Using the software final cut express has been a
challenge. Personally I don’t like the software as I found it confusing and
hard to work with, but nearing the end I have learnt many functions and can
work at a quicker pace, and I know my way around the software. We found it hard
to add transitions as we spent many hours trying to fade out and then back in
but for some reason this did not want to work on our timeline, as we could not
increase the timing. The transition would be a milli second and not visible to
see. So we changed macs to try and resolve this. Nothing could be done even
though we had moved our sequence to a different desktop, we asked all the media
teachers for help and even a year 13 student that had previously completed
their thriller coursework, but nothing seemed to work on our sequence. We made progress
by moving our sequence to V1 as it was on V2 originally and this helped as it
would now fade in but not fade out. Expecting that this transition would not be
successful we ended up making a gap and adding the transition onto the clip
that we wanted to fade out. I extended the timeline and clicked on the
transition and it allowed us to extend the timing, we could now successfully
fade out. Moving the rest of the sequence back next to the transition we put a
lot of effort into trying to fade the next clip in but it simply would not
work. Even looking at YouTube tutorials, it was the impossible. But we are
satisfied with the fading out and think our thriller looks effective. Adding
the text was another challenge we faced. Firstly when trying to add it to our
preliminary it was not successful. So in a free of mine I experimented and
still could not layer the text onto the clip as it kept coming up as a separate
clip with a black background when we wanted it overlaying on top of the video.
I asked a teacher for help and we discovered that putting the letters on V3 layered
it over the video. My partners were very pleased to know that the text issue
was now solved. Rendering the clips took a significant amount of time but we
made sure we rendered small sections as we went along to ensure the continuity
was correct and to minimise the amount of time it took to complete rendering.
When adding effects many hours were spent perfecting and finding the right
filter we needed as final cut express does not allow you to view the effect
without putting it on the clip and rendering it, we found this most inconvenient
as for most of the effects we spent time putting onto the sequence we then
spent undoing what didn’t look effective. In the end we found echo, which we introduce
once Rose starts smoking the weed, this shows the audience the film from her
point of view. As she is becoming high and hallucinating the screen represents
this, creating an understanding of what is happening in the sequence and so the
audience understands she is not in her right state of mind. What I did like
about final cut express was the colour corrector as when filming outside the audience
could not see our bodies at all and this would have lost us marks so we played
around with the colour corrector and created a balance that made our bodies and
faces visible. The quality of the video was slightly altered but isn’t too
visible to see. The only time the quality is very visible is when we had to add
a pink tone to a short clip where I receive the weed. The hot tub lights were
on a changer and had changed from pinkie purple to blue as we cut two clips and
put them together. Our teacher said this did not flow and would lose us marks
so we corrected this by changing the lighting using final cut express, but the
quality of the video is very grainy. The main thing is the continuity and that
has been achieved so our teacher is now satisfied and pleased with this part of
our sequence. Adding the music was extremely easy, we created sub clips and
added them into the first two boxes of sound on final cut express and found
that you can drag the clip of music longer or shorter depending on the timing
you want. The music used is copyright free as it has been homemade. The fading
out of music was also easy to achieve as I added the audio transition and could
extend or decrease the timing by simply dragging the clip that was on the end
of the audio. Taking audio out from certain places for example our establishing
shot of the sixth form sign was simple as I simply clicked on it and deleted it
from our timeline. We made sure we saved our work progress after every successful
edit we completed to ensure our thriller was safe. After using final cut
express I would not recommend it as it was difficult and time consuming to use,
I didn’t think it was user friendly but after using it for several weeks it’s
not as bad as I first thought.
By Jordan Gale
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