Editing Lesson Blog

In class today, we first learned about the cameras we will be using to film various projects throughout the year.  My teacher showed the class how the camera and tripod works. We are using a cannon camera that is a size that can be handheld. It has a touchscreen on the side that flips open and closed. When it does this, it turns in and off so we don’t have to worry about pressing any buttons when we begin or finish filming. It also has a slot for an SD card. The tripod had three legs that can be pulled out to make it taller. It has a detachable slab at the top where we can attach the camera to. We screw the bottom into the camera and tighten it with a knob at the bottom. The camera also has various tools to allow us to preform pans and tilts.

Next, we were taught how to edit. We will be using an editing software called ‘Pinnacle Studios’ throughout the year. We were walked through the steps on how to generally edit things using it. First we have to make a folder on our desktop where the footage will be held. Next, we dump the footage from our camera to the computer using a plugged in SD Card Reader. We go into the software and select all the clips we want to import so we can edit them.  This footage that is selected to import is called raw footage, which is our actual takes. We start the import and wait for the footage to load into the editor. We have different tracks for each “layer” of our film. AV File 1 is for titles, AV Title 2 is for our film itself, and AV File 3 is for music. We also learned how to cut the footage by splitting the clip. We click on the razor blade and the clip splits into multiple.

We learned more tricks to successfully edit our footage. If we made a mistake, we click the back arrow button in the top left corner or ‘File’ then ‘Undo’. If we right click, we can access speed to reverse something or speed it up/slow it down. We can also access the effects editor by right clicking. From there, we can control things like brightness and filters. To get rid of sound, we can click on the desired track, right click and then click ‘Detach Audio’. This splits the sound and then we can delete the part of the sound that is unwanted. Once we are done editing, we click on ‘Save Movie As’ and put it into our folder that we created in the first step. Once we have turned it in to the teacher, it’s time to export. We make sure it’s on the best quality and we remove our footage from the editing software, making sure to close out of it when we are done.