Pros & Cons of Equipment/New Skills Learnt

Equipment used

Equipment

• Canon 600d with 18-55mm lens
• Tripod
• Digital stills camera.

Software

• MPEG Streamclip (for converting video)
• Audacity (for creating ambient noise)
• GarageBand (for music)
• Final Cut Express (for video editing)
• Sony Vegas Movie stuido HD Platinum 10 (For the storyboard cut)
• Serif DrawPlus 8
• Adobe Flash CS5

Pros and Cons of using equipment/software

• Sony Vegas Movie studio HD Platinum 10 can use multiple file formats, whereas Final Cut only takes .mp4 and .MPEGs.
• The camera allows us to use depth of field, which is useful, as well as having an optical zoom as well as a digital zoom.
• The tripod allows for steady footage (without a tripod, the footage is shaky).
• The digital still camera is lower quality that the camera used to film with.
• Garageband is really only useful for creating simple ambient music (as the loops provided are repetitive and not reflective of the quality of the film.
• It takes much longer to make an ambient sound on audacity to match up with the music on Garageband than to add another ambient loop on Garageband.
• Audacity offers more control over the sound (editing and effects wise).
• Sony Vegas Movie Studio is more simplified in some areas than Final Cut Express is.

What new skills have you learnt?

• We learnt to plan things better and more efficiently, because we had to organize other people as well so there was little room for errors.
  
• Learnt the importance of doing practice cuts of the footage to see which is better when cut together, with cut down scene lengths, etc.
• Learnt to take more than one shot of the same scene to ensure that there are no problems when editing.
• To take shots of the location (using the digital stills camera) to help the editor match up the shots correctly as to ensure continuity of the film.
• Learnt how to match up audio created on Audacity with audio created on Garageband.