EDIT4: Let’s get down to business (to complete the film)
Well, this is day 4 of the edit. You know, the point where we get super-serious about editing and start doing proper edit-y things, as that’s kinda the whole point of being here. At the end of the day we’re supposed to be making a film, and that’s what we’re gonna do.
So, let’s get down to business (and defeeeeeat the huuuuun).
My main job for today was to edit together a super-short transition with the clock timelapse footage we’d recorded way back on the first day of filming, which I was expecting to be quite easy. Was is easy? Well, moderately. Was is quick? Heck no. It took the whole day to put together, due to the software being slightly fussy. I’ve been told that I should guide you through what I actually did to achieve what I did today (yep, it took a whole friggin’ day for 30 seconds of footage), so I naturally will sorta try and do this while trying to not sound like an automated message being played through a meat grinder.
First up was importing the footage of the clocks on separate layers, and then making the top layer mostly transparent by using the videomerge tool (which apparently has a different name in other programs, by the by). The different clock layers were being generally fussy when I tried to overlay them. Even though we tried our best to line up all the clocks on the shoot, we obviously hadn’t tried very well as they were all completely out. Oops. In the end I had to spend quite a bit of time trying to line up all of the clock faces, one of which I didn’t even use in the end.
Next I had to simulate the pace of the clocks speeding up by applying the time remapping tool and speeding up the clips by over 800% (no, I am not making an “over 9000″ joke here) to achieve an appropriate result. For some reason it wouldn’t increase over this amount, which was kinda weird but wasn’t too much of a problem since I didn’t really need ‘em to be any faster than that. After this was adding some silly visual effects to the video, which wasn’t too hard. It was basically just a case of dragging the desired effect over to the correct clip, which would have been easy if it wasn’t for the endless render times. Oh boy, those render times were super-annoying. They took up nearly all of my editing time, and were simply a pain. I could spend another couple of hours ranting about how annoying render times are, but I have better things to do than that. Such as anything else.
Up next was adding sound, which was both irritating and simple. Adding the clock sounds was a breeze, and consisted of literally just dropping the track onto the timeline (just like me old mate, Windows Movie Maker). Choosing which foundling voice to use was a bit more of a challenge, but in the end I found an appropriate clip and shoved it over the clock noises. This leads me to the irritating part, which was trying to find out how to adjust the audio levels and make the clock noises a little less loud so we could actually HEAR the foundling. In the end I sorta figured it out, but it still wasn’t really that great. Ah well, it was worth a shot.
Anyways, that was how I did the clocks bit. Apparently someone’s gonna magically add a very short teaser of what I did to this post, which should help make what I’m describing seem a bit less like the ramblings of someone who’s been spending a bit too long on a 30 second segment of film. But first, someone’s gotta go render that clip. Good luck to ‘em, they’re gonna be there a while...
- Jay