. The cameras we either fired in a sequence or all at the same time, depending on the effect being filmed. 

Then, single frames from each camera were arranged and displayed consecutively to produce the movement desired of an action frozen in time or in extreme slow motion. 

In The Matrix, the camera path was pre-designed using computer-generated visualizations as a guide. Then, cameras were arranged behind green screen, on a track and dolly and then aligned through a laser targeting system, forming the complex curve seen in the effect. The cameras were then triggered at very close intervals, so the when taken into the interpolation software, the action could unfold in extreme slow motion. Extra frames could then be inserted to slow down the action if it needed to be slowed down further and to improve the fluidity of the movement, and also frames could be taken out to increase the speed of the action. 

Week Ten - Poetry Documentary (18/04/13)

In today's session, we started off by being told some further research topics that we could include on our blogs, these topics were:

• Bullet Time (The Matrix)
• The Special Effects used in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey
• Side by Side Documentary

After that, we spent the rest of the session going through our documentary project that we are creating for the Moving Image Production - Narrative module. I started off by showing Chris the very first assembly that I had put together the day before and then he spent the rest of the lesson going through with us everything that we need to do this the project. 

We started off by looking at the process of editing the documentary. The process that we came up with was:

• Paper Edit
• 1st Assembly 
• Only interviews with Addie 
• 2nd Assembly 
• Cut down interviews 
• Add interviews with other people
• 3rd Assembly 
• Add voiceover or graphics to tell the facts
• Could possibly have a beginning middle and end at this point
• Rough Cut 1
• Add cutaways and the Escape poem
• Rough Cut 2
• Add a new voiceover or graphics to suit the footage
• Add music
• Rough Cut 3
• Pacing
• Intro and Outro
• Fine Cut 1
• Record voiceover in sound booth
• Fine Cut x ?
• Continue to add fine tune the cut

This structure taught me a lot, because whilst going through it, we were speaking about the elements that each section included.

One thing that I learnt was to use the interviews for the feelings, emotions and engagement with Addie and to use voiceover or graphics for the facts in the piece. This made a lot of sense to me after thinking it through with the footage that we have got and I think it would be a very good idea to add a voiceover. Also, Chris mentioned to use a girl's voice for the voiceover so that way we would have two entirely different voices. I thought this was also a good idea because that way, people won't get bored of hearing a similar tone of voice throughout the piece. 

I found out that the ratio for vox pops in a documentary is 10:1, meaning that for very 10 vox pops that are recorded, only 1 of them may be useable. 

We also spoke about the poem that we would like to use throughout the film called The Escape Movement. The entire poem was 3 minutes and 30 seconds so it wouldn't work if we just put the poem in there on a locked off shot as Addie spoke it for us. We decided that it would be a good idea to still use the entire poem but cut it up into sections to use throughout the film. I think this will work very well and am looking forward to placing the poem into the film.

After looking at the process of the film, we went on to structure our film. After a lot of talking and moving pieces around, we decide on a structure. The structure we decided on was:

• 0:00 - 01:00 - Introduction and Escape poem
• 01:00 - 03:00 - Bedroom Interview - Introduce himself, Passion, Brotherhood
• 03:00 - 04:00 - Park Scene and Interview - Inspirations
• 04:00 - 06:00 - Gorilla Poetry Night - Vox Pops - Performances
• 06:00 - 06:20 - Brotherhood Montage
• 06:20 - 07:20 - Riverside Poetry Night
• 07:20 - 07:50 - Golden Hour, Ending Scene - Future of Poetry in Sheffield

I think that the structure that we came up with will suit the film very well, getting our point across well.

We then finally went our a schedule for the next week up until the deadline of the film. 

Overall, I thought that this session was extremely helpful. I feel a lot better about the project now, knowing that we have a clear structure of the film and we know exactly what needs to be done and when it needs to be done by. I aim to have rough cut 3 done by next Thursday to show Chris in the session again to get his feedback one more time before the deadline on the 29th April.

Stereoscopic 3D vs Anaglyph 3D

Stereoscopic 3D

Stereoscopic 3D (also known as True 3D), is a technique that uses two dimensional images and adds depth to them, making the images look 3D. It can be achieved by having two cameras set up very close to each other (like the distance between your eyes), filming the same action. These cameras are filming an sequence for each of your eyes and when played back along side each other, the illusion of depth is then achieved.

