Yasminmuat02's Blog

The Editing of the footage for the 1minute showing (Rough Cut) – 03.03.10

Myself, Laura and Samantha met up today in order to edit down the footage. James and Aaron were unable to attend due to other committment. We met up at half 11 and went down to the Avid Editing suites. As I hadn’t had much experience with using Avid before, Laura and Sam kindly allowed me to have a go at using it by transferring the tapes over to Avid and doing some editing. When I pressed the ‘record’ button to begin with, an error message occurred saying that there wasn’t any signal on the tape. We then tried the other tape to see whether it would say the same thing which unfortunately it had. We decided to switch to another computer to see whether it would work on another tape dec which it successfully did. It took us around an hour and a half to transfer the footage over. I labelled each scene a different name to make it easier for us to locate later on when we begun the editing.

Myself and the girls begun with looking through the various footage of inside the taxi, the office and the bus station and taking out the areas that we thought would look good to include. I was then able to put this all onto one timeline. We then looked at the interview footages’ and picked out the areas that we wanted to include from it into our 1 minute clip to show tomorrow (interim critique). I suggested that we use the majority of the different shots that we were unsure of to enable us to ask the class for their opinions and feedback on whether to include them into the final piece. There were times where the video was not in sync with the audio but we soon resolved this by zooming in onto the timeline and cutting out unwanted areas.

We constructed the video so that when Abdul was talking about specific areas, his voice would be played over different video footage such as of him turning the steering wheel. I think that this worked really well as it made the documentary a lot more visually interesting rather than having Abdul stood there talking. After spending nearly 4 hours editing this down, we rendered it, squeezed the file down and saved it on a memory pen which Sam then took back with her to upload onto YouTube.

Below is the rough footage that we have come up with so far.

Editing was a very time-consuming job today but I enjoyed the experience and now feel a lot more confident with using Avid after being taught the shortcut keys also. I think that the video we have come up with includes all the necessary shots that the group had initially wanted and works well within the set theme of ‘Working Lives’.