Editing Process
This year, for my group particularly, the editing process was a lot more complicated. Considering we made use of a green screen and a car chase in which we had to import a lot of sounds, it is evident that we made it difficult for ourselves but we were up for a challenge. Below I will try to explain as much of what we did as possible but it was especially difficult to track because 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).
Final Cut Pro being used at Parkstone Grammar School
Sony Vegas being used at Luke's house - Luke essentially took on the role of editing for the green screen stuff whilst myself and Jordan helped out with the main film editing
To begin with, I'll explain how we went about getting on with the hardest part of the editing which was undoubtedly the green screen editing. Last year we worked on our film using iMovie but this year 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. There were very noticeable white outlines around David seemingly no matter what we did on Sony Vegas so we gambled on using Final Cut Pro for the green screen instead and it ended up being a lot better. Of course 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.
The actual process of editing for the green screen wasn't actually as hard as we thought it would be. 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. Essentially I'm saying that you can see at times that it's a green screen being used but, given that we're students, we felt it remained consistent enough to not damage the film's quality. In order to fully make use of our green screen, we used a feature of Final Cut called chroma keying. This is where you pick out a certain colour in a shot and/or shots and select it to be replaced buy 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. We could have done this with other scenes too but we felt we didn't want to go overboard on it in case it all ended up looking bad and it got to a stage where we couldn't fix it so we just kept to the car chase scene.
Onto the general aspects of the editing now. Perhaps the most important and most difficult part of our editing (outside of the green screen) was the sound and clip management. The sound effects in our film are almost all foley sounds which means we had to fiddle around with layers and volume settings constantly throughout the process.
The above images show our names of clips and sounds - this is how we organised them before we put them in with the film. By layering the sounds like this, we hoped to produce a far more three dimensional sound experience that would definitely enhance our film quality. This was essentially something we looked to build on from last year because our sound editing was very basic (we would take select sounds from an online website and then just put them over the top of clips). A big thing we incorporated this year as opposed to last was the use of sound bridging which really helped our continuity this year - when looking back at last years project, it's fairly clear that we seemed to cut sounds off at the ends of clips which tampered with the smoothness of the film. Renaming clips was a large part of the sound organisation this year and Luke highlighted this for myself and Jordan because we let him know our struggles with remembering which sound should go where last year. Luke advised us that renaming clips and changing sound formats could actually help us out a great deal.
Lastly, the final notable section of editing for us this year was the general visual editing. For example, we made use of blackbars at the top and bottom of our film this year to give it a more cinematic and professional feel. Another small detail that made a big difference was the way in which we 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. Of course, white balancing helped with this too (see White Balance under Research).