Evaluation Task 6: Technology

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Filming Equipment

SD Card

 Adam's Camera was good in that it has high definition capability up to 1080p, sadly however, we could not utilize this due to limited space on the SD card and, more importantly, severely limited battery life (using 4 AA batteries) of less than 10 minutes; possibly due to a fault with the camera.

Adam's Camera

Other drawbacks in regards to recording were a slight static noise when recording, evident in the actual film. Luckily for us, it doesn’t affect the scene which we used the camera for.

The camera used an SD card for storage and this was a good substitute for the tape which the School camera used. The SD card allowed us to simply insert it into the computer’s SD card slot and drag and drop files into Pinnacle. The only disadvantage would be finding relevant files, as all of the names were very similar and hard to differentiate.

School Camera

From this we have learnt to test equipment before hand so we do not commit to filming if the technology won’t work or doesn’t meet our requirements.

Our Schools Camera on the other hand was much more reliable and proficient. An incredibly generous battery life of more than 200 minutes (on rechargeable batteries) meant plenty of time for filming, and much less fumbling around with an almost unusable camera.

Tape

Consequently, we were able to film the bulk of the film in one day. The camera ended up producing much better quality images than the other camera, visually and audibly. The fact that we could recharge batteries even while filming (as we had spares), and also import our filming straight into Pinnacle Studio for editing made this camera the far superior choice in every way. We have learnt that many options for filming and editing etc have to be explored in order to make the film as good as it can be.

Panasonic HDC Camera

Touch-screen Viewer

Unlike Adam's camera, the School camera used tapes which capture the footage, which is better in some ways and worse in others. Using a tape meant the computer could record the footage off the camera onto its hard drive and hence all of the files we needed were right there for us in Pinnacle, allowing us to make a rough edit easily.

 We also used another camera for the interrogation scene, the Panasonic HDC allows for full 1080p recordings and is very user friendly. The camera shutter opens and closes automatically and uses a touch screen menu system which minimizes the need for physical buttons on the exterior. 

The battery life was even more generous at over 300 minutes, and it has a built in SD card slot - much more reliable than a tape which can deteriorate over time. The SD card additionally allowed more storage for files, which can be upgraded depending on how much storage you need. The SD card we used was 8GB which proved to be plenty; we simply deleted old files when it was getting full as we already had them saved on our computer.

One problem we found was that HD filming takes up a lot of space, especially when considering that we needed to transport the files to and from school. Not just this, but uploading them to a video sharing site such as Vimeo, where there is a 500MB per week limit for those with a free account. (Vimeo Pro allows you to have much less restriction regarding uploading)

To get around this problem, we had to convert the footage into an AVI format for editing, making the files much smaller and as an unfortunate consequence; it made the HD footage standard definition (480i) however the same audio fidelity was maintained.

School Tripod

Adam's Tripod

Adam's Tripod allowed for easy access to the relevant controls when changing height and angles, it’s strurdy metal legs gave it increased durablity and rubber grips on the feet ensured no damage to the locations or equipment.

The School Tripod also met our requirements when it came to filming, like the other tripod it allowed us to film without any inherent problems. The only inherent problems with it would be that it is more fragile due to its plastic legs, and it was impossible to pan due to its stiffness.

We were able to take advantage of multiple battery packs at one time, allowing us to have backup charge for the School camera if we needed it. This showed us that rechargeable cameras are much more reliable than those which use disposable batteries.

Battery Pack

Web Technologies

Vimeo allowed us to upload and share our edits of our opening so we could critique and analyse it, as well as embed it into our blog. We found it was quick and easy to upload a video and queue multiple videos to upload at one time. The only problem we found was that the quality was slightly degraded when the video had been uploaded.

We used Art of the Title to look for inspiration in our title and credit ideas, we looked at films such as Se7en and analysed the way they used titles in font choice, size, placement and animation effects. http://www.artofthetitle.com/

Dropbox has, in a way, been a cornerstone of our media production; it allows easy transfer of files between our home computers, school and mobile devices. With 2 Gigabytes of storage we have had plenty of room to upload any word documents as well as our soundtrack, actual film and any other files we may have needed. https://www.dropbox.com/

Blogger has been used to document our progress and keep track of where we were up to in the entirety of the project. We have found it to be generally easy to use in regards to editing text and adding links, with the odd hiccup when it came to adding pictures next to specific parts of text. Furthermore, drafts can be saved to avoid publishing unfinished work, and we could all read each other’s blogs to check for new posts and research carried out.

Finally, Slideshare allowed us to share and embed any PowerPoints produced and gave us a more unique and interesting way to share our ideas. 

Media Programs

Adobe Photoshop CS2 was used to edit our logo for our production company “Enigma Productions” we made use of the fonts in the program and the tools such as burn and clone to remove anything that we did not want to be in the final image. Burn on the other hand was used to darken our storyboard, therefore making them more visible in our animatic.

Pinnacle Studio 15HD was used to edit our film opening and we found it to be a good editing program for beginner to intermediate editors such as ourselves. This is due to the easy to use layout and ease of navigation as well as tutorials that come with the program. There were however some problems with the program. When editing at school, we found it to be very unreliable as it tended to crash around every five minutes when any clip was edited frame by frame. Another problem early on was that the program would not save our project when prompted, which caused some frustration. These faults were caused by access problems due to the schools safety settings being incompatible with the software installation.

The colour correction tool added to the sense of continuity, as it minimised sudden chages in brightness of our shots.

Fortunately, we already had a copy installed on Kieran’s computer, so we managed to edit from home, and this was a much better experience, with no crashes experienced whatsoever throughout editing the entire film. We found such editing processes as J cuts and L cuts a breeze with being able to isolate the audio and video on separate editing tracks, which also made it simple to add music and sound effects, and then fade them in and out of the soundtrack when appropriate. We also changed the speed of some clips to make them more believable e.g. when Adam cuts Kieran with the knife, and reversed the clip where the car runs over Adam, then reversed and sped it up slightly. Overlay titles were also added and fade in and fade out effects used on them.

The title editor made adding credits as overlays and changing their size and colour simple.

When exporting the actual file we found some problems with syncing, this was due to lower quality exporting options and so this was fixed easily and quickly. The multitude of editing options is good if you have experience and know the advantages and disadvantages of each, but for beginners this could be daunting and time consuming due to the many different devices they may want to play it on, and subsequent technical issues.

The clock icons show where we changed the speed of the clip for fight scenes etc.

 We spliced bits of dialogue into other scenes when needed by locking the video track
and then manipulating the sound.

We probably learnt the most from the editing process overall, it is imperative that a backup of either software or a different editing program entirely is needed to edit a film to a deadline, and also feedback throughout the course of editing to identify any mistakes and then enough time is allowed for rectification of them.