Stereoscopic 3D is growing rapidly, being use in major films, such as Avatar, and is even now being presented in video games. Films that use 3D have been reported to generate as much as three times as much money compared to the 2D version of the film. The technique has been around for a long time, however it hasn't been widely used due to the fact that there hasn't been high enough quality equipment as it is very expensive.

Many companies, such as Sony, have now released Stereoscopic 3D televisions and also they have released an update for the Playstation 3 that will mean Playstation games can also be played in 3D. However, the down side to these devices is that to view the content in 3D, you have to wear LCD Shutter Glasses to make the image 3D. This is because the majority of programs or games that you can watch or play won't have been recorded using two off-set cameras, so the glass will output the visuals to your eyes how they were meant to be viewed.

The glasses work by synchronising with the Stereoscopic 3D display to separate the images that appear as a conjoined mess without the glass, and only show the right images to the right eye and the left images to the left eye. The glasses have liquid crystal in them which either allow the light to pass through them for the viewer to see or block the light so the viewer cannot see it.

Television have a refresh rate that is measure in hz (hertz). If a television has 100hz, this would mean that it refresh 100 times per second. This mean that the footage for the left and right eyes will be displayed every other frame on the television, one after another. So images for the left eye may be displayed at 01, 03, 05, and the images for the right eye would be displayed at 02, 04, 06. If you were to watch the screen without the glasses, it would look like a big blurry mess. The LCD Shutter Glasses will sort out which images each eye is supposed to see, meaning the left eye would see the images at 01, 03, 05 and the right eye would see the images at 02, 04, 06.

Anaglyph 3D

Anaglyph 3D works in a very similar way to Stereoscopic 3D. As with Stereoscopic 3D, they are created by having two images that are captured from slightly different angles, normally achieved by setting two cameras next to each other and having the lenses about 3 inches apart, which is like the natural space between your eyes. The left eye will be rendered to red (blue and green channels set to zero) and the right eye will be rendered to cyan (red channel set to zero). When we look at the image through anaglyph glasses the images will be separated, as the left eye will only receive the red signals and the right eye will only receive the cyan signals.

When we look at the 3D image, our brains see the red filtered areas as white and the blue filtered areas are seen as black. The brain then blends the images together and sees the differences as being differences in distance rather than colour. The colours red and cyan are used because they are at opposite ends of the visible light spectrum, this is why the black and white areas area different.

Yorkshire Film Archive

The Yorkshire Film Archive is a registered charity which aims to find, preserve and also provides public access to videos, films and moving image made in or about the Yorkshire region.

The Yorkshire Film Archive also managed the collection that were held by the North East Film Arcive (NEFA). The two archives merged together in July 2012 and are now all under the Yorkshire Film Archive. However, because each region has an extremely strong identity, they both each hold their regional titles.

Between each archive, the charity has collected over 50,000 titles, 17,000 of these are held by the Yorkshire Film Archive and 33,000 of each are held by the North East Film Archive. This footage ranges from early film pioneers of the 1890s, to more recent footage which looks at the changing landscape and life across both of the regions.

Both the Yorkshire Film Archive and the North East Film Archive are based on University campuses, with specialist facilities such as temperature and humidity controlled film vaults, which are in place to safeguard the collections, and also there are specialist viewing and editing facilities to help in the work of making the collection accessible to everybody.

The Yorkshire Film Archive is based in York St John University and the North East Film Archive is based at Teesside University in Middlesborough. However, it isn't necessary to go to the Yorkshire Film Archive to view the footage as there is more than 80 hours worth of footage online at the Yorkshire Film Archive website. There is also a link on the way to deposit your own videos with them to help add to their collection.

After researching into the Yorkshire Film Archive, I wanted to search for my home town in the archive and I found some footage from the 1930s. I thought it was very interesting to see how the town had changed and stayed the same over the past 80 years. I think film archives are a very good way of preserving films and a good way of being able to show future generations what it is like today.

Week Nine - HD Importing and Exporting (11/04/13)

In today's session, we started off by looking at HD Importing, mainly focusing on DSLR footage.

Footage filmed on a DSLR automatically has the H.264 codec, which isn't a cutting codec because it is too compressed. The first thing that you need to do when importing this importing is take it onto MPEG Streamclip and transcode it to the Apple ProRes 422 codec, keeping the quality at 100%. This will make the file size almost 2.5 times the original but uncompresses the footage, making it a lot smooth to work with in the edit.

