Evaluation Activity 6 - 'What Did We Learn' - Final

The camera we used for the filming of the opening was one we had just purchased, and throughout the process we learnt to work with it confidently, and by the end were fairly well acquainted with the vast majority of it’s features, as well as considering it’s “auto-focus” when doing shots – the opening pan, for example, had certain angles being unable to be used, because the sky would become blurred and instead the trees would come into focus, despite them not being the main point of focus for the shot we had planned, so we chose a higher angle and a different location to shoot from to avoid that from happening.

We also used Adobe After Effects CS4 when putting together the clips and adding certain effect to them, which we were also unacquainted with using when we started but by the end were confident with using – we learnt how certain effects can be used and when they’d be appropriate, such as the lens blur on several of the shots (like the one of the knives, glass of water and pills), and how to put clips together. The render quality of the final video was considered as well, and the need to test a few different settings to get the best quality-to-size ratio made us come up with the idea of simply rendering out each of the individual shots into different files and then putting the clips together in one final video and rendering that instead – this decreased the time to render at the end of the project, as instead of having to calculate different effects it was simply rendering clips together, which allowed us to find an appropriate quality with a small enough size that was able to be played back properly (without the jittering).

We also used WinX HD Video Converter Deluxe, a video conversion program (and DVD burner) that allowed us to convert the .MTS videos recorded with my camera to .AVI files with fairly little quality lost in the process of doing so – this was something we had to do, due to several problems with rendering using .MTS files in After Effects. After using several programs that just didn’t work quite as well, this program was found to be the best out of all of them, and was also used in order to burn the DVD at the end of the project – other programs made for the task just didn’t do it right, resulting in the loss of several non-rewritable disks (we hate Nero). We learnt that in the future, WinX HD Video Converter Deluxe is the program we should use for conversion jobs and DVD burning – we’ll be buying it at some point soon (or at least Dale will).

We also learnt that DVD+R disks are the best to be used when handing in the final project – we went through DVD-R, DVD+RW, and DVD-RW disks before finally using a DVD+R disk, as all of them had problems when burning the opening to a disk, such as the image becoming distorted and the sound being delayed by a few seconds (which wouldn’t matter all to much if the gunshot hadn’t been placed so specifically).