I learnt about how footage is compressed using the binary code. When footage isn't compressed, the binary code of a pixel could be 100111101 for example. When the same pixel is compressed, the code would look like 100(4)101, grouping all of the 1's that are together in a bracket to keep the code smaller. However, this causes problems in the edit because the program has to take all of the 1's out of the brackets, meaning that the program has a lot more work to do. So converting the footage to Apple ProRes 422 and uncompressing it all helps the edit run a lot smoother.

I also learnt about the use of the batch list in MPEG Streamclip. On the menu at the top of the screen, there is List menu, and under that menu there is a Batch List option. This means that you can add more than one file to the program and it will create a list of jobs to do. This is very helpful to save time so that you don't have to transcode each bit of footage separately. I was told never to check the 'Fix Timecode Breaks' option because this would cause problems in the edit and also it is good to see yourself where any timecode breaks are so you can fix them yourself.

I was given a piece of advice because transcoding can take so long, and that was to use more than one computer to transcode with. This makes a lot of sense because if you had a job that would take 4 hours to complete, doing it on 2 separate computers would mean that it would only take 2 hours to complete, saving a lot of time.

After looking at importing the footage, we also looked at exporting it. In Final Cut Pro, the settings that should be used when exporting HD footage I had included in the screenshots below.

After we had been through HD Importing and Exporting, we were given the task as a class to come up with 100 things we all know about editing and also to get on with our blogs whilst Chris was doing blog reviews. 

My blog review was very helpful because Chris gave me a lot of positive feedback and also let me know what extra I need to do. This was to include more of my own opinion on films that I had watched. I also realised when looking through the blog that my post about Chromakey vs Lumakey needs more information adding to it because the section on Lumakey isn't very informative.

Finally, just before the end of the session, we looked at a scene from the TV show, Breaking Bad, and the use of music in this scene. The scene was a montage with a Beatles music track over the top of it and I thought that it worked very well. The man put the record on in his room while he was relaxing and then we cut to a short scene of a lady in a car drawing a love heart on the window for the man in the next car who she was having an affair with before rolling the window down to rub it off. We then cut back to the man in the room relaxing and he took the music off play because it was all getting too much for him. I think this worked very well as a piece.

Overall, I thought todays session was very useful and I learnt a lot about HD importing and exporting and also my blog review was very useful to help me improve my blog. 

In The Blink Of An Eye

I have recently finished reading the book In The Blink Of An Eye written by Walter Murch. The book is a revised transcription of a lecture on film editing that Walter Murch gave in a mixing theatre in Sydney Australia in 1988. The book was revised in 2001 to reflect on the changes in the digital editing.

The book goes talks through various sections such as why do cuts work, the rule of six see around the edges and the decisive moment. Whilst reading the book, one of the sections that stood out to me was in the 'Methods and Machines: Marble and Clay' chapter of the book.


"When you look at the dailies for the first time, you have a relatively fixed idea - based on the script - of what you are looking for. Later on, though, you review some of your original notes, and they will say, for instance: "212-4 NG." What does that mean? It meant that at the time you thought take four of Slate 212 was No Good, and you didn't bother to make a note of why you thought so. Well, many times in the re-editing, what you thought was originally unusable may come to be your salvation."


The quote above made me think about when I had been editing and I had decided that there was a shot that was unusable. I labelled it with the colour red on Final Cut Pro to show that is was a bad take and I wasn't going to use it. After cutting the film I was working on together, I showed it to my group and they asked if there were any other shots of a certain type, one of them being the shot that I had originally labelled as a bad take. I looked back at the take and then decided in the end that I could use the shot. Through my own actions and also reading this book, I think it is a very good idea when you are going through footage for the first time, to write down any comments that you have about a shot that you think at the time is a bad take just incase in the future you need to know why you originally thought the shot was bad without having to find it and watch it back.

A couple of pages later in the book, I noticed another statement that stood out to me.


"When you look at rushes the second time, you will have evolved and the film has evolved. You will see different things than you saw the first time, because you may have assembled scenes that hadn't been shot the first time you saw the material, and strengths or problems may be emerging with characters and events as they unfold"

The quote above again made me think back to another situation I had when editing another film. I had been given the footage that had been shot however; there were still several scenes that needed to be filmed. I got straight on with the assembly of the scenes that I had been given and they didn’t feel strong at all. Once I had the rest of the footage a few days later, I assembled the rest of the scenes and then looking back at the original scenes that I had edited, I noticed that several of the shots that I decided not to use were now usable because the meaning of the scene had changed.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading through the book and I feel as though I have now learnt a lot more about editing, taking what I had learnt by reading the book into my own practice and improving my work using the knowledge I had gained from the